Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Go Knicks! (I really mean it.)
Tonight is the Hermès womenswear
show in Bel Air, where I hope I’m lucky enough to see you. More on that tomorrow. In today’s oh-so-special Inner Circle issue (trade up here), I’ve got the details on all the major moves at Kering, where Alexander McQueen has a new C.E.O., Saint Laurent’s Cédric Charbit is getting reinforcement via an LVMH vet, and more speculation on who may replace beloved Bottega Veneta chief
Bartolomeo Rongone, who started at Moncler in April.
Up top, our guy Malique Morris is back with the scoop on more changes at Fear of God. Plus, a call for a moratorium on the word “Cruise” and a look at the truly mind-boggling fervor around Chanel’s Métiers d’art collection, which arrives in stores today.
Tomorrow on Fashion People, my guest is Zegna creative director Alessandro Sartori, who is showing his latest
collection in Malibu on Friday night. We chat about Oura rings, the purpose of a suit in the soft-pants era, why he loves color but only wears black and white, and plenty more. Listen here and here.
Also mentioned in this issue:
Luca de Meo, Nathalie Raynaud, Jerry Lorenzo, BMW Italia, Anthony Vaccarello, Gianfranco D’Attis, Louise Trotter, Demna, Vera Bradley, Bastien Daguzan, Anouck Duranteau-Loeper, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Luca Solca, Andrea Guerra, Nadège Vanhee, the Antwerp Fashion Festival,
Matthieu Blazy, Massimiliano Di Silvestre, Astrid Wendlandt, and more. |
Three Things You Should
Know…
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| Malique Morris
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- Jerry built:
Fear of God founder and creative director Jerry Lorenzo’s ambitions to run the brand himself have coincided with a wave of departures at the Los Angeles–based label. The brand’s chief of staff left in March, I’m told, followed by former chief executive Bastien Daguzan and strategy executive Lacey Hines. In May, C.O.O. Catherine Jacquet departed for Isabel Marant. Indeed, a cursory social media search also reveals that tons
of high-level staffers have jumped ship this year, including human resources V.P. Sunny Trac, who left in January after five years, and technology V.P. Sam Browning, who left this month for Skims. (Fear of God didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Yet for all the turnover, the company’s financial performance has been great. As I wrote last week, the brand’s online sales and profits doubled in 2025. Lorenzo may be operating under the assumption that he can take it from here, even if much of the groundwork was laid by the staffers who’ve departed. Fear of God remains a very good brand, with solid products across Essentials and its higher-end main line. But the company could face an uncertain future without an experienced executive team.
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
Agentic commerce isn’t a future concept. It’s already reshaping how people shop. Static storefronts are giving way to
guided, conversational experiences that don’t just surface products. They drive decisions and conversion in real time. Swap’s Agentic Commerce 101 breaks down what’s real and what it means for brands right now. Inside: |
• What agentic commerce is and why most AI tools don’t qualify • Why AI discovery platforms aren’t built to convert for your brand • Why owning your AI experience and your data is becoming non-negotiable |
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-
Quit calling it “Cruise”: Resortwear has never been a bigger category. There are dozens upon dozens of brands that trade exclusively in garments intended to be worn on and around the beach. And yet the actual Cruise collections increasingly have nothing to do with vacation because of the time of year they arrive in the stores (i.e., December/January, when, yes, people go on island holidays, but they also need coats).
Blessedly, fewer brands are publishing Cruise
season lookbooks—designers have enough pressure—but the ones still committed to the pursuit are featuring anything but swimsuits and caftans. The exception is Chanel, which is fitting, given the literalness of Matthieu Blazy’s designs. Anyway, it’s high time to rebrand this season as something less confusing.
Some designers agree with me. Hermès women’s head Nadège Vanhee has gone so far as to brand the collection she’s showing tonight as “Part
2” of her Autumn/Winter proposal. (The first half was shown in March.) Personally, I like The Row’s approach. They simply call their four collections Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer, as nature intended. I know they hate to be copied, but in this case it would be for the greater good. - Métiers d’art mania: Every day, I wonder just how gobsmacking those 2026 Chanel revenue numbers are going to turn out. Blazy’s first Métiers d’art collection
arrives in stores today, and someone sent me a photo of the brand’s Bond Street store, in London, where there were shoppers camped out front—with chairs and everything. The queues aren’t quite first-McDonald’s-in-the-U.S.S.R. level, but it does remind me of the early days of the iPhone and other feverish consumer moments.
Chanel is a privately held business, and executives indicated they underbought Blazy’s first ready-to-wear collection as a precautionary measure. I suspect they went
deeper this time around (and also created plenty of commercial products that complement the original runway pieces). It’s truly something to behold in this market, where positive comps are still hard to come by.
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And now, your mid-2026 Kering executive roster report… |
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Luca de Meo’s grand turnaround plan for Kering was met with skepticism in April. But
insiders are starting to see his penchant for installing executives from outside the industry as the only path forward. |
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It’s been about six weeks since Kering’s now-infamous Capital Markets Day—the new pastime in which C.E.O.
Luca de Meo spoke for three hours straight, Bernstein analyst Luca Solca inspired Demna to write a motivational memo to his team, and we ate all our meals standing up, mulling the future of the company. In the aftermath, a host of questions around the chief executive’s long-awaited turnaround plan remain unanswered. Among them: How is de Meo measuring “brand desirability,” a new K.P.I. for label-level executives? Would the Renault veteran hire
more car guys? (Yes, Gucci is now partnering with Formula 1.) Most importantly: Would his overhaul actually work? |
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A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR |
Agentic commerce isn’t a future concept. It’s already reshaping how people shop. Static storefronts are giving way to
guided, conversational experiences that don’t just surface products. They drive decisions and conversion in real time. Swap’s Agentic Commerce 101 breaks down what’s real and what it means for brands right now. Inside: |
• What agentic commerce is and why most AI tools don’t qualify • Why AI discovery platforms aren’t built to convert for your brand • Why owning your AI experience and your data is becoming non-negotiable |
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Recently, industry conversations around these philosophical questions have taken on a more optimistic
tone—partly because the fashion world seems to be belatedly coming to terms with luxury’s great slowdown. The growth experienced during the peak years, many now recognize, will simply never be replicated. De Meo, however, can only benefit from those changing expectations, especially because there is still plenty of money to be made. To wit, there are early signs that Demna’s Gucci is working—at least that’s what de Meo recently shared with investors.
It also helps that de Meo has started
to fill executive openings at the brand level. On Monday, the company announced that former Prada brand C.E.O. Gianfranco D’Attis was headed to Alexander McQueen—an indication that Kering and de Meo are committed to the label, which it nearly unloaded at one point. D’Attis’s bona fides are solid: Before his nearly
three years at Prada, he hopscotched between watches and ready-to-wear at Dior and Chloé, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and IWC Schaffhausen. However, he has yet to truly lead a brand. (As Prada Group C.E.O. Andrea Guerra has made relatively clear since D’Attis’s exit, the brand leads within the group are expected to be managers, not visionaries.) So it is unknown whether D’Attis has the dynamism and imagination to enact such a daunting turnaround.
McQueen, of course, is
among the least of de Meo’s problems. Over at Saint Laurent—the most stable brand in the portfolio, with arguably the most potential—C.E.O. Cédric Charbit needs to simultaneously fix an overleveraged handbag program, maintain momentum in shoes, and broaden the ready-to-wear offering, which was once a big driver of customer acquisition. To give Charbit a hand, de Meo hired Anouck Duranteau-Loeper, the well-regarded former LVMH exec who spent the past decade
running Isabel Marant, according to a report by journalist Astrid Wendlandt. (Reps for the company had no comment regarding the report, and Duranteau-Loeper did not respond to a request for comment.) Duranteau-Loeper steered Isabel Marant through a difficult period, and after a failed sales process, she was able to orchestrate a succession that widened the brand’s appeal beyond French bobos and wannabes. (She’s a major reason why American college kids are now wearing Isabel
Marant merch.)
At Saint Laurent, Duranteau-Loeper will probably play a similar role as Nathalie Raynaud at Balenciaga—taking responsibility for the product and designer relationship while working closely with creative director Anthony Vaccarello. It’s still unclear whether Balenciaga creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli can fulfill the brand’s mandate of capturing Gen Z, but Raynaud has managed to keep things moving with an exemplary bag
program.
Another outstanding question has been who will replace Bottega Veneta C.E.O. Bartolomeo Rongone, who joined Moncler after he was passed over for the group C.E.O. gig. During the presentation in Florence, de Meo made it clear that he was not rushing to find a successor and was deeply involved in the brand himself, noting that Bottega’s profit margin was far too narrow. For a while, there were rumors that a Renault executive was taking over, but the company was
quick to shoot that down. More recently, people inside and outside the company were pegging Massimiliano Di Silvestre, the former C.E.O. of BMW Italia, who left that business at the end of May, as Rongone’s successor. |
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The company has insisted that this is 100 percent not true, and de Meo has vowed that he won’t bring in an
auto-industry outsider to lead Bottega. (I have a hunch that Di Silvestre will end up in Kering corporate, but we’ll know for sure soon.) While de Meo has put plenty of his guys in C-suite roles within Kering, he has insisted that brand leaders need deep product knowledge. But one person close to Rongone expressed surprise that his role had not yet been backfilled, particularly given Bottega’s momentum and importance to the overall group.
In some ways, it would make more sense for
Duranteau-Loeper to lead Bottega than pair up with Charbit, but it seems Kering favors the tag-team structure given the difficulty of the tasks at hand. Whoever does get the Bottega job—whether a seasoned luxury executive or someone from outside the industry—will have to work to get the best out of Louise Trotter, who was close with Rongone. More than anything, these moves all suggest that there are simply not that many experienced fashion executives around who are equipped to
manage through the new normal—a trend that’s also emerging, by the way, in the media and entertainment industries. Of course, that’s precisely why they hired de Meo in the first place. |
What We’re Reading…
and Looking At… and Shopping For
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OTB has acquired the remaining 30 percent of Viktor & Rolf. The group already owned 70 percent.
[Inbox]
Pamela Drucker Mann, longtime Condé Nast business-side patriot, raised $10 million for her publishing platform, Run-A-Muck. [WSJ]
The Antwerp Fashion Festival is opening today and sounds incredibly fun.
[See All the Programming]
Obviously, I like the Mango–Eckhaus Latta collaboration. I want a lot of it, but especially the ribbed polo neck sweater, the sheer top with matching beaded belt, and the
metal chain belt. It’s all about belts! [Mango]
Yet another person has an opinion about the origin story of the Celine calico bags. They think they are
inspired not by Vera Bradley, not by Pierre Deux, but by Souleiado, which has a museum in Provence. [Shop It If You Wish]
Bloomingdale’s is one of the few multibrand luxury players punching above its weight in a trying retail sector. The Macy’s-owned retailer reported 10 percent sales growth in the first quarter of 2026, the highest Q1 jump in its history. The flagship Macy’s brand logged a 2
percent increase, and Bluemercury saw a 6 percent bump during the quarter. Maybe the new saying will be “scatter my ashes at Bloomingdale’s.” [Macy’s]
Lululemon’s revenue grew a paltry 4 percent, to $2.5 billion, in the first quarter, but its U.S. sales dropped 3 percent and
its net profits nearly halved. The company expects a 1 percent sales decline for the full year. Here’s hoping incoming C.E.O. Heidi O’Neill has some big ideas when that Nike noncompete is finally up in September. [Lululemon]
Todd Snyder partnered with CB2 on a line of homewares that include a leather dining chair, a glass decanter,
and a velvet pillow. The basic bros who buy CB2 are the perfect target for Todd Snyder, which caters to the everyman who strives to be movie-star handsome. Plus, the interiors in Todd Snyder’s retail stores are as appealing as the clothes. [Todd Snyder] |
Until tomorrow,
Lauren
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