My New Podcast (!), Prada-Caitlin & Kylie Beauty Murmurs

Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. We’ve got the latest and greatest beauty intel from Rachel Strugatz today (bother her at [email protected]). She’s tackling two of our favorite family businesses: LVMH and Kardashian Inc. But first, I have an actually exciting announcement.

🎙️We’re launching a podcast!! It’s called Fashion People, produced by Puck (remember, the place where I work) in partnership with the fine folks over at Audacy. Think of FashionPeople as Line Sheet come to life on the two days you’re missing Line Sheet. On Tuesdays, I’ll be joined by my favorite industry journalists and analysts to parse through the most interesting news and (responsible) gossip. Our inaugural (and I predict, frequent) guest is the Wall Street Journal’s men’s fashion columnist, Jacob Gallagher, an expert on far more than New Balance loafer sneakers, I swear.

On Fridays, we’ll dig into one press-ing topic that deserves deeper examination. (First up: Why are clothes so darn expensive?) If you love me, love Line Sheet’s growing cast of characters, love the Puck Cinematic Universe, love podcasts, love fashion, love beauty, love deals, love serious business analysis delivered in a way that doesn’t feel so self-serious, or all of the above (I hope all of the above), please like and subscribe either here, here, or wherever you get your podcasts. And thank you to our launch sponsors, my ladies at Lyst and Netflix. I’m very excited to do ad reads.

Anyway, I’m jazzed, and I hope you are, too. Please don’t be shy: keep the topic and guests suggestions coming. I am open to ideas, really!! Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Mentioned in this issue: Kylie Jenner, Kylie Cosmetics, Caitlin Clark, Michael Rubin, Coty, Prada, Condé Nast, Hailey Bieber, St. John Knits, Brett Heyman, Nick Reardon, LVMH earnings, Sephora, Travis Scott, Gabrielle Katz, Anne Bancroft, and many more.

• The Prada-Caitlin craziness: By now, if you care, you know that women’s basketball superstar and record-breaking-ratings generator Caitlin Clark was covered in pink (and a few black) Prada triangles at the WNBA draft, where she was the number one overall pick, and, according to Fanatics C.E.O. (and tacky party-thrower) Michael Rubin, sold more jerseys on draft night than any player, in any sport… ever. (She will only make $76,535 in her first season, which is insane, but let’s hope all the incoming endorsements make up for it.) People going nuts for Clark equaled people going nuts for Prada, with an early analysis of social media chatter by Launchmetrics showing that, in the 24 hours post-draft, conversations about Prada x Clark generated an estimated $419,000 in Media Impact Value (Launchmetrics’ measurement of success, based on everything from the number of posts and tags to likes comments). Prada’s own Instagram post generated $95,000 in M.I.V. alone. That’s good.

  So, yes, of course Prada was eager to dress Clark. Giorgio Armani may have invented the red carpet, but Prada made it as important to pop culture as the awards shows themselves, ever since they started dressing celebrities seriously in 1995, when Uma Thurman wore that seminal lavender gown and pashmina. Prada is the thinking woman’s brand, and they’ve always taken a cerebral approach to this arm of the business. The coolest, newest, most intellectually provocative people wear Prada.

  So, combine the fervor surrounding Clark and Prada’s one-step-ahead-of-the-rest strategy with the effectiveness of dressing athletes—many of whom are global stars with massive, rabid followings—and you can understand how Monday went down. My prediction is that athletes, already some of luxury’s biggest campaign stars, are going to embed further into the fashion ecosystem, starting with the Paris Olympics later this summer. (Think: creative directing gigs.)

• An update on those ambulance-chaser Instagram ads targeting Condé Nast: If you read Monday’s issue, you’ll know that there are ads floating around Instagram, trying to convince people to file an arbitration claim that posits Condé Nast was not upfront about data collection on some of its websites. (On Monday, I mentioned the ad spotlighting Architectural Digest. But I’m finding that most people got Bon Appétit—sometimes it showed up right under a Bon Appétit Instagram post! I’m sure you’ll get it, too, now that you’re reading this—along with some semaglutide product.) There were some freaky Vogue ones, too. I still haven’t been targeted. It’s rude.

  According to my inside sources, the company is taking this seriously—there are a lot of these types of class-action recruiting efforts happening right now—but it should also be fairly easy to fix. P.S., you know what really works on me? The New Yorker article ads on Instagram Stories.

• Smoke some weed in your St. John Knits gold-button jacket: Today in the things-you-really-didn’t-expect-to-ever-happen department: Lanvin Group-owned St. John Knits announced a collaboration with Edie Parker, Brett Heyman’s handbag line turned cannabis company. Heyman covered a new version of the “Burn Bag”—featuring a funny-if-gimmicky retractable lighter holster on the side—in the Orange County-based company’s famed tweed.

  If you are not American and/or don’t know about St. John, it’s a conservative sportswear company—and by sportswear, I mean the old-fashioned word for American ready-to-wear. The look is traditional, proper, and totally in line with how a certain set of people are dressing right now. Both companies happen to work with publicist Gabrielle Katz, but Heyman says she got the idea after the ladies who lunch (and have been wearing St. John Knits since the Reagan era) started buying weed pens from her Upper East Side boutique.

  There’s an Anne Bancroft vibe to the whole thing. Heyman is a sort of modern-era lady who lunches—she can play the role but also has a job—and probably just started wearing St. John Knits. I like that Lanvin Group isn’t trying to make the brand—which is doing well, according to recent earnings reports—unnecessarily cool or something it isn’t. This collaboration feels very risky, and yet, when you really think about it, it’s not risky at all. Republicans smoke weed, too.

• Notes on the LVMH earnings, Part I: LVMH’s first-quarter report was released yesterday. They missed analyst expectations, but people were pretty nice about it. I decided to focus on organic growth—up 2 percent in the fashion and leather goods division, 3 percent overall—rather than growth adjusted for currency fluctuations, because I want to see if people are buying more. Turns out, they aren’t. They are just spending more because prices have increased.

  Overall, I’d say that the group’s underperformance in China aligns with Kering’s similar guidance. (Kering is obviously in a more precarious situation since its brands are trend-driven, for the most part, with a heightened sensitivity to downcycles.) In the U.S., aspirational customers haven’t disappeared altogether, but the pandemic behaviors are not returning. Louis Vuitton, which outperformed the division as a whole, is winning; Dior, notably, is not. Loro Piana has “excellent momentum.”

  LVMH is the bellwether for the rest of the industry, and there are a few things to contemplate as the economic cycle plays out. First, it’s an election year in the U.S., and the outcome could very well affect spending. Second, Chinese consumers are quick to pick up trends they love, but they are not going to just buy anything that’s put in front of them. The bottom line: For everyone who thought, somehow, sales were going to be great forever, or at least bounce back effortlessly after last year’s “correction,” the world doesn’t work like that. LVMH is better positioned than most to sail through unscathed. For those who aren’t, it’s going to be a tricky few months at least.

• Notes on the LVMH earnings, Part II, starring Rachel: Beauty overall, and especially Sephora, remains a perennial bright spot for LVMH. In January, the luxury giant acknowledged that the retailer’s U.S. business had been exceptional in 2023, and unsurprisingly, this momentum has continued into 2024. LVMH touted “remarkable growth” at Sephora, contributing to an 11 percent increase on an organic basis for the Selective Retailing division, citing strength in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. Finally, the retailer will focus on the U.K., a market starved for stand-alone beauty stores, by opening three more doors this year, bringing the total door count to five.

  LVMH announced last month that Sephora was exiting Korea, a “very competitive market,” but noted that this operational decision didn’t reflect their overall view on the APAC region. LVMH is still “extremely hopeful” about China, okay? Duty free still hasn’t recovered from Covid, but Sephora and some very strong fragrance sales may be enough to pick up the slack. Dior’s beauty business is “excellent,” the opposite of its performance in fashion. As expected, Dior perfumes (Sauvage, J’adore, and Miss Dior) continue to fly off the shelves, and Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s wildly overpowering Baccarat Rouge 540 remains wildly popular. —Rachel Strugatz

Internet theories are silly, but I suspect the most recent spate of crackpottery is related to the fact that something definitely is happening with her brand. She’s in the midst of “stripping down” her image, she told The New York Times last month, and it’s apparent that Jenner’s still trying to figure out what to do with Kylie Cosmetics, which has lost momentum since its launch almost a decade ago. Also, Jenner’s relationship with beauty, including the brand she helms and the ways she’s manipulated her physical appearance over the years, remains complicated.

I’ve chronicled Jenner’s beauty business extensively over the years, documenting her impressive arc of successes, misses, scandals, and more. I recall a particularly memorable interview, in 2017, a few days shy of the then-pregnant Jenner’s 20th birthday. We were chatting at matriarch Kris Jenner’s home, and Kylie’s team was adamant that the piece publish while she was still 19 so she could be positioned as a teenage entrepreneur. This was during peak Kylie-beauty mania, pre-Fenty, while Glossier was still a pretty tiny company and before Hailey was a Bieber. Kylie and Kris “opened their books for me” and shared some sales figures from Kylie Cosmetics’ first 18 months in business, and they were some of the wildest numbers I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t until years later, when Coty took a majority stake and shared the brand’s revenues, that I learned those figures were, allegedly, complete B.S.

That interview feels like an eternity ago in the business. In the years since, Jenner has faced a unique set of challenges, pandemic notwithstanding. There’s been the surfeit of celebrity competitors, of course, but also an erosion of the “first-to-market” advantage enjoyed by Kylie, Fenty, and Glossier. Everyone is now following similar marketing, distribution, and product strategies. What initially made Kylie Lip Kits innovative––using Instagram as a launch pad and a “drop” e-commerce model—is now essentially table stakes.

The rampant speculation, denial, and eventual admission that Jenner had cosmetically enhanced her lips put a dent in her credibility as a seller of lip products. Customers lost trust in her brand once they learned that no amount of liquid lipstick or liner could do the work of filler. And product-wise, Jenner has yet to re-create the virality of her Lip Kits, or any other hero product for that matter, despite Coty having majority ownership in the brand for nearly five years (it was rumored last summer that Jenner was in talks to buy back the 51 percent stake that Coty paid $600 million for in 2019). Maybe this is one reason that the haters are out in force.

Beauty trends and aesthetics change, too. Demand for the Jenner-patented overly “done” Instagram face thing tapered off once TikTok became the social media platform of choice, and Hailey Bieber became the face of clean girl beauty. Instagram makeup was out and “glazed donut” skin was in.

Yes, sure, the Kardashians represent the worst of American culture in many ways—obviously—but the family’s penchant for reinvention is incredibly admirable. These are relentless people, people! Skims is an indisputable, runaway success, and Kim Kardashian still decided to relaunch her beauty brand for a third time (I’m sure a beverage is on the horizon). For Jenner, whose Kylie Cosmetics has yet to reach Skims status, a reinvention was also inevitable. Already, Jenner’s new perfume, Cosmic, seems to be giving her business a much-needed boost: After double-digit declines in sales for the majority of the last year, according to Earnest Analytics, sales on Kylie Cosmetics’ website were up close to 300 percent last month. Maybe Jenner should have stuck to perfume all along.

Until tomorrow,
Lauren