Prada Sale Murmurs, Hedi-Dior Fever Dreams & Phoebe Intel

Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Last night, I went out to the only two places that fashion people really visit in L.A.: Sunset Tower and Chateau Marmont. (My new trick is parking in a metered spot in between the two—it’s a four-minute walk each way. Valet is terrible.) The dinner by the pool at the Chateau was hosted by Isabel Marant, who flew in from Paris, and convinced everyone from Annie Hamilton (she’s funny) to Hillary Kerr (her Substack is a hit) to Derek Blasberg (in snazzy, high-waisted pants) to leave home for the evening (not easy in this town). Also, Anouck Duranteau-loeper, the brand’s C.E.O., is the best. I had a great time hanging.

Now I must sleep. Especially because this issue is very full, but actually not that crazy word-count-wise. We’ve got Gucci news, a Hedi rumor, a report from the fourth floor of Bergdorf’s, M&A whispers, and more. If you have a tip for me, just reply to this email. I appreciate you and I already know you’re on Mounjaro with a Jardiance chaser.

Mentioned in this issue: Prada, the Wertheimers, Net-a-Porter, Richemont, Gucci, Stefano Cantino, Hedi Slimane, Celine, Isabel Marant, Phoebe Philo, Summer Fridays, Vennette Ho, LVMH, Catbird, Matches, Raey, Tapestry, Capri, Annie Hamilton, Hillary Kerr, Derek Blasberg, and many more.

• Gucci’s new boss: A few weeks back, I hinted that a high-profile LVMH comms executive was headed to Kering in a new role. I knew that Stefano Cantino was headed to Gucci, but didn’t know that he’d be named deputy C.E.O.—quite the promotion, even if he had 20-plus years of experience across various departments at Prada, and six highly demanding years running communications and marketing at Louis Vuitton. Anyway, it’s a positive development for Gucci, which wants to be as big as Vuitton someday, and a big test for Cantino, whose skills will complement C.E.O. Jean-François Palus’s finance background and Kering deputy C.E.O. (and Saint Laurent head) Francesca Bellettini’s merchandising expertise. When you’re a business of that size, it takes a village?
• Finally, a new rumor: I’ve gotten a couple of requests to address the speculation that Hedi Slimane is leaving Celine after his June show. Someone wished and hoped that he was headed to Dior. (We can dream.) I reached out to a Celine rep, who told me very nicely that the company does not comment on rumors.

  I’ll keep reporting on this, but I don’t think it’s true, at least not yet. There’s still a lot of opportunity at Celine, where the brand’s retail and beauty expansion were both investments made to boost Slimane’s vision. And there is no reason for LVMH to rush through these designer changes. Steady, if not always slow, wins the race these days—and that’s certainly been the case with Nicolas Ghesquière at Vuitton, Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, and Jonathan Anderson at Loewe. The three-year contract is no longer the thing.

  If it is true, LVMH will be just fine: Slimane’s whole modus operandi, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, is that he is a very predictable designer. Wherever he goes, you get Hedi. But he is also more sensitive to a brand’s specific needs than one might realize, and he’s established clear house codes—a neat little trunk packed with denim, shirting, jackets, bags, boots—on which another designer could riff. Celine is Hedi, yes, but it’s also bougie ladies’ fashion, which, let’s be real, it has always been, even under Phoebe Philo.

  The bad news is that very few designers are as good at selling clothes as Slimane, so finding a replacement could pose a challenge. As for the Dior idea: I’ve mentioned this previously, but I am increasingly convinced that Dior is simply too big for one designer, and Dior under Slimane would have to be—once and for all—One Dior, as they like to say.

• A report from the fourth floor of Bergdorf Goodman: How was the Phoebe Philo drop? My spies were out this morning at the opening of the brand’s first physical kiosk—a sparse setup, from what I can see from photos. The scene in the early hours was anything but hectic: a lot of employees (both BG and Philo, including her husband and business partner in the venture, Max Wigram), and some die-hard Bergdorf customers. (You know, the types who have the time to shop at 10 a.m. on Thursday morning.) As promised, a good amount of the collection was available, including the MUMUMUMUM necklace and the new, $2,000 elongated pouch bag that people are into. (Elongated bags are a thing.) Glenda Bailey showed up. One friend said the pants looked impeccable in person, as did the knits, but the shirting was underwhelming. She didn’t buy anything.

  The most important note: There wasn’t a line out the door at the opening—although one formed later—and there weren’t a ton of customers to start. I am guessing that, if you want to go over the weekend and check things out, there will be plenty of pieces left. No regrets, but if the Phoebe Philo team had aligned this drop with the brand’s initial launch, it would have been amazing for both parties. (I honestly would have flown to New York to witness it.) Here’s hoping that, with future deliveries, they can coordinate. Phoebe Philo, the designer, is all about desire, and the brand needs to stoke desire, too.

• An update from Rachel on the Summer Fridays sale process: Everyone in beauty has been wondering what’s next for Summer Fridays, the maker of the internet’s other favorite lip balms, which has hired banker Vennette Ho, global head of beauty and personal care at Raymond James, to lead a sale process. When I first reported the news last month, I was told by sources that the brand, co-founded by influencers Marianna Hewitt and Lauren Ireland, had not officially kicked off a sales process—yet. Well, this is all really semantics, since the worst way to sell something is by actually selling, and so (not surprisingly) I’ve heard that the founders are still simply “meeting people”—i.e., prospective acquirers—“casually.” This is all part of a very carefully orchestrated dance, full of “unofficial” introductions and “informal” meetings. “There has been high-level stuff going on, but they haven’t even had a fireside chat,” a source familiar with the situation told me. —Rachel Strugatz
• Wearers of dainty jewelry unite: On Tuesday night, I stopped by Catbird on Larchmont—one of my favorite private equity-fueled streets in Los Angeles, save for the parking—to say hi to my friend Ali Pew, who was hosting a shopping event at the Brooklyn-founded jewelry retailer’s new store. For anyone who has walked down Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg over the past 20 years, you might know the place, which sells whisper-thin stackable rings and other delicate jewelry. From 2010 to 2015, Catbird’s tiny store was at the epicenter of the layering-necklace and stacking-bracelet aesthetic. (They’ve since moved to a bigger space on North 7th and Wythe.)

  The look is not for everyone. I would rather be mom friends with Jenny Slate (working on it) than wear a ring designed in collaboration with her. But Catbird got something very right other than being on-trend, always: They managed to sell fine jewelry at manageable prices, and gamified the process by making it feel like you were collecting rings like you’d collect baseball cards.

  Coincidentally, a Line Sheet reader recently asked me if I knew how they had managed to open up all these new locations. (There are 3 stores in New York, two in L.A., one in Georgetown, and more coming.) Well, for one, they’ve been open for 20 years, and if it’s being run properly, the margins on the costume jewelry, in particular, are very good.

  In recent years, high-performing, venture-backed-from-the-start D.T.C. plays like Mejuri have proven that it’s a worthy category for investors. I’m sure Catbird has some sort of outside funding—retail stores are expensive to open—fueling its growth. I reached out to the team over there for some clarity, but haven’t yet heard back. Let me know if you know!

Onetime rival MatchesFashion is also for sale after its current owner, Frasers, bought it for a song at the end of 2023. (I say “onetime rival” because these luxury-only retailers are no longer competing against each other, they are simply competing to survive.) Teneo is managing the process, and from what I’ve been told, they are welcoming bids on every component of the business, from the customer database and the Matches intellectual property to the leases on the physical stores (including Browns) to the I.P. of Raey, the in-house label beloved by many a fashion insider—an old-fashioned four-alarm fire sale.

Perhaps there will be a taker for some of this (I’m sure, for instance, that Browns is appealing to the right buyer). For now, though, the group has halted payments and stopped communicating altogether with many, if not all, of its brand partners. That’s all expected, and the brands will simply have to accept the losses and take it up with their insurance companies, just like they have in the past when retailers have filed for bankruptcy or closed. What’s more concerning for many of them: Matches seems to have started selling full-price items through Walmart’s marketplace in an effort to profit off of more inventory before a liquidation process starts. Just head over to Walmart.com and type in your favorite designer label—Khaite, Toteme, Dries Van Noten—and you’ll see what I mean. The only ones missing are those that operate through a concession model, meaning Matches didn’t own the inventory. Also, The Row seems to have escaped this fate. Maybe their sell-through is so good that it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Net-a-Porter and Matches are in pretty dire situations, but even some of the good deals are in limbo right now. Across the pond, there is speculation that Biden’s Federal Trade Commission is dragging its feet on Tapestry’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Capri, first announced in August. Last week, there were murmurs that the F.T.C. had hired economic consulting firm Bates White to advise on the deal, which doesn’t need to close until early 2025.

The F.T.C. did request more information from Tapestry and Capri in November of last year, suggesting that there may be some antitrust concerns. (Capri shares have fallen about 20 percent since the day after the merger was announced.) Look, I tend to assume these things are going to be fine. Unlike big tech, fashion is still mostly made up of, and sustained by, hundreds of tiny little businesses. European conglomerates that are increasingly vertically integrated, like LVMH and Kering—which own factories, material suppliers, etcetera—are changing that, but the combination of Tapestry and Capri seems not only non-non-competitive, but also increasingly necessary.

Of course, everyone at Capri and Tapestry wants very badly to consummate the merger, and Tapestry C.E.O. Joanne Crevoiserat has said all the right things publicly to ensure this looks as un-monopolistic as possible. In the end, it’ll be up to Lina Khan, the F.T.C. chairperson, to decide whether it’s worth making a point about the high cost of luxury (or, in the case of many Tapestry-Capri brands, pseudo-luxury). The antitrust battles against Kroger and JetBlue proved a point—that groceries are too expensive, that air travel is too expensive. Will defending $3,000—or even $1,000—handbag-carriers’ rights to get a good deal be worth the trouble? In the end, my guess is probably not.

On its face, Prada intrigue in Europe more or less matches Ralph Lauren curiosity here. In both situations, you have founders of a certain age who would stand to earn out historic liquidity events. Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, are worth a combined $14 billion, largely from their position in the company, which is publicly listed in Hong Kong. Ralph, for his part, is worth about $10 billion. Anyway…

As much as I love dissecting rumors, I didn’t share the Il Giornale report when I came across it because it felt so farfetched. People have meetings. They mean nothing. Do the Wertheimers have the cash to buy Prada, which currently has a market cap of $20 billion and would command a premium? This is what banks and leverage are for. Would this actually be a great way to preserve the Prada legacy? Yes.

The Wertheimers have owned Chanel forever (really, they’ve been in the business since the 1920s) and have, whatever you think of the strategy, managed to preserve the essence of the brand while generating billions of dollars a year in profits. The Bertellis aren’t going to want to sell to LVMH. But if they take some money off the table when they list on the Milan exchange, that makes them slightly more vulnerable to a takeover when the share price dips—which it eventually will, because fashion is cyclical. (See: the great Hermès vs. LMVH battle of 2014.)

All that said, most of the people I know near the Wertheimers think it’s unlikely that they buy Prada. In that case, what is taking so long with the Milan listing? As of October 2023, the company’s press communications suggested that the dual listing on the Milan and Hong Kong stock exchanges was not urgent, especially given the company’s exceptional growth. (Remember, the Miu Miu brand was up 82 percent in the fourth quarter.) And yet, this is the company people are talking about right now. Maybe it really is just chatter. Representatives for the Wertheimers and Prada both declined to comment.

An update on my luxury real estate wars story. Apparently, Chanel is looking at the same Fifth Avenue building as LVMH. [Bloomberg]

The necessary and important return of the Balenciaga City bag. [WWD]

Expect to see more titles relaunching a print product this year. From what I’m hearing, luxury advertisers are into print right now—they always were, obviously, especially since they enjoyed so much leverage. Nowadays, they have smaller budgets, so they want to funnel them to niche products geared toward big (or biggish) spenders. [Axios]

So glad I cut the cord after Mad Men ended. (Nine years ago. Jeez, we’re old.) [NYT]

Dumb phones. [The New Yorker]

Can someone get me into a screening of Challengers? [Red Carpet Fashion Awards]

Stella and Vanessa watched The New Look so you (and I) don’t have to. [NYT]

Lauren Oyler, the writer of that just-okay piece on the Goop cruise, is getting woman’d. Is it crazy that this scathing review of her new essay collection made me want to at least scan it, whereas before I didn’t care? It all feels so empty, and yet I continue to engage. [Bookforum]

Until Monday,
Lauren