A couple of weeks back, I got a tip that Bode was talking to LVMH about a strategic investment. This was before the oh-so-precious New York label, founded by designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla, was the subject of a lengthy feature in New York magazine, but after a separate lengthy feature in GQ that wasn’t really pegged to anything in particular, other than Bode liking GQ and GQ liking Bode. 

Oftentimes, when a founder looks to sell a stake in their company to an investor, or the devil, or whomever, they’ll attempt to engineer media coverage that sort of puts them on the market, whether or not bankers or lawyers have actually been contacted behind the scenes. Bode, which is owned by the designer but is sort of co-run by her husband (the furniture designer Aaron Aujla) and his brother (Dev, who is officially the C.E.O.), hasn’t quite positioned itself for a story like that: They prefer not to share financial information, and are regularly mad at a variety of the major news outlets. 

For instance, they were upset with the Times’ Guy Trebay because he wrote flatteringly about a brand that had copied them; they were angry at WWD for writing about their store opening in L.A., because they had an “exclusive” with another outlet. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if they went to GQ as a positioning tool. (If I was their P.R., I would have pitched some sort of Vogue Business-GQ double billing, but again, they don’t want to talk numbers.)