Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Earlier this evening, I watched Faith Kipyegon attempt to become the first woman to run a sub-four-minute mile at Sébastien-Charléty Stadium in Paris’s 13th arrondissement while writing this evening’s note on the stunning but also totally predictable news about Anna Wintour, the (slight) loosening of her grip on American Vogue, and who might succeed her in the day-to-day running of the magazine in a newly created regional role. Kipyegon didn’t break four, but she did break her own world record, and it was still a pretty awesome moment. It was also a meaningful expression of Nike C.E.O. Elliott Hill’s attempt to revive the brand’s fortunes in both the female and performance categories. Breaking4, as they dubbed it, coincided with Nike’s quarterly earnings call, which helps to explain why Mark Parker, Nike’s executive chairman, and not Hill, was in Paris for the event. Meanwhile, back in Portland, Hill and his team announced that the company’s revenue drop in its most recent quarter was less than anticipated, although shares still wobbled. In today’s supersize Inner Circle issue, I dig into the Anna succession plotlines. Plus, I’ve got a Gap scoop on a new category, an update on the Saks debt situation, and a last look at Demna’s Balenciaga. Programming note: Tomorrow on Fashion People, I’m joined by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Robin Givhan, author of Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. I don’t even know how to characterize our conversation here because we cover so much, from Abloh’s upbringing to his contributions to Louis Vuitton, LVMH, and the culture at large. (There’s also some great Nike stuff in here that Elliott Hill should take note of.) Listen here and here. Mentioned in this issue: Anna Wintour, Condé Nast, Vogue, Mark Guiducci, Sara Moonves, Chloe Malle, Chioma Nnadi, the Met Gala, Vanity Fair, Nicole Phelps, Samira Nasr, Saks Global, Marc Metrick, Demna, Balenciaga, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Lemaire, Wales Bonner, Dries Van Noten, and many more…

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Four Things You Should Know…

Never forget Dream, Heaven, Grass, and Om: Here’s one for the Millennials who were obsessed with Gap fragrances in the 1990s: According to a source with direct knowledge of the situation, Gap plans on launching a beauty line. I have no other information at the moment—Is it makeup? Is it skincare? Is it fragrance, again?—but I will share more as I know more. As Rachel Strugatz can tell you, these types of high-street beauty plays are rarely successful, but let’s be open-minded for now. While I have you on the subject of unforgettable ’90s beauty moments, remember Club Monaco’s Glaze lipstick, worn by Monica Lewinsky during her Barbara Walters interview? A rep for Gap did not respond to a request for comment.

Mo Money? Mo Saks?: On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that Saks Global is in talks to raise another $600 million from bondholders as its $120 million interest payment comes due on June 30. I asked my Puck bud Bill Cohan, author of our Dry Powder newsletter and the foremost expert on Saks’s debt situation, for his assessment. “This rumored financing defies market logic,” Bill told me. “With the bonds trading at 38 cents on the dollar, you’re really telling me that bondholders are going to throw good money after bad? And that the company is going to allow $120 million of interest payments out the door for bonds yielding 44 percent? Marc Metrick, phone home!” I guess he’ll have to by Monday?
Demna’s peaceful transfer of power: Moments after walking into the Kering headquarters on Wednesday night, at the start of the exhibition celebrating Demna’s decade at Balenciaga, an editor loudly whispered at me across the aisle, in front of the off-the-shoulder puffer from the designer’s first collection: “Pierpaolo is here!” I knew already, of course. Someone had posted a video on social media of Demna’s successor, Pierpaolo Piccioli, walking through the show, chatting with the man of the hour and a small circle of friends. Demna’s voice could be heard wafting through the cocktail party in the garden, but also throughout the exhibition, where he narrates nearly every look. The Balenciaga team was also on hand, including the house archivist, who has served through four designer eras—Piccioli, Nicolas Ghesquière, Alexander Wang, and Demna. Outgoing C.E.O. François-Henri Pinault and all the top Kering brass were there, too. Everyone was chill, which is something, considering the tremendous pressure they are all under at the moment. While the couture show on July 9 will be Demna’s grand finale, the exhibition was a more cathartic exercise: 10 years of the designer’s life, all laid out, piece by piece, from a rejection letter he saved after interviewing for a menswear designer job at the house in 2008, to the Simpsons episode, to the trompe l’oeil jeans, to his own black hoodie. It was all a bit nostalgic, but more than anything, it got me excited about Demna’s Gucci proposal. I hear he has recently become a Tom Ford obsessive.
A tale of three fashion shows: I attended only a few proper runway shows this week, and chose selfishly. Lemaire, Wales Bonner, and Dries Van Noten are all personal interests of mine, but they’re also three labels in transition. Lemaire’s business is bigger than ever, as is its influence on the way urbanites dress. What I like so much about co-artistic director Sarah-Linh Tran and Christophe Lemaire’s work is its iterative nature: Shoes are streamlined from one season to the next, crotches are dropped, volumes and proportions change. After the show, I immediately headed to the internet to see whether some version of the wrap-around sandals shown were available. Turns out, I already own the current version. (See, everything is just new enough to keep you wanting more…)

Looks from Lemaire, Wales Bonner, and Dries Van Noten.

Meanwhile, Grace Wales Bonner celebrated her 10th anniversary in business with a collection that I imagine mirrored her own wardrobe, and, as she said backstage, clearly defined the Wales Bonner proposition. I liked the elegance of the standing-collar barn jacket and simplicity of the printed shirt with track pants, part of her long-running and hugely popular collection with Adidas.On Thursday, at Julian Klausner’s first menswear show for Dries Van Noten, the audience let out a big whoop at the end, with a crew of French journalists even standing to clap. People cried. (I think it was the nipped waists that got them.) Sophie Fontanel, one of the journos so moved as to stand, noted on her Instagram that Klausner was “beyond successful.” Don’t get me wrong, he is deeply talented, and sharply de-aging the Dries look in the vein of VFX. But I’m sure Klausner also benefited somewhat from recency bias. (The season has been relatively quiet.) And yet, there’s no denying he’s sifting through the Dries brand idiosyncrasies with an impressive confidence, especially given the circumstances of his particular succession.

And now, the main event…

Wintour in Winter

The surprising and yet totally expected news that Anna Wintour is dropping her day-to-day American Vogue responsibilities has the industry in a predictable tizzy. Here’s what the replacement leaderboard looks like.

Lauren Sherman

At his men’s show on Thursday, shortly after Condé Nast announced that chief content officer Anna Wintour was finally relinquishing her editorship of American Vogue, the rumor backstage was that Rick Owens changed the soundtrack to “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead.” Except she isn’t. Like many leaders of her generation, Wintour is not letting go so easily, and many of her obligations are not subject to change. She’ll remain Condé Nast’s chief content officer, and the lead chairperson of the Met Gala. She’s also still the global head of editorial content for Vogue. After systematically killing the title, Wintour will be the magazine’s last editor-in-chief. But now the regional job of running content at American Vogue, a position that has technically laid vacant on the Condé org chart for five years while Wintour did multiple-duty, is going to get filled. Mark Guiducci, who hasn’t even started at Vanity Fair yet, would have been a candidate just weeks ago. Virginia Smith, Wintour’s longtime fashion director who “basically runs the magazine,” just shifted to working four days a week and is a vestige of a bygone era. This is too small of a job for W magazine co-owner and editor-in-chief Sara Moonves—the most natural facsimile of the Wintourian mix of realpolitik business savvy, artistic integrity, and creative psychology. I’m skeptical that she would return to Condé Nast in a foot-soldier mold.

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Other names that will inevitably surface are Meta’s Eva Chen (makes too much money, although I could see her nabbing the Met Gala in due time) and Rickie De Sole (ambitious, but perhaps too much so). Chioma Nnadi, the current content head at British Vogue, may very well want to move back to the States, and her appointment could make room for Ib Kamara to take over that magazine. But Nnadi remains relatively unproven in that role, and the U.S. job, while not the job, is the biggest of all the little ones. Then there’s Vogue Runway and Vogue Business director Nicole Phelps, who has the respect of the industry and her staff. Chloe Malle, who currently runs Vogue.com, is the funniest (and most determined) nepo baby around, and fits the paradigm of younger, digital savvy people who know how to manage the decline of these institutions. Also, as an efficiency maximalist, Wintour has ensured that the production of American Vogue is a low-key military operation: art direction, photography, and styling could remain consistent no matter who takes over. On the outside, Samira Nasr would appear to be a natural contender. A former Vogue assistant turned fashion director and stylist, Nasr was tapped by Hearst to lead Harper’s Bazaar when Glenda Bailey was on her way out. Her tenure at Bazaar, I would say, has been successful by plenty of measures: Advertisers like her, and she’s brought a deep sophistication to the brand, even if she has yet to nail the art of the magazine cover. And not for nothing: Nasr, who, unlike her predecessors, has maintained a friendly relationship with Wintour in her years at Hearst, was invited to this year’s Met Gala. Too bad it’s a smaller role with a lesser salary. (And, of course, an awful title.)

Good Luck, Everyone…

Technically, there are also plenty of people with legitimate bona fides outside of the Vogue orbit who will have their allies make calls and recommendations on their behalf. This isn’t a simulacrum of the Vanity Fair situation, after all, where the brand’s authority was so diminished that the enlistment of a Wintour insider felt inevitable. Well, maybe it feels inevitable in this case, too. The Guiducci appointment suggested that Wintour was rewarding her favorites from a new generation. And for that reason, my money is currently on Malle: For her, this job would be a step up—a big one.

Speculation that Wintour, who is 75, was finally contemplating retirement began around the Met Gala. (To be fair, this has happened almost every year for the past decade or so.) Despite the chatter, I figured that she would announce her retirement in the summer of 2026, after the opening of the new Costume Institute gallery space at the Met, a project she spearheaded. In any case, it makes sense that Wintour finally agreed to make a change. Just like Vanity Fair and other Condé Nast titles, Vogue is going to have to continue to resize itself: There will be cuts, painful but logical decisions, etcetera. It’s only going to get worse, and Wintour likes to look ahead. Along with luxury sales leader Susan Cappa, who quit this week after frustration over resources and budgeting, I heard there were layoffs on the product team. Wintour needs someone like Nasr—or, more probably, Malle—to assure advertisers that American Vogue is still essential. But what will happen when she finally, really exits stage left? Wintour has made it clear that she not only feels responsible to lead Condé Nast through this post–Si Newhouse transformation, but that she also wants to pull it off. There are plenty around her who fear that her decision to preside over this stage of the company’s life has diminished her legacy, but it may humanize it, too.

What I’m Reading…

I’m sorry, but I love this. Louis Vuitton and the architecture firm OMA have built a cruise-ship-shaped structure at the entrance of a mall in Shanghai, and transformed it into a store, complete with a museum-style exhibition featuring 10 different “themed” rooms, a café, and, of course, retail. Bonkers in the best way. [WWD] Come for Tina Brown’s lede, stay for her honest assessment of Michelle Obama’s curious rebranding. [Fresh Hell] I went to the Serpentine Gallery Summer Party once, when I was 21, or 22, when I used to somehow get myself invited to parties like that. It was so glamorous, but in the British way (meaning everyone looks a bit out of sorts). And it still is! Should we get ourselves invited next year? [W]

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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