Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. It’s a busy week for fashion people in Los Angeles, and not just because the Grammys are on Sunday. Last night was Fashion Trust U.S. cocktails at The Edition (sorry I didn’t show, I needed to sit with my kid while he played “choo choos”). Then, on Saturday, there’s a High Snobiety and Maison Kitsuné dinner at the Chateau (you’re not invited). And most notably, there’s also the Fifteen Percent Pledge Gala on the Paramount lot. I will be attending both of those parties in my finest Grace Wales Bonner and would love to see you, so say hi if you see me.

In the meantime, just a reminder that today is Rachel Strugatz’s first day as Puck’s contributing beauty correspondent: I encourage you to harangue her at rachel@puck.news. Starting next Wednesday, Rachel will be delivering the only beauty industry report you actually need to read, with contributions on an ad-hoc basis throughout the week. Today, I’ve got a bit of a teaser.

P.S., for those of you who forward this email to your entire company, I see you and your shameful behavior. My editors are even meaner than me and will get you eventually. Support journalism, lower your taxable income, and hit up Fritz@puck.news for a corporate subscription. Kisses!

Mentioned in this issue: Jacquemus, Julie Schott and Brian Bordainick, Adrian Appiolaza, more Schiaparelli, Helena Helmersson, H&M, Brooke Pace, Starface, Marc Puig, Molly Ringwald, Roblox Toilet Tower Defense, Tiffany Dufu, gentrification, Bret Easton Ellis, Casey Lewis, and a knock-off Paul Mescal.

• Moschino’s new guy: The Aeffe-owned Italian fashion house announced that J.W. Anderson womenswear designer Adrian Appiolaza is its new creative director, succeeding Davide Renne, who tragically died just a few days into the job. My initial thought: People like to poach from Jonathan Anderson. (Remember, Seán McGirr also came from J.W. Anderson, and former Lanvin designer Bruno Sialelli came from Loewe. There are more.)

• H&M’s C.E.O. shuffle: Longtime exec Helena Helmersson left rather abruptly this week. It sounds like it was a personal decision, at least in part, driven by the insanity of running one of the biggest fashion companies in the world, currently being ravaged by faster, cheaper, arguably less ethical competitors. (See: Shein, Temu.) H&M has always been “overstored,” as they say in retail, and it is not vertically integrated like Zara, its major competitor in Europe, which has managed to move a teensy bit upmarket in order to differentiate from those Chinese challengers. (H&M has always had more inventory than it knew what to do with.) I’m a big fan of Arket, the group’s answer to Uniqlo, and wonder if there is an opportunity to further develop that brand. But the company has a lot of issues: fit, design, supply chain, distribution. It’s going to take quite a lot to right this ship. It’s enough to wonder: Is H&M becoming the Gap of Sweden, and not in the go-to apparel-brand way, but in the decades-of-decline way?

• More on the red carpet march of Schiaparelli: After reading my recent note on Schiaparelli’s celebrity strategy, a comms executive reminded me that Los Angeles-based V.I.P.-dressing firm Alta Moda reps Schiaparelli, as well as Fendi, Giambattista Valli, etcetera. In case you don’t know: Most big brands have in-house teams that manage relationships with celebs, but many smaller ones contract an outside agency. Alta Moda, run by Brooke Pace (a longtime friend of former Moschino designer Jeremy Scott), is one of the leaders in the category. “This Fendi-Schiap combo has really made them the it V.I.P. agency this awards season, I would say,” the executive tells me.

I think the pushback is really less about this particular collection than the culmination of a long-building resentment. Jacquemus, by his own account and the account of people close to the company, is an independent, commercial success, and he flaunts it. Fashion people recoil at immodesty, or, more kindly put, outward confidence. (See also: Khaite.) He also has a habit of teasing his social media followers by posting suggestive imagery indicating that he has accepted a job at a big, old Parisian house.

It’s never true. For instance, this summer, I heard he was talking to Givenchy. People around him denied that he was on his way. After Matthew Williams exited in December, the rumors resurfaced, fueled by his post inside Hubert de Givenchy’s office. (He gave Vogue Runway the honest answer: “No.” Anyway, the Sarah Burton speculation has started up again…)

I felt a shift in attitude toward Jacquemus last June, when I walked by a huddle of white-linen-covered banquet tables plopped in the middle of Dimes Square, an alfresco party thrown for his collaboration with Nike. (Wait… I checked and I wasn’t in New York during that weekend. I must have just seen it on Instagram. What is reality?) People started asking, What’s the real deal? How is this a $200 million, $300 million-a-year-in-sales collaboration when A.P.C. was making less than $100 million a year when it got bought by private equity? Then, at the end of 2023, the company’s C.E.O., Bastien Daguzan, exited unexpectedly, just a few weeks after he was given additional responsibilities. Why? I don’t know.

I’m happy to go deeper on this for you at a later date, but for now, here is a touch of analysis: I suspect Jacquemus’s U.S. distribution remains quite shallow, and that most of the sales come from Europe and Asia, which is why it’s hard for many American fashion people to believe it is as popular as reported. After all, the business’s bread and butter is leather goods and in particular, novelty mini bags that start at just over $500. You can sell a lot of those, and I’m willing to bet the gross margin is at least 80 percent, maybe more. Whether that gets you to $250 million in annual sales… anything is possible.

What’s certain is that Jacquemus is the most successful independent French fashion designer of his generation, and that is enough to ruffle plumes. As one Line Sheet reader put it to me, “I disagree with the assertion that Jacquemus’s success is related to government or even industry support. It is more likely related to accessible pricing, celebrity P.R., and Simon’s charisma and good looks (ain’t nothing wrong with that).” I tend to agree. While the French government offers far more structural and financial support to young designers than the U.S., it is not a country of entrepreneurs. Making it on your own there, especially at scale, is all but discouraged culturally. By now, Jacquemus could have had a big job at a big house. He’s chosen a more difficult route, exposing him to far more criticism. You have to give him that.

I had known about Starface essentially from the start. But I didn’t really know about Starface. I’ve dipped in and out of beauty throughout my career, but my reporting has mostly been on the prestige market—my favorite subject—where the luxury groups play. Starface, to me, was just another D.T.C. brand—and a very Gen Z D.T.C. brand at that—which happened to be co-founded by my former colleague’s husband and her best friend. It seemed like a fun business, but one I would never myself need to study.

“Ha!” was the reply to my guess. “More like $75 million.” Turns out, Starface generated around $90 million in actual revenue in 2023, according to people with access to point-of-sale information. And they had only raised about $18 million, I’d heard.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised by the attractive revenue-to-invested capital ratio. After all, Schott and Bordainick sold to big-box stores, including Target and CVS, from the very beginning, which allowed them to scale almost instantly. It seems like a reasonable approach, but even in 2019, it was a big middle finger to the previous generation of indie beauty brands, determined to sell direct-only forever, until they realized that was a bad idea.

I wanted to talk to Julie and Brian about more than distribution. When I was growing up, acne was something teens were desperate to hide, and there was (and still is) a whole market of blemish-erasing products geared toward preteen girls, from face wash to cover-up. Today, we are obsessed by the trend of preteens raiding Sephora, spending hundreds of dollars a visit on skincare that’s designed for skin aged four, five, six times their own. At the same time as they are buying anti-aging potions, they’re also putting glittery, medicated star stickers on their pimples rather than masking them with a poorly matched foundation.

“Starface is social currency,” the writer and expert-on-teens Casey Lewis told me this week. When the company started fundraising in 2018, there was nothing in the U.S. market that could compare. Now there are plenty of pimple patches on the market, and it’s a full-blown category.

Starface is only one of several businesses Julie and Brian have founded together, including Julie (a morning-after birth control pill) and Futurewise (a skincare line dedicated to the “slugging” method… look it up). I hear that this summer, the group, incorporated as Brand New—unorthodox for a holdco model in that different brands have different investors—is launching a Narcan product that reverses drug overdoses. They declined to comment on this, but I’d say it might end up being the most audacious product play. As one person said to me, they like to tackle “ugly problems,” but these problems are increasingly political and polarizing. Perhaps that’s another reason to keep these businesses separate businesses.

We get into all of that and more—from branding in 2024 vs. 2014 to the state of beauty M&A— below, right after I unleash the mightiest of disclosures. Julie and Brian’s shared interest—her best friend and his wife, who introduced them—is Rachel Strugatz, Puck’s new contributing beauty correspondent, which means she will not be covering their businesses. As for my own connection to Julie and Brian, besides having Rachel in common: I met Julie for the first time about a month ago, but was familiar with her work as an editor and writer at xoJane and Elle. I had dinner once with Brian, a serial entrepreneur who also ran innovation at Hudson’s Bay Company for a spell, at Souen in Soho (R.I.P.) many years ago.

I could just go ahead and never speak of Starface in Line Sheet for all eternity, but what they’re doing—the good and the bad of it—is too big a part of the overall conversation to ignore. I didn’t discuss this interview with Rachel, only to let her know I was writing it. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Brian Bordainick: It was challenging for us for a couple reasons. First and foremost, if you look at the aesthetic, it was one of the only brands at the time that was moving in that very vibrant direction on the heels of the pastel, sans-serif craze. So even if you were super into consumer brands, you were like, What the hell is this? It didn’t look or feel or talk like anything that sort of came before it. And the category was unknown. The approach of building an acne brand without using models and before-and-after photos and trumpeting efficacy was new. Some people got it. Most people did not. But it was pretty polarizing. There was no like, We’ll get back to you in a week. It was all, Absolutely not. Julie, you had your own experience.

Julie Schott: Eventually, we had data to back it up. A year before we even had any product to sell, I was talking about Starface on my own social channels and followers were putting emojis on their selfies, saying, Give me Starface, I need Starface.

You launched straight into multibrand retail—Target, CVS—at a time when indie consumer brands were super-hyped on the direct-to-consumer experience. Why?

Julie: A lot of what we did year one and year two was intuition. I grew up going to CVS. The Targets, the Walmarts: They’re so essential to that ubiquity that we were trying to build. And then, around the same time that we entered those retailers, the collective conversation around the culture of going to Target swelled. If you go on TikTok, you see that trips to Target are an entire plotline in the lives of so many Americans. That felt very true to our own experience.

I have a lot of friends here in Los Angeles whose 10-, 11-, and 12-year-old kids are obsessed with going to Sephora and buying these expensive, sophisticated products for their beauty fridges. Why do you think that’s happening, and how does it intersect with what you’re doing in the mass market?

Julie: Starface exists in a world of play and collectibility. There’s a viral TikTok of kids on the playground trading Starface patches like currency. It’s gamified. As for the tweens in Sephora, I don’t think that’s different from what we grew up with. It’s just a different venue. When people are outraged by it, it feels like pretty much your classic attack on girlhood. My friend Faith makes these TikToks about her 12-year-old son. She mentioned one day that tween boys are obsessed with the toilet from Roblox, but no one ever talks about that. Nobody dissects their behaviors in the same way.

You have your hands in a bunch of different companies, but you’re hiring operators for each of them, and they often have different investors. A problem with a holdco, especially one with young brands, is that founders end up spending too much time on the problem child (or children), and not enough time on the brand that’s skyrocketing. How are you managing all of that?

Brian: One of the early things we realized was that a lot of the organizations that pooled capital like a topco and agreed to start x number of companies a year tended to start businesses that were looking for a problem to solve versus a genuinely good idea. What’s good about this structure is, every time that we have an idea, we have to rationalize it on its own. We have to prove this needs to exist. It forces us to have to defend a thesis.

On the brand level, we’ve been good at hiring people who are better than us at certain things so that we can focus on the things that make us who we are. I don’t actually think I would be more effective than our Starface brand president [Kara Brothers] running the business day-to-day. She’s a way more effective manager than I am.

When it comes to your thesis, someone said to me that you’re going after ugly problems.

Julie: We gravitate toward a coming-of-age experience, an experience that might happen at a really formative, pivotal point in your life, and is universally relatable. And, yes, I think we love a taboo, we love something that nobody wants to talk about. The morning-after pill is that to 1,000 percent.

What do you think works in brand building today? Since you started Starface, the category for pimple patches has grown tremendously. But you remain dominant—it’s not like one of the big C.P.G. players dropped in and stole the market from you with a new concept. What do you think you all get about brand building in this era that gives you a competitive advantage?

Brian: The big C.P.G. companies are probably afraid to do a lot of the show, don’t tell that we do. With Starface, for example, it might just be too scary and risky to put out skincare products and not tell your audience how to use it or show a before and after. We take a very different, entertainment-first approach. If you look at Julie [the brand], we have this series of two individuals standing in front of a shelf, talking about why they need the thing. But at no point do they mention the drug Levonorgestrel. They’re just having a genuine, funny interaction, which would be scary to the big player in that category.

The market for beauty M&A is very active right now. Everyone is hiring bankers. What do you think the big strategics are looking for right now, and where is everything moving?

Brian: An interesting delineation to draw here is between prestige and mass. That’s not something that gets enough air time. The prestige playbook is somewhat defined. What’s been interesting over the last couple of years is that a wave of millennial brands got acquired, with varying degrees of success when integrating them into the mothership. People did these deals between $300 million and $800 million or so, under the pretense that there was more to unlock. Some organizations were really successful when integrating, and others weren’t.

Today on the mass side, there are a few dynamics that don’t really get talked about. One is that retailers have gotten really good at developing their own private-label brands, like Target with Good and Gather. To the degree that you see Kimberly-Clark divesting of their private label business in Europe, Haleon is dumping Chapstick to focus on healthcare. But for mass strategics, you still have to solve for this inevitable truth, which is you have no choice if you want to continue to grow your topline, and you’re likely going to have to do that through M&A. But how are you going to take a business and let it do its thing without losing its magic?

There used to be a website called Racked that covered local retail news (sample sale info, where-to-shop guides). It no longer exists (R.I.P., again) because of some poor management decisions (much love to Leslie, Izzy, Britt, and Julia, the editors). Emilia Petrarca, a great reporter of small-but-meaningful moments, gives me Racked vibes. Her latest newsletter, a guide to clothing and shoe repairs in New York and Los Angeles (I helped out a little there) is helpful, but also just very fun to read. [Shop Rat]

A nice interview with Marc Puig, whose company might I.P.O. this year, that breaks down some of what makes the group unique. [Financial Times]

Tiffany Dufu, a serial entrepreneur with Lean In heritage, has been named president of the Tory Burch Foundation. Did you know Tory Burch is also 20 years young this month? [Inbox]

Skye Parrott, most recently editor-in-chief of departed Departures, is relaunching her magazine, Dossier, with a bunch of her old team. [LinkedIn]

Molly Ringwald says most of her clothes in The Breakfast Club were bought at Ralph Lauren (so Chicago suburbs circa 1984), and that the costume designer dyed the shirt so that it would “look different.” Loved this interview and am submitting a petition for Erin to take over more often. [BBSP]

I had a great time sifting through this four-decade timeline of Williamsburg’s gentrification “transformation.” Especially the mention of the diner Relish on Wythe Avenue, where I ate a veggie burger on my 21st birthday before… let’s just say I am so happy there wasn’t social media in 2003! If anyone is in touch with my old boss Lacy, owner of The Landing, which was across the street from Relish and sold mostly Brooklyn designers, including Built by Wendy and Octopi (R.I.P., yet again), please let me know. I loved working retail. [NYT via Public Announcement]

“It pains me to name-drop, but one of my earliest visits to Horses was a three-top with Bret Easton Ellis shortly after he appeared as a guest on our podcast.” LMAO. Jason doesn’t subscribe to Puck, which is truly so rude, but I enjoyed this as-it-stands review of creepy Hollywood restaurant Horses anyway. [Taste]

Adidas is on the struggle bus, selling Yeezy sneakers at cost instead of writing them off. [Bloomberg]

And finally… what in the world is happening here?