Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. I’m writing to you from a screening room in Beverly Hills, where I just previewed Queer, the new film by Luca Guadagnino. I’ll be interviewing Queer’s costume designer, Jonathan W. Anderson (yep, that one), on Friday at Stories of the Season—Puck’s fancy to-do celebrating the past year in movies—alongside Colleen Atwood (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), Janty Yates (Gladiator II), and Virginie Montel (Emilia Pérez). And I’m just kicking things off: What I’m Hearing author Matt Belloni will be chatting with Dune director Denis Villeneuve and Anora star Mikey Madison (!!!) for a live taping of his pod, The Town.

Other big voices slated to speak include documentary heavyweights Matt Tyrnauer, Shiori Ito, Josh Greenbaum, and Morgan Neville, and revered actors Zoe Saldaña, Jeremy Strong, and Peter Sarsgaard (a.k.a. Tommy Molto), among others. We have a few seats left. If you are a guild member and a Puck subscriber, email Fritz@puck.news to join us! (And if you’re not a Puck subscriber already… for shame.)

Today, beauty queen Rachel “Rachel@puck.news” Strugatz is back with intel on the leak of Estée Lauder heiress Jane Lauder’s savage letter calling for the removal of her cousin William from the company’s board of directors. Now that Stéphane de La Faverie is slated to take over as C.E.O., will Jane move into William’s executive chairman seat? Rachel has some thoughts. Up top, I’m keeping it light, with Richemont and LVMH H.R. updates and notes on a sneaker sea change.

Before we get started, a bit of feedback: Several of the folks who originally wrote to me admonishing Taylor Swift’s velvet sandals—inexplicably worn with a Vivienne Westwood dress during a dinner outing this past weekend—wanted to clarify that they actually liked the sandals, but simply thought they didn’t look right with the outfit. (I agree, I like the sandals but they didn’t work with the dress.) Kate Young and I discussed this weighty topic on Tuesday’s episode of Fashion People. Anyway, moving on…

Mentioned in this issue: William Lauder, Jane Lauder, The Estée Lauder Companies, Stéphane de La Faverie, Chanel, LVMH, Bernard and Delphine Arnault, Cartier, Sophie Brocart, the sneakers you want now, Chloé, Loewe, Chantal Gaemperle, Sidney Toledano, Mercedes Abramo, Michael Burke, and many more…

• Richemont’s other loss: Longtime Cartier executive Mercedes Abramo is leaving the business, I’m told. Her last day is Friday.

  For the past year and half, Abramo has been based in Switzerland, overseeing commercial activities across regions, from stores to pricing to distribution. But before that, she was C.E.O. of the North American business, and before that, she ran the Fifth Avenue flagship. A great thing about the retail biz is that you can work your way up from the store to the corporate offices; it doesn’t happen as much as it used to, but it still happens. (A rep for Cartier declined to comment.)

  Anyway, there are whispers about whether Abramo is headed to Tiffany, the LVMH-owned archrival, where many of her colleagues have landed and big changes are expected to be announced in the coming weeks. (Tiffany isn’t yet a threat to Cartier—which is still way nicer—but it’s chipping away.) For what it’s worth, I’ve heard that Abramo’s next move is not set in stone just yet. Good to remember that she was an acolyte of recently departed (and beloved) C.E.O. Cyrille Vigneron, and that she is American. I love Switzerland—especially in the summer—but I’m not sure I’d want to live there full-time.

• An LVMH exec scoots over to Chanel: Around the end of Paris Fashion Week, I heard that longtime LVMH executive Sophie Brocart, most recently the C.E.O. of Patou, was out. Now, WWD is reporting that Brocart has landed at Chanel to lead some sort of eco initiative focused on circularity. The first question, of course, is about the viability of Patou—the tiny, LVMH-owned brand that’s designed by Guillaume Henry, one of these youngish talents that people like Bernard Arnault and Sidney Toledano are desperate to keep close. Patou has always been about the fragrance; Brocart and Henry ran it like a startup, so whether or not it continues will depend on how badly LVMH wants to keep Henry on their roster, especially if they have nowhere else to put him.

  I always wondered why Brocart, who spent a lot of time working with Delphine Arnault and other senior executives on recruiting young talent—for the LVMH Prize, but also within the LVMH Fashion Group—wasn’t made C.E.O. of the company’s fashion group when Michael Burke stepped down. As someone on the LVMH board reminded me a couple of weeks ago, the Fashion Group is so, so small compared to Louis Vuitton and Dior—and the executive in charge has far less clout than the people running those brands. That said, the fashion group should be run by someone who is interested in identifying and working closely with young talent, because the smaller brands can serve as a feeder to the larger ones. Former fashion group leader Pierre-Yves Roussel brought in Phoebe Philo, Jonathan Anderson, Riccardo Tisci, and many executives.

  Anyway, perhaps Brocart’s departure has no connection to the departure of ousted H.R. head Chantal Gaemperle, whom I’ll have more on soon. As we all know, this is only the beginning of the changes going down at the second-biggest company in Europe.

• About this new high-top Chloé sneaker: It’s called the Kick, is inspired by boxing shoes and ballet slippers, and is giving extreme Isabel Marant Beckett vibes—but without the wedge—and also riffing on the Puma Speedcat, further indicating that we have entered a new sneaker cycle. (I expect we’ll see it on the Lyst list a few quarters from now.) One style that will likely carry over in this transition is the Loewe runner. As my friend Claire (Chris’s wife, actually) texted last week, “I’ve been stuck at LaGuardia for many many hours and the number of Loewe runners I’ve seen is entirely unprecedented.” Hard data for you. If you’re interested further in the Chloé influence and why ever hard-hearted ladies like me are cottoning, read Becky Malinsky’s latest missive.

The proximate cause of the rift was the elevation of Stéphane de La Faverie to C.E.O., replacing the outgoing Fabrizio Freda. It was a job that Jane herself very much coveted and, as both a family member and the company’s chief data officer and executive vice president of enterprise marketing, perhaps regarded as her birthright. When Jane learned that de La Faverie was to be anointed—before the news was made public—she resigned. Around the same time, William, whom Jane blamed for enabling Freda’s long and recently unprofitable tenure, announced he’d be stepping down as executive chairman. Of course, there were nuances here, too: Jane was presumably also pissed that William’s support of Freda had come at the expense of her own elevation. Also, William’s demotion was ostensibly prompted by the board. After all, ELC has endured nine consecutive unprofitable quarters. (A spokesperson for The Estée Lauder Companies declined to comment.)

Yes, it’s messy, and yes, Estée’s grandkids sound like petulant grown children, and ones who could never contemplate an existence outside the confines of the GM building. But Jane is probably the only family member who’s meaningfully challenged the way ELC operates, and she’s a more formidable opponent than anyone realized. “It looks like Jane has some balls,” said a person with ties to the family. “She doesn’t feel that the board has acted as it should have, and William was the executive chairman and said yes, yes, yes to Fabrizio time and again.”

Freda, unfairly or not, has been shouldering much of the blame for the company’s market cap freefall. He’s been C.E.O. since 2008, and for many of those years, things were very good. The Lauder family, as averse to leadership change as most wealthy families, was hoping that the same executive would be able to turn things around, even after it became clear he couldn’t. William, one of several family members with outsize influence on the board, was likely in favor of de La Faverie’s promotion, much to Jane’s chagrin.

On some level, perhaps, none of this is entirely surprising. William, 64, was the C.E.O. before Freda—until the board forced him to step down in 2008 while he was still in his 40s. (The board created the executive chairman role for him as a consolation prize.) Sixteen years later, some of the very same board members again took away William’s role. Alas, any efforts the family had made to “take the heat off William” and protect him from being tainted by the current mess, according to a source who knows the family, appear to have been in vain.

A former executive dismissed this scenario. “If it was her, we would have been hearing rumblings 10 years ago,” this person said. “Nobody waits 30 years, and only when they get to wit’s end, and the ultimate humiliation, do they preempt and quit––on the heels of having done nothing for decades that would ever be called into question, and never having been a source. It’s not her nature.” (A source close to Jane told me that Jane “definitively didn’t leak it.”) The Chapin and Stanford grad has always been introverted and cautious, much less visible socially and across the brand than her sister, Aerin.

Jane’s 80-year-old father, Ronald—the prolific art collector, onetime mayoral candidate, and deep-pocketed Republican donor—could have had the motivation to stir things up. He’s presumably upset that his daughter was passed over while his nephew William cooled his heels. And Ronald, I’m told by several sources, has used the media to his advantage in the past.

A more apposite question may be: Whose reputation remains intact after the Journal’s report? “The fact that Stéphane wasn’t painted in a negative light is telling,” mused an analyst from a top bank. Another source noted that an article about the family’s internecine squabbles certainly validates the board’s decision to go outside the family for the company’s next chief executive.

Either way, I’m hearing that some senior-level employees are very eager for January, when de La Faverie officially starts in his new role. “The last couple of years, the focus on Who’s next? or What’s next? has been such a distraction for everyone, and this other drama that’s unfolding is yet another distraction,” said a current Lauder executive. “Everyone is over this and ready to move forward. We want to do the things we need to do to reposition this company. There are finally real changes coming.”

Until Tomorrow,
Lauren

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