Hi, welcome to Line Sheet. Thanks to everyone who came out last night to Skylight Books to hear Chantal Fernandez and me discuss Selling Sexy, and thanks especially to Hillary Kerr, who guided the conversation so effortlessly. (And to the Puck reader from Croatia who elected to spend a whole night of her Los Angeles trip with us.)

The neverending work party that is currently my life continued this afternoon at Cipriani Beverly Hills, where St. John Knits C.E.O. Andy Lew and I co-hosted a lunch filled with pals from fashion, beauty, Hollywood, the Pacific Palisades (that’s far), and beyond, including Digital Brand Architects C.E.O. Raina Penchansky, Line Sheet superstars Jamie Mizrahi and Alissa Zachary, my mom-friend and big-time producer Jordana Mollick, and UTA’s Dan Constable. Getting to be a part of these super-chill-and-yet-extremely productive get-togethers is just one of the many reasons I love Puck. Alliances were formed. Jokes were made.

Giant thanks to Puck’s very own Eric Van Gelder and publicist extraordinaire Gabrielle Katz, who together whipped this thing up with incredible speed and made sure we all had a great time. Tonight, Chantal and I are once again celebrating Selling Sexy… where else? In a private home in Beverly Hills, the only place to have a book party in Los Angeles. Thank you to the hosts, my friends Alissa Zachary, Natalie Krinsky, Max Stein, and the peerless Risa Heller for their generosity of all kinds.

If you want to know when I had the time to write and report this issue, well… actually, you don’t need to know! Just enjoy it. There’s something for everyone: updates on some troubled media entities, internal whispers about the LVMH numbers, and the start of an investigation into why Poog, one of my favorite podcasts, appears to be on its way out. Subscribe here to read all about it. If you reply to this email with some topline thoughts about tonight’s Armani show I’ll give you a 🍪.

🎧 And wait, one more thing: Tomorrow on Fashion People, I catch up with one of my teenage idols, Jane Pratt, who just launched a very advanced vision on her Substack, Another Jane Pratt Thing. I love her. She lives up to the hype. Subscribe here and here.

Mentioned in this issue: Bernard Arnault, LVMH, Anna Wintour, Steff Yotka, i-D, Yashica Olden, Will Ferrell, Big Money Players, Alexia Niedzielski, Elizabeth von Guttman, Thomas Lenthal, Ssense, Jonathan Wingfield, Roger Lynch, Jacqueline Novak, Kate Berlant, Giorgio Armani, and much more…

• What the heck happened with Poog?: Comedians Jacqueline Novak and Kate Berlant (who walked not one, but two shows at New York Fashion Week) just cryptically announced that their five-year-old podcast, which pokes gentle fun at the beauty and wellness racket (it’s Goop spelled backwards, get it?), is being discontinued. What happened? Something regarding their contract with producer Big Money Players, the Will Ferrell podcast network under the iHeartRadio umbrella. If you know more, and I know some of you do, message me! Let’s solve this!
• Karlie’s creative muscle: Seems like new i-D editor-in-chief Thom Bettridge may be the grownup that Bedford, Karlie Kloss’s media company, so desperately needed. He’s already announced two big hires: Jamie Reid as global creative director, and frequent Fashion People guest (and my former intern, which she’ll never live down) Steff Yotka as global editorial director. Steff worked with Thom at Ssense and is super competent and knowledgeable, so that makes sense. (And I’m sure she was also up for Thom’s job after he left to run i-D a few weeks ago, so he must have made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.) Now that there is a solid team in place, we’ll see if they can make this thing move forward—or if the stasis was a disease, not a symptom.
• Even DealBook wrote about the LVMH slump: They never deign! But the Times and others may have overstated the impact of fleeting macroeconomic factors—the U.S. election, Chinese austerity, etcetera—on the luxury conglomerate’s disappointing third quarter. This is not investment advice, as my partner Bill Cohan often writes in his Dry Powder email, but LVMH will be more than fine. In fact, the consensus among the group executives I surveyed was that LVMH is poised for a bounce-back on the other side of these exogenous factors. One particularly confident person said, “The tide will turn. It always has.” A competitor called the mere five percent decline in the fashion and leather goods category “reassuring.” Luca Solca, the popular Bernstein analyst, is rating the stock an “outperform.”

  But there are reasons to believe that the setback is also the result of strategic missteps. “I don’t think this is just about the sector,” one person close to the company told me. “They’ve extended prices too far over many years, and under-estimated Chinese restraint, and over-estimated demand from so-called ‘urban’ Americans.”

  C.E.O. and chairman Bernard Arnault has been talking a lot recently about craft, which may be an appropriate way to frame the company’s value proposition. It also appears to be an implicit recognition that traditional forms of marketing now insufficiently romance the consumer. All the advertising looks the same. Creative products are what sells, and, at the moment, there just isn’t a lot of creative leadership at LVMH. Arnault knows that, and is working with his closest advisors to make changes. (Of course, existing contracts and tricky demands get in the way of the designer dominoes falling cleanly.)

  Interestingly, some of the executives in the company are interpreting the dip as an opportunity to experiment and focus on other parts of the portfolio. Fashion and leather goods may make up half of the group’s overall revenue, but it’s unlikely that’ll be the case a decade from now.

• System problem: What actually happened at System magazine? Right before the pandemic, a person named Mike Obenson partnered with Rodolphe Bourgeron, a Middle East-based finance guy, to invest in the biannual examination of the fashion industry’s innards, founded in 2013 by Alexia Niedzielski, Elizabeth von Guttman, Thomas Lenthal, and Jonathan Wingfield. Obenson signed a letter of intent on February 26, 2020, and purchased the publication in June 2020, according to a legal document I viewed. My understanding is that, prior to the arrival of Bourgeron and Obenson, Niedzielski and von Guttman each owned 40 percent of the business, while Lenthal owned 20 percent in exchange for working for free. (Wingfield, while instrumental in the conception of the product and considered a true co-founder, was an employee and never held any equity.)

  By the time of the deal, System was an industry institution, but also in debt (like most independent publications), according to U.K. business registrar filings. I was told that Bourgeron floated £600,000 to the entity in exchange for equity; Obenson didn’t put in any of his own cash but received equity in exchange for his work contribution. However, according to Obenson, with whom I spoke this morning, Bourgeron never actually ended up investing. Obenson said he has been the sole owner since 2020 and funded the business with debt and revenue.

  Again, others dispute this, and say that Bourgeron was eventually paid back half of his original investment after leaving the equation. Niedzielski followed Bourgeron out the door about one year ago, three years into Obenson’s tenure. Then, last week, von Guttman, Lenthal, and Wingfield announced that they were leaving, too, with plans to launch something new in 2025.

  I’m still picking apart what exactly happened. One source texted me, “Check Mike’s bank situation!” That’s easier said than done, but I did ask around about Obenson. Like me, nobody had ever really heard of him before 2020. Recent anecdotes portray him sidling up to bold-face names at events and trying to work his way into Hollywood. (I gave Obenson, Bourgeron, Niedzielski, von Guttman, Lenthal, and Wingfield the opportunity to comment on the record. Other than Obenson, they either didn’t respond or declined.)

  Since Obenson entered the System equation, the magazine has increased its commercial projects, launching a beauty supplement and a digital publication, the latter run by the respected journalist Susanna Lau. He says that the business has quadrupled revenue in four years. I asked why many contractors claim he has not paid them. He said that publishing is a “good business, but difficult in terms of cash flow,” and he is often late on payments while waiting for advertisers to pay him.

  Regardless, the key to maintaining System’s rarefied positioning in the fashion ecosystem was always the co-founders, with their singular talent and relationships. Without them, there’s an argument that there is no reason for System to exist, or for advertisers to advertise. As one insider put it, “[Obenson] appears to have wanted to buy his way into a magazine, did so, then ran it into the ground.”

  Obenson, of course, disagrees, and says that he is the one that owns the relationships with the advertisers. “I received a lot of support when last week’s announcement was made,” he told me. “A lot of people want to be part of the next System.”

Tani cited a December email from Vogue entertainment director Sergio Kletnoy raising concerns about Teen Vogue’s allegedly pro-Palestinian Gaza coverage. As Tani noted, Condé Nast employees have apparently become incredibly reluctant to bring these issues to their human resources department, partly because they feel their concerns are ignored. Kletnoy met with several of the seven or so company executives after sending his email and apparently came away feeling like the only person who showed sympathy for his concerns was Anna Wintour. She checked in on Jewish employees after the war began and invited a concentration camp survivor to speak to employees in the wake of Kletnoy’s email.

Many believe Olden was a scapegoat for broader mistakes by the leadership team during the past year. Employees have said that executives mishandled communicating about the October 7 attacks on Israel, and failed to create clear expectations for what was, and wasn’t, permissible public commentary about the war. Most notably, of course, contributing editor-at-large Gabriella Karefa-Johnson resigned from Vogue last year, shortly after the Oct. 7 attacks, when she compared Israel to an “apartheid state” and the Israeli military to a “terrorist organization.” Other employees have been reprimanded by human resources for speaking out about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, without any follow-up guidance on what constitutes acceptable language.

Anyway, this horrible war has created complex internal dynamics for virtually every business. But the funny thing about Olden is that pretty much everyone I spoke to believes that she was a good person who was trying to do the right thing, who also made remarks that could have been construed as antisemitic remarks. “What happened with Yashica wasn’t great,” one person said. “But her being forced out wasn’t the solution.” (I reached out to Olden for comment on this but have yet to hear back.)

The company leadership team also effectively undercut her by slashing her staff and budget, an unfortunate consequence of Condé’s revenue challenges. Like much of the grunt work at this company, the onus somehow fell on Wintour, the keeper of what’s left of Condé Nast’s flame, to clean up the mess. (The company has yet to hire a replacement for Olden.)

Things are destined to grow more intense as autumn progresses and concerns around potential layoffs bubble up once again. Next Tuesday, new chief revenue officer Elizabeth Herbst-Brady will host her first revenue summit, which I’m told was whittled down from two days to one day by Herbst-Brady, herself. (I heard that she even thought of canceling it altogether). Remember that Herbst-Brady is overseeing both advertising and consumer revenue—a step up from her longtime predecessor, Pamela Drucker Mann, who didn’t touch the consumer business, including subscriptions. The change makes sense, and was the right move on Lynch’s part: Every revenue stream should work hand-in-hand, and should ladder up to one person. The problem, of course, is that the new strategy probably requires significant streamlining—another restructuring, as Duncan would say. We all know what that means. Soon enough, one suspects, many Condé employees will be compelled into action by the more immediate need to fight for their jobs. Lynch has promised no more layoffs this year, but 2025 is less than three months away.

Regardless, it’s clear that Lynch’s leadership team will have to manage a two-front challenge. Last Friday, in one of the company’s employee resource groups on Slack (I thank my lucky stars every day that we’re not big enough to have those yet), a Vanity Fair fact-checker ruffled feathers by suggesting that the company create a Palestinian working group to educate employees on how to be “antiracist.” Many people in the group felt this comment was inappropriate, especially for a fact-checker, who is supposed to be impartial. What’s more, there were implications that such a “working group” would, by definition, be antisemitic. If only they had a D.E.I. officer to handle it all.

This is how you do it. Giorgio Armani gave a big interview to an Italian newspaper and said he plans to retire in two to three years. He also said that he hasn’t made any decisions to sell his company, despite interest from buyers. [Reuters]

Good headline. [Bloomberg]

When they’re talking about meeting the moment, they’re talking about Mel Ottenberg! [Interview and Interview and Interview]

Years after it severed ties with Kering, Altuzarra has a new minority shareholder: P180, the newish investment firm founded by industry vet Brendan Hoffman and Christine Hunsicker, the C.E.O. of white-label clothing rental platform CaaStle. [Inbox]

NewJeans is girl power! [Hommegirls]

NGG co-founder Andrea Grilli is now running Pharrell’s brand Humanrace. [BoF]

Last weekend, Liana Satenstein came to Los Angeles to help Liz Goldwyn sell some of her most precious vintage collection. (Some of the best is still available on Arcadeshops.com.) Now, this Sunday, October 20, m-fing Lynn Yaeger is shedding stuff at the Standard Hotel in the East Village, with Liana once again facilitating. Happy shopping.

Why? [Instagram]

Prada made a cool spacesuit that’ll actually be used in space. [WWD]

I am just really obsessed with the aesthetics of this whole thing. The leopard print. The fake tans. The waxiness. [WaPo]

Chantal surveyed 300 readers about the bras they buy. [The Cut]

Chanel’s next cruise show will be set on Lake Como. 😍 [WWD]

Until Monday,
Lauren