Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. It’s Wednesday, and I’m still in Los Angeles, prepping for my 3-year-old’s upcoming “graduation” from an eight-day intensive swimming course.

Lucky for you, Rachel “Rachel@puck.news” Strugatz is back with a tale of Hailey Bieber’s Rhode and Selena Gomez’s Rare—two successful celebrity beauty brands, created by rival stars—and what their competition betrays about the state of the industry. I’ve also got fun things up front for you: i-D developments, Beka-Style Not Com news, Vampire’s Wife dissolution details, a take on this Gap “couture” dress (smh), and an alternative view of Virginie Viard at Chanel.

🚨 An important announcement for all you L.A.-based Line Sheet readers: We’re having a party and you’re invited! On Monday, June 3, at 7 p.m. PT, join me at the Roosevelt Hotel, where I’ll be moderating a conversation between five of HBO and Max Originals’ top costume designers. If you’ve been dying to know the story behind that Irene Neuwirth name-drop in the first season of Hacks, this event is for you. Joining Hacks’ Kathleen Felix-Hager is The Gilded Age’s Kasia Walicka-Maimone, The Regime’s Consolata Boyle, The Righteous Gemstones’ Christina Flannery, The Sympathizer’s Danny Glicker, and True Detective: Night Country’s Giulia Moschioni. I personally cannot wait to talk to these people, and also to meet many of you! There will also be fashions on display. Click here to RSVP.

Finally, in honor of the long weekend in the U.S. and the U.K., I’ll be publishing a truncated version of Line Sheet next Monday, which means it’s Mailbag Time. Got a question for me? Just reply to this email. I will do everything in my power to answer.

Mentioned in this issue: Selena Gomez, Rare Beauty, Hailey Bieber, Rhode, Sephora, Karlie Kloss, Holly Shackleton, Style Not Com, Beka Gvishiani, The Vampire’s Wife, Jimmy Iovine, Matches, Zac Posen, Anne Hathaway, Dôen, Chanel, Virginie Viard, and many, many more.

• Karlie’s making moves, finally?: Holly Shackleton, the editor-in-chief of i-D before Alastair Mckimm, has returned to the brand. I’ve heard the contract is six months, and it’s more of a let’s-see-how-this-goes situation. She’s filling in for editorial director Olivia Singer, who left within the past week. Singer was one of just a few editorial people from the Mckimm era remaining after his exit in February and layoffs in March. I’ve also heard that i-D owner Karlie Kloss has been in conversations with art director Ferdinando Verderi about the global E.I.C. role, although they’ve been talking to a lot of people. More on this soon, I’m sure! (A rep for i-D declined to comment.)
• Beka goes to Hollywood: Beka Gvishiani, the creator behind Style Not Com, everyone’s favorite fashion news publication, has signed with CAA. Earlier this year, the Georgia-born Gvishiani partnered with Shado Ventures’ Hassan Pierre for management, and now he’s linking up with the connectors over at CAA to wheel and deal.

  Gvishiani is just the latest fashion commentator-creator to hire an agent. (At UTA’s pre-Met Gala party, I was reminded that HauteLeMode sweetheart Luke Meagher is a part of their talent roster.) But Gvishiani is unique in that his platform is Instagram, and his chosen communication tool is words (white ones on a cobalt blue background, to be precise). When I first wrote about Beka a few years ago, I said he was the Anti-Diet Prada, a reference to the hate-read account that blasts designer copycats and in-poor-taste fashion, alike. Today, though, Style Not Com is something far bigger: It’s what WWD should be—an endless stream of news and information, delivered in a quippy, clever-but-not-too-clever package. He doesn’t miss a trick, and the brands know it and love him for it. Whether or not CAA makes him a lot more money, the signing belatedly recognizes that he has become a cultural figure, and an essential part of the fashion industry ecosystem.

• Sucking all the life out of independent fashion: It’s over for The Vampire’s Wife, according to a statement from the company, which is holding a final blowout sale in London this weekend. Alas, it’s no secret that Susie Cave’s British label faced some financial challenges over the past couple of years, despite the popularity of its waist-defining, puffed-sleeve frocks.

  More specifically, according to a person close to it all, Cave—who is famously married to crepuscular rock star Nick Cave, hence the company name—was ready to call it quits after 10 years. The brand’s biggest account was Matches, the distressed zombie luxury retailer, and its bankruptcy “left TVW in the lurch,” according to the person. Not only was Vampire’s Wife selling the most merchandise to Matches, but many of those designs and fabrics were exclusive to the e-tailer. With the blessing of the majority owners, music executive Jimmy Iovine and wife Liberty Ross, and other investors, Cave could have probably sold the name. But everyone bowed out, I’m told. (A rep for Iovine reminded me that this was obviously a very tiny part of his portfolio.)

  Vampire’s Wife won’t be the last indie brand to close up shop in the coming weeks. (On Monday, of course, I noted that Mara Hoffman was winding her company down. These things always happen in threes, or more…) The Matches fallout is to blame, sure—but Matches itself is merely a victim of larger exogenous forces: rising interest rates, post-Covid behaviors, rising shipping and material costs, and the fact that fashion is hard business.

• Cotton “couture”: I received lots of requests to offer feedback on the Zac Posen-designed dress made for Anne Hathaway, who wore it to a Bulgari event in Rome. (“Zac and Gap about to get Sheeted,” a friend said.) The dress—a refashioned white shirt, lightly corseted—was branded Gap, and will be available, in some iteration, to preorder on the company’s website sooner than later, according to an Instagram post. You may recall that Posen is the creative director of Gap Inc. and chief creative officer of Old Navy. (In a recent press release, they called him a “cultural curator.”)

  First, I’d like to say that Anne Hathaway is hot. Second, the dress is beautifully constructed, and reminded me of Gap’s late-aughts collaboration with a range of American designers riffing on the white shirt. Third, this is absolutely not the right strategy for Gap at this moment. Stunts like this, or the denim Met Gala dress, raise awareness, and Gap does not need awareness. Gap needs “simple, American clothes that look cool for the masses,” as one frustrated friend told me: cool jeans, the perfect t-shirt, nice-fitting button-ups. They want someone to show them how to dress, not how to dress up.

  This week, Gap also launched a collaboration with the California-based brand Dôen, the majority of which promptly sold out. I am happy for Dôen, a truly remarkable company turning out distinctive designs and making money along the way. Their name is better known to the masses now, and the alignment with Gap—another resolutely American brand—is smart. Gap, however, is using overused tricks to solve a fundamental business problem.

• Chanel wants you to know Virginie is doing a great job!: In 2017, the famously private fashion house started publishing its annual results to quash the usage of what it deemed incomplete information. At the time, the company was run through a Dutch holding company and filed financial reports via the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce. Chanel claimed those figures did not account for the entire business—that some entities were missing—so analysts and gossipy industry types weren’t getting the whole story.

  Chanel executives, including the president of fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky, realized the business press had a trickle-down influence on consumer press and consumers alike, and that there was an opportunity to control the narrative by publishing the numbers themselves—even though they have no obligation to do so as a private company. This week, Chanel revealed that it is approaching Louis Vuitton in annual revenue, generating just under $20 billion in 2023, an extraordinary feat. The difference between the two businesses, of course, is that Louis Vuitton is much more reliant on handbags and accessories, while Chanel makes a lot off of beauty products (both fragrance and cosmetics).

  Chanel’s biggest talking point, however, was not its sheer size or that it’s increasing its capex to open more stores in China (where the group believes it is, as retailers like to say, underpenetrated), but that creative director Virginie Viard is a “massive contributor” to the business, as C.F.O. Philippe Blondiaux told WWD. Again, the point of saying this is to control the narrative. Viard’s aesthetic is at once old lady and little girl, and the internet goes apeshit over her fusty take on youth culture after every collection. But according to the suits, Viard isn’t going anywhere, so stop dreaming of Hedi Slimane or Marc Jacobs or whomever.

  For what it’s worth, I think the accessories are consistently good, and have gotten better since Viard replaced Karl Lagerfeld. I generally don’t like the collections, but most people didn’t like Lagerfeld’s late collections, either. It would be fun and fabulous to have Slimane or Jacobs in charge, but Viard seems like an easy-going type, so why rock the boat? My sources close to the business have said previously that the Wertheimers, the family that owns Chanel, understand that Viard, who is 61 and has worked at the company full-time since 1997, is not a long-term solution. Probably, more than anything, because she doesn’t want to be. This is not a person seeking validation from others, that’s for sure.

  I’m more interested in what the Wertheimers continue to do with their massive fortune. Will they buy another fashion brand? There was the reported Prada meeting, yes, but there are others that could benefit from such an arrangement… Ferragamo, Burberry, maybe even Missoni. The shortlist is short—and there is no other brand as attractive as Prada—but for the Wertheimers, it’s certainly worth a gander.

Yes, one of these entrepreneurs used to date Justin Bieber while the other is married to him—the ingredients of a pseudo-rivalry that might delight the TMZ crowd. A more compelling beef, however, is the fact that Rhode is now preparing to make its official entrée into makeup: The company is launching blush in June, I’m told. Sure, every brand has blush, but this is a big deal: Rare’s bestselling product is blush, which means that for the first time in these brands’ brief lifecycles, they will be directly competing for Gen Z’s fickle affections.

Some have boiled Rhode’s success down to timing: Bieber launched a beauty business at the peak of her cultural currency. But I’d argue that she actually preternaturally understands how content and commerce should be intertwined—how famous-for-I’m-not-sure-what celebrities can use their social handles as commerce platforms to vertically integrate the business from product to end-user. Bieber lives and breathes the brand she created, and more recently tipped us off last summer about this yet-to-be-released blush. Her fantastically pink cheeks during the promotion of her Strawberry Glaze lip gloss were likely a teaser for Rhode’s new, creamy blush sticks.

In order to scale, Rhode needs to get her glazing fluid, gloss, and now blush in front of the 90 percent of people who prefer to shop for beauty products in the real world—meaning at Sephora, Ulta Beauty, or Target. “If Hailey doesn’t have Selena scale, it’s an issue,” said a person who used to work closely on Rhode’s business. “But I also know that Hailey would rather be D.T.C. and exclusive and always sold out,” as opposed to Rare, which has a bigger market opportunity and TAM.

Meanwhile, I’m hearing that Rare, “while performing exceptionally well,” is assessing its options and could be exploring an initial public offering. (I’ve reported that it hired Goldman Sachs and Raymond James’ ubiquitous Vennette Ho as financial advisors.) The business has gotten so big, I’m told, that the startup is potentially too expensive for strategics that would prefer to spend billions of dollars on something with history, like Creed or Aesop. According to a banker, Rare was allegedly always exploring a dual process, but the timeline is unclear.

Now, it’s up to Bieber to show that she truly has cross-category appeal in skincare and makeup, and can get her products on shelves in an actual store. If she does, it will be interesting to see how big Rhode can become. For now, there’s something intensely human about this micro-drama. If Bieber and Gomez have taught us anything, it’s that you can be hot, rich, young, helm a $100 million beauty business, and still be insecure about your husband’s ex. Celebrities are petty, just like the rest of us.

Until tomorrow,
Lauren