Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. In this special issue, available only to Inner Circle members, I’m revealing what I know about Jonathan Anderson’s first few months at Dior, which he spent designing a menswear collection that will debut later this month. Anderson is under a tremendous amount of pressure, but so is his boss, Delphine Arnault, who landed at Dior during arguably the most challenging moment in the brand’s history—at least since her father, Bernard Arnault, appointed John Galliano as its creative director in 1996. I’m also sharing what I’m hearing in Copenhagen at the Global Fashion Summit this week, as the industry grapples with an E.S.G. backlash. And yes, I’ve got new insights regarding the speculation that Saks Global may be looking for a “partner” to help ramp up operations at Bergdorf Goodman. Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, I’m joined by Jonathan Schley, vice chairman of Newmark’s global retail advisory. We’re gonna talk about what it all comes back to… real estate! Jonathan and I have known each other for more than a decade, and it was great to get his perspective on the evolution of the upscale retail market in the U.S., and what it says—and doesn’t say—about the luxury consumer. Listen here and here. Also: For those of you who love pitching me stuff about artificial intelligence (and for serious people, too), Puck is about to launch The Hidden Layer, a twice-weekly private email written by Ian Krietzberg, the wunderkind former editor-in-chief of The Deep View. Get excited, because Ian is a leading voice in A.I. who’ll be covering everything from the wheeling and dealing to the more existential questions. Subscribe here. Mentioned in this issue: Jonathan Anderson, Dior, Kim Jones, Gucci, Delphine Arnault, Hedi Slimane, Loewe, Jack McCollough, Lazaro Hernandez, Pietro Beccari, Maria Grazia Chiuri, Saks Global, Richard Baker, Stefano Tonchi, and many, many more…

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Three Things You Should Know…

Bergdorf is forever: A fuzzy report in WWD suggested that Saks Global was looking for about $1 billion from a financial partner in the Middle East to help expand Bergdorf Goodman and “shore up liquidity.” Saks Global responded defensively and obfuscatingly. “We’re not selling the business,” C.E.O. Marc Metrick told WWD. “It’s core to our strategy—it’s the data, it’s the brand positioning, it’s part of our story. It’s not something we would do.”Sure, but a joint venture is different from selling off Bergdorf. It’s clear from the reporting lines that Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus are being run as one business, and Bergdorf Goodman as another, so I could envision a world in which there’s an outside partner for Bergdorf who helps the brand open new stores in the Middle East, Asia, and beyond. American department stores—including Saks—have done this for decades. That said, Bergdorf is unique in that it is only one store, and even if there are expansion opportunities abroad, it may not make sense from a brand perspective. (Those offshore outposts are usually far enough away that they don’t erode the brand value by much, but there is undeniably something a little hollow and cheap about a Bergdorf Riyadh.) Of course, funding Bergdorf separately from the rest of Saks Global could isolate it from the rest of the group’s other issues, although I’m not sure how the company’s creditors would feel about that. Regardless, everyone—Metrick, his boss Richard Baker, all the people they owe money to, Bernard Arnault, etcetera—recognizes that Bergdorf is special, and I hope that can be preserved. Once you start coming up with ways of extracting value just to make money, things tend to go south.
All roads (at the moment) lead to Rome: Tourist throngs aside, this is really the year to pay a visit to Gammarelli for the red socks. To wit: It’s the Catholic jubilee through January 6, 2026; the conclave just named a new pope; Maria Grazia Chiuri is in the midst of restoring her theater; and Valentino Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti just opened their foundation in Rome. “You have to go,” a friend messaged me last week, after Chiuri’s final Dior show. Now, Harper’s Bazaar Italia, the magazine run by Stefano Tonchi (he’s the editorial director; Massimo Russo is the editor-in-chief), has released eight Juergen Teller–photographed covers in celebration of the jubilee. (In the spring of 2024, Teller was commissioned by the Vatican to shoot a portrait of Pope Francis, who died a year later.) Anyway, the covers are stunning and collectible, available on newsstands starting today, in Rome and beyond.
Don’t you dare say the S-word: Less than a decade ago, fashion brands led with “sustainability” in their communications and marketing materials, trade publications avidly hired “sustainability” editors and reporters, and an entire conference—the Global Fashion Summit—was created so that industry executives working on E.S.G. initiatives could talk shop. But with all the macro crises facing the industry (tariffs, higher interest rates, slower consumer spending) compounded by the current political environment (goodbye, D.E.I. programs), many of these conversations have ended, or at least been diminished.That’s why I said yes to an invitation to attend this year’s Global Fashion Summit, organized by Global Fashion Agenda, a nonprofit that aims to connect companies with policymakers. It’s easy to feel like any attempts at progress have been unwound by the current U.S. administration, but the reality is that if there’s money to be made—as there is in materials innovation, in particular—the morality of it all is a secondary concern. On the way over to the venue on Wednesday morning, I shuttled with a group of American executives from a giant retailer that has publicly walked back its D.E.I. efforts. Nevertheless, there were six representatives here. Whatever you want to call it—sustainability, social responsibility, etcetera—the underlying issues aren’t going away. And yet, during my conversations over the past few days, it was undeniable that the people who do this work are feeling a bit down. “Beaten-up” is how the conference’s emcee, Nadir Nahdi, put it at the close of the show. The good news: I also heard plenty of conversations about the rise of the secondhand market, advancements in materials innovation, and a hope that, someday soon, more progressive regulations are on the way. While in Copenhagen, I got to spend time with the founders of three companies that baked social responsibility into their business models without being all sanctimonious about it: Ganni’s Nicolaj and Ditte Reffstrup, who hosted a beautiful dinner at their fabulous home on Wednesday; Eileen Fisher, who was kind enough to sneak away for lunch with me on Thursday; and Veja’s Sébastien Kopp, whom I interviewed onstage. None of them started in this industry for any reason other than they like it. But they’ve managed to build companies that are in step with where the world is moving, whether or not we want to believe it.

And now, the latest on Jonathan Anderson…

The Book of Jonathan

After quietly working at Dior for several months, Jonathan Anderson has officially and publicly taken over the men’s and women’s collections. Now he’ll have to achieve something that’s never been done before, at arguably the most challenging time in Dior’s history.

Lauren Sherman

By the time Jonathan Anderson posted a bed of four-leaf clovers on his Instagram grid on Monday morning, announcing at last that he was the new creative director of Dior’s men’s and women’s collections, he had already been working at the company for several months. In his first weeks in the men’s studio, which he entered shortly after Kim Jones said his goodbyes in late January, team members were asked to sign N.D.A.s to keep his presence and operation under wraps. Last spring, as I reported at the time, Anderson was weighing all his options, and there was a real sense that he might consider moving to Kering—most likely to take over Gucci from Sabato De Sarno. But there was also movement at Dior. In early 2023, LVMH chairman and C.E.O. Bernard Arnault had installed his eldest child, Delphine, at the company in an executive shuffle that included moving Dior C.E.O. Pietro Beccari to Louis Vuitton. At that time, Dior was fresh off a seven-year run of tremendous growth, fueled by the potent commercial work of both Maria Grazia Chiuri and Jones. (Never forget the J’Adior slingback, or the manbagification of the classic Saddle.)

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But Beccari’s engine had begun to sputter due to a mix of designer fatigue, lack of product innovation, and changes in consumer behavior that only truly manifested in late 2024. It seems incredibly obvious now that the late-pandemic luxury boom was unsustainable. The growing aloofness of the Chinese consumer—a far bigger issue—was less easy to predict. Last September, as Delphine Arnault took over as C.E.O. of the brand, I took note of the challenges at the house and suggested that Anderson and Hedi Slimane were the top candidates. In retrospect, it’s likely that Anderson’s appointment at Dior had been decided around this time. Anderson’s final Loewe runway collection, shown on September 27, was clearly his final show. I had heard speculation that very week that Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez had come to Paris to meet with Sidney Toledano, the longtime Arnault deputy, to discuss backfilling Anderson at Loewe. Anyway, by the time Delphine made it official with Anderson, her problems had mounted behind the scenes, and it felt more important than ever that LVMH execute its latest game of designer musical chairs as gracefully as possible. From what I’ve been told, Jones effectively quit, or at least came to a mutual agreement regarding how the partnership should end. (The group, and in particular Bernard Arnault, remains indebted to Jones for his service at both Louis Vuitton and Dior.) Chiuri’s exit was messier, in part because her contract ran through the middle of 2025. In a recent interview with The Business of Fashion, Delphine said that the group waited to officially announce Anderson until after Chiuri’s May 27 show in Rome as a gesture of respect. Delphine’s father seemed to have gone rogue during an investor meeting in May, however, when he decided to casually mention that Anderson would be taking over the men’s portion of the house. We all know that the Chiuri situation was more complicated than simply waiting things out, to the detriment of her own legacy. But it was also to the detriment of the Anderson announcement. I still hold out hope that she might end up at Fendi, although she certainly doesn’t need the money. LVMH may put their designers under unsurmountable pressure, but they also pay them very well.

10 Billion Bucks Stop Here

Regardless, the enthusiasm for Anderson eclipsed the wah-wah rollout. Everyone wants him to succeed, from the internet fandom and sycophantic press to industry analysts and couture clients. But there’s no denying that what he is trying to achieve is unprecedented, and will require a superhuman effort on his part. Dior is estimated to do around $10 billion in sales, give or take a million or two, considering the declines over the past year. (LVMH does not break out sales of individual brands.) Even in a lull, it’s still a massive business, requiring a team of executives, each leading individual categories, reporting into Delphine. Among her recent recruits has been Pierre-Emmanuel Angeloglou, who serves as her official deputy (they worked together at Louis Vuitton), and Benedetta Petruzzo, director of Christian Dior Couture, who was poached from Miu Miu. And don’t forget Olivier Bialobos, Dior’s “chief communication and image officer,” probably the most powerful C.M.O.-type in the industry, and definitely the group.

And yet, the buck stops with Delphine and Anderson, himself, who will now oversee 18 collections a year across Dior, J.W. Anderson, and Uniqlo. If anything, that actually understates the scope of his job, when you consider all the additional Dior capsule collections, not to mention red carpet looks—sometimes 10 or more original gowns per event. There was a time when designers were backing away from such tremendous responsibilities, fearful of mental and physical exhaustion. Not Anderson. Delphine’s greatest challenge will be allowing Anderson to truly exercise his creativity while reinforcing the value of the Dior brand in markets where consumers simply don’t care as much as they once did. I had dinner with a Shanghai-based executive last night, and he confessed that the outlook in China remains grim, because the mindset of the consumer there has fundamentally changed. There is already plenty of speculation within the walls of Dior about how it’s going. I was told by multiple parties that Delphine dismissed Anderson’s first attempt at a menswear collection, concluding that it wasn’t Dior enough. However, someone else close to the center of the operation told me that was impossible: Anderson hasn’t shown anybody anything. Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s relatively common for a first collection to be scrapped, and Anderson’s a big boy—he can handle whatever constructive feedback comes at him. The real test will be whether he can succeed in a world where he doesn’t have complete control, like he did at Loewe. I suspect, if he succeeds early on in this process, he will gain some of what he’s lost on that front. Yes, women’s, men’s, and couture may be a tremendous undertaking, but I can see a world where Anderson is overseeing jewelry and childrenswear, too. Can he pull it off? Our first clue arrives June 27.

What I’m Reading…

Every once in a while, the website formally known as Twitter has still got it. [X] L Catterton has set up a Japan fund—its first country-specific fund outside the U.S.—with plans to invest in “10 small- and medium-size companies in consumer-driven industries including cosmetics, food, and retail.” [Nikkei] Jane Larkworthy, one of the great beauty editors, has died. My heart goes out to her family, but also to all the Line Sheet readers to whom she was a mentor, confidant, and friend. She had fantastic taste. [WWD] The original Birkin is up for auction and Jane Birkin expert Marisa Meltzer has the scoop. [NYT] Quince is coming for you, beauty industry. [BoF] PVH lowered its outlook for the year. [MarketWatch] Naomi Fry, Jalil Johnson, Erin Wasson, and plenty of other Line Sheet–adjacent folks star in Aaron Levine’s new campaign. [Instagram]

And finally… I hope Vanessa Friedman is still writing her Kate Spade book! Until tomorrow, Lauren P.S.: We are using affiliate links because we are a business. We may make a couple bucks off them.

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