Hi, welcome back to Line Sheet. By the time you read this I’ll be OOO, enjoying the big trees in the Pacific Northwest. I plan to relax!

🚨🚨Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, my guest is Hagop Kourounian, the guy behind the Instagram account Director Fits. We discuss the fashion of the great auteurs (not just Sofia Coppola), the A24 book How Directors Dress (Hagop made a lot of it happen, I contributed a chapter), and why a Saturn return is a great time to establish your adult look. I enjoyed our conversation and think you will, too. Subscribe here not to miss it.

And before we get started: The byline on Rachel Strugatz’s Blake Lively story was wrong. Rachel wrote that story and did all that reporting, not me! Read it here.

Mentioned in this issue: Victoria’s Secret, Hillary Super, Town & Country, Stellene Volandes, Emily in Paris, Netflix, Ami, Vestiaire, Bill Ackman, Nike, Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, Ulta Beauty, Peloton, Kamala Harris, Savage x Fenty, Rihanna, Anthropologie, Les Wexner, Amanda Dobbins, LVMH, Le Monde, and many more…

• Emily in Los Angeles: I attended the Emily in Paris “global premiere” at the Egyptian Theatre last night. The event space, constructed in a parking lot beside the theater, was designed to look like an Instagram café: very floral, and sort of like LùBar in Milan or Pink Mamma in Paris. Shop With Google (run by fashion person Stephanie Horton, late of Farfetch and Alexander Wang) was the title sponsor. Today, Netflix opened the space up to fans, who’ll get a first look at the Emily in Paris video game (available to play now on Netflix; let me know how you like it), as well as an up-close-and-personal view of some of the show’s most recognizable costumes. They snuck Google Lens, the visual search tool, into a few activations.

  Since joining Shop With Google, Horton has been smart about showing up in the right fashion-adjacent places, and perhaps there is no more obvious fashion-adjacent place than the Emily in Paris premiere—besides being a breezy comedy and a silly melodrama, the show is a big ol’ fashion advertisement. In the first three episodes alone, which are now available to stream on Netflix, there are storylines featuring (spoiler alert!) Ami, Vestiaire, Baccarat, and Kering-owned Boucheron. Not to mention the avatar app Zepeto and Michelin (as in the restaurant guides), which both get plenty of airtime. I’m sure the influencers that my friend (and world-renowned podcaster) Amanda Dobbins and I were conveniently seated next to during the screening can relate. They are the real-life Emily Coopers, cosplaying in pink berets and heavily applied lipstick while using their phones to Photoshop the full-length shots taken at the step-and-repeat.

  To ask if said advertisements are effective is the wrong question. Of course they are. There is one scene—another spoiler alert!—where there is essentially a call-to-action to follow Boucheron’s Instagram account. At the time of the screening, the jeweler had 877K followers. Let’s see if that number creeps up. The better question, I think, is whether the show is brand safe, to use advertising parlance. In earlier seasons, there were hefty mentions of Rimowa, Dior, and Vespa—and don’t forget the McLaren Artura. (I know that the Rimowa placement was, as they say in the P.R. world, “organic,” meaning that it wasn’t a pay-for-play deal.)

  I’ve only seen three episodes of Season 4, but so far no LVMH brand has played a significant role. Maybe it’s coming, maybe the producers behind Emily in Paris have decided that featuring those sorts of brands isn’t important to the show’s target audience, maybe those types of brands are steering clear. But there is an entire plotline involving a family-owned luxury firm called JVMA, run by the patriarch and an approval-seeking son who truly looks like he could be the fifth Arnault boy. In the storyline, which started brewing in Season 3, the owner of the firm is a creep who took advantage of Sylvie Grateau (the chicest character on the show, played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) when she was a young executive working for him. Another spoiler alert, but Sylvie gives a shocking interview to Le Monde revealing her (negative) experience.

  Look, part of the fun of this show is that it isn’t a ripped-from-the-headlines, Law & Order-type situation—it’s a work of fiction and we need to resist the urge to fact-check. For instance, there isn’t a “brand room” at LVMH like there is at JVMA. (There is no way all the brands would have their samples in one, centralized place. That would be crazy!) Also, Vestiaire, the resale site, does not buy items outright from sellers, not even couture, which is what happens in one of the episodes. (And a piece of actual couture would not resell for €3,000. That’s also crazy! It would be far more expensive.)

  Fictional or not, does Emily in Paris need to nail the details? I, for one, was still able to enjoy it. But I’m not sure everyone at LVMH headquarters in Paris will.

• It’s like when ‘Friends’ and ‘E.R.’ did a crossover episode: I’m a known fan of Stellene Volandes’s version of Town & Country, and not just the coverlines. Volandes and her team are still having fun in an industry where there’s little fun left. Case in point: For the September issue starring Katie Holmes (my king Eric Wilson wrote the cover story), Volandes enlisted one of her deputies, Erik Maza, to collude with Justin Moran and Mickey Boardman of Paper magazine—the result a “dream dinner party” portfolio, photographed by Hunter Abrams, in celebration of Paper’s 40th birthday. Paper may be decidedly downtown and Town & Country very uptown, but those delineations feel so dated these days. (Dimes Square fixtures Marisa Meltzer and Krissy from Sky Ting live on the Upper East Side, after all.) Featured players include everyone from Nicky Hilton Rothschild and Lynn Yaeger to Sarah Hoover and Candace Bushnell. (Liana Satenstein even made it in there.) It’s a nice tribute, with a lot of spirit. I like this idea of magazines collab-ing.
• Three’s a trend?: On Wednesday, it came to the public’s attention that Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square bought 3 million shares of Nike stock—worth about $230 million—at the end of June, following the company’s disappointing quarterly report. Then, there was the news that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway took a $266 million stake in Ulta Beauty. And finally, David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital acquired a small but notable piece of Peloton. What does it all mean? Ackman’s Nike play… makes sense. Read this and listen to this for context. The Peloton play, too. It’s nearly a penny stock, down more than 50 percent this year alone, and there’s probably a solid, smaller private business hiding inside the dreadfully overleveraged public one.

  As for Buffett on Ulta: First off, he is not an activist investor, like Ackman or Einhorn. The man from Omaha, who has billions in dry powder at his disposal, looks for long-term positions. That said, the Ulta stake is tiny for him; Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio is worth something like $300 billion. But it’s interesting, as Buffett tends to invest in companies he believes to be undervalued in the long run. (He isn’t always right, of course, but his opinion still matters to people.) The endorsement of Ulta, whose stock is down about 30 percent over the past year—revenue is up, but EBITDA declined slightly—didn’t go unnoticed. My thoughts? There is a lot of money to be made in the Line Sheet universe, and smart investors will take advantage.

For the past year and change, Super was the C.E.O. of Savage x Fenty, a challenger to Victoria’s Secret that has never quite cut through despite the incredible popularity of its founder, Rihanna, and even moments of genius marketing. (It’s big, but it’s not Skims.) Before that, Super was the C.E.O. of Anthropologie, and before that, she was a merchandiser at American Eagle, and Gap, and pretty much every other mall brand you could name. Why don’t people know her name, then?

Like many retail execs, Super has hopped around quite a bit, probably due to a mix of necessity and personality. Her longest stint was five years at American Eagle. (I wonder if she had to live in Pittsburgh.) And the largest P&L she’s managed, at the chief executive level, was Anthropologie, which did just under $2 billion in sales in 2023. Victoria’s Secret, meanwhile, is a giant job. The company generated more than $6 billion in revenue last year. Sure, those aren’t Nike numbers, but nonetheless, the board must have been incredibly impressed with Super’s merchant bona fides, because I’m sure there were a dozen turnaround experts champing at the bit to fix this beleaguered beast of a company.

It goes deeper than this, but you can trace the problem back to former owner Les Wexner’s refusal to embrace the rise of the bralet. Then there was the #MeToo movement, which put the company’s objectification of women into stark and uncomfortable relief. Then there was Wexner’s association with Jeffrey Epstein. Then there were marketer Ed Razek’s utterly idiotic remarks to Vogue. Then there was the attempt at going woke, which backfired.

After Wexner finally backed away, Waters was chosen by the board because of his unique position: He had been with the company since the 2000s but ran the international business, which meant that, while he was in the inner circle, he wasn’t in Columbus, and that gave him both sufficient distance from Wexner and familiarity with the company to feel like a responsible choice. Waters is well-liked across the business, and was arguably the executive the company needed at the time to boost morale. But he wasn’t a product guy, and the only time the company progressed over the past five years was when former C.F.O. Stuart B. Burgdoerfer ran the business in the interim between Wexner and Waters.

Enter Super. It’s notable that the current board of Victoria’s Secret—which looks far different than the crony-led organization of Wexner’s era—did not choose a turnaround expert, or a familiar face, or even an MBA type for this job, but a merchant instead. “If they want to sell less and charge more, this is the perfect candidate,” BMO analyst Simeon Siegel told me when I called him up on Wednesday. “That requires increasing price elasticity, decreasing discounting, and improving the brand image.” (The other thing Super has going for her: The expectations are low.)

I’m still surprised no one has taken V.S. private—apparel brands are almost always easier fixed offline, where you can take the revenue hits required to course correct without the market watching your every move. And many would argue that Victoria’s Secret, which is still so big, is worth saving: It’s the Levi’s or Nike of its category. Then again, no one wants to buy retail businesses at the moment, not even private equity firms. Regardless, Super will have to make the necessary changes to the company as if it will remain public. If she can increase profits and sales, the market will react favorably, although it won’t be easy. Once you start under-charging consumers, the discounting is hard to rewind.

Whatever happens when Super starts on September 9, she must make it clear to everyone that V.S. lost the plot with their marketing, worrying too much about making amends for the previous regime rather than staying true to what made the brand work in the first place. I’m not saying they should go back to the way it was, and neither is anyone else. But Super should ask what every successful Victoria’s Secret marketer has asked: What is sexy now? If she and her team can answer that riddle, then they have half a chance.

Brands are worried about influencers talking about the election. [New York Times]

I’m a big Kate and Andy Spade person, and I loved Liana’s dive into their book from 2000, Contents. The concept: A bunch of their cool friends emptied their handbags out onto the floor. The Spades photographed the, um, contents. Then, the friends explained to the Spades what was in there and why. [Neverworns]

Anna Wintour, Tory Burch, and Aurora James are reportedly hosting a Kamala fundraiser in Southampton over Labor Day Weekend. If you’re already out there: Tonight, August 15, Away C.E.O. Jen Rubio, her husband Stewart Butterfield, and Lauren Santo Domingo are doing it up for Tim Walz. (The entrance fee is a minimum of $6,000.) The musical guest is Mumford & Sons, which makes sense, since Rubio B.F.F. Molly Howard—La Ligne C.E.O. and daughter of one of my favorite Line Sheet characters, John Howard—is partnered up with the band’s very own Ben Lovett. [Bloomberg]

Kaitlin Phillips got my friends a perfect feature regarding their new business, which I like to describe to people as the A24 of Romance or Hip Hallmark. They are worthy, but she is also a very good publicist. [Vanity Fair]

Off-label, compounded Ozempic is “crushing it” for Hims and Hers. Hope you’re an investor! [The New Consumer]

R.I.P. Peggy Moffitt. [New York Times]

Until next week,
Lauren