More LVMH Murmurs, Copping’s Lanvin & OnlyFans Intrigue

Hi, and welcome to Line Sheet. Still in Milan, still haven’t gone shopping. (Although, the sales are on…) Anyway, I unexpectedly met a few Puck fans last night at a get-together for The Wilde, a new members’ club opening here that’s backed by Three Hills, the aesthetically minded private equity firm behind Sant Ambroeus, Hunter, and Tomorrow, among other fashion-adjacent thingies. (Good job with the party, Christian!) Today, I’m digging into this Peter Copping x Lanvin news—one creative director appointment down, about 5,000 to go. (Should I create a spreadsheet?) I’m also sharing some feedback on the latest goings-on at LVMH. Speaking of: a reminder that tomorrow’s episode of Fashion People is all about Bernard Arnault. (Get excited, Mickaël.) I’m joined by Bloomberg Businessweek editor-in-chief Brad Stone and reporter Angelina Rascouët, who recently profiled the LVMH chairman and C.E.O. for the magazine’s relaunch. We go into everything from succession questions to the implications for luxury if Marine Le Pen is elected. Subscribe here not to miss it. Finally, if you are a listener of Fashion People but haven’t yet signed up for Puck, please know that one cannot exist without the other. Join us. Mentioned in this issue: Lanvin, Peter Copping, Siddhartha Shukla, LVMH, Angelina Rascouët, Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, Richemont, Cartier, Lina Khan, Demna, Balenciaga, OnlyFans, Nina Ricci, Puig, Oscar de la Renta, Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, Alber Elbaz, Stefano Pilati, Loewe, Jonathan Anderson, Karlie Kloss, and many more.

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More, more, more LVMH: I got a lot of feedback on yesterday’s column, and your words conjured some additional thoughts. Regarding the group’s current fashion and fine jewelry acquisition strategy: I am convinced that LVMH is done buying up little fashion brands, even if it appeases a top design talent that they want to use for another house. (There are other ways to appease said talent, such as money.) I am also convinced that they are considering selling some of their smaller brands. (What’s the point of managing a $200 million to $300 million a year—or less!—business if they don’t have to? Those operations offer insufficient contribution margins for a company of this size.) But as Angelina Rascouët reminds me on tomorrow’s episode of Fashion People (remember, subscribe!), Arnault doesn’t like to let things go.That may be true, though I still believe that the Marc Jacobs brand is an exception, given the history and success he’s had with its namesake. But everything else that’s small maybe doesn’t belong in the business anymore. As for the family’s stake in Richemont, presumably with Bernard’s eye on Cartier? “Arnault buys Cartier on the same day I wear JNCOs. Never,” a person who knows both companies well told me. I’m still riding for a Richemont-Kering merger, but we all know it’s just me and the analysts. Another thing a lot of people wanted to talk about: Will LVMH run into antitrust headaches and regulatory hurdles as it attempts to make further acquisitions? The combination of Tapestry and Capri, after all, is far less of a threat to consumer prices, and they’re getting dragged through court. The difference, I guess, is that LVMH’s hard and soft luxury goods are generally much more expensive than Tapestry and Capri’s offerings, and the F.T.C. and Lina Khan might not want to spend their time protecting the wallets of extremely rich people. It’s already a stretch in the case of Michael Kors and Coach.
The verdict on couture: It was a strange season, as I have mentioned before, given that Fendi, Alaïa, and Valentino were out, Chanel was only half in, etcetera. I managed to catch Thom Browne and Armani in the evenings—both strong, you could see a real client in the looks—and heard good things about Schiaparelli and Chanel, too. The news was Balenciaga, and not only because Demna went ahead and did jeans—wow, the internet cares!—but also because, just a day after the show, it was announced that couture deputy Peter Copping would be headed to Lanvin in September. (People, even mean people, appear optimistic about the Lanvin appointment.) Copping actually moved into a VIP and special projects role at Balenciaga a while back, according to an internal company source, but externally he was still associated with couture. Feel free to complain about the pre-Olympics traffic and the closed-off Invalides and the difficulty getting around all you want, but the reality is that the Fédération pulled off both men’s and couture with relatively little drama. Also, since everything was moved up a week, American editors can spend Fourth of July at home for the first time in decades.
OnlyFans at Fashion Week?: One of the stranger bits of gossip floating around concerned multiple editors and their accounts on OnlyFans and other related sites. I did not engage with that other rumor, so I won’t engage with this one. Too tacky. And in this instance, I do not think the truth will set them free. (Apparently, three out of five “adult creators” have experienced discrimination at work. Duh.) For certain fashion brands, however, there is a business case for engaging with OnlyFans—maybe even putting a few of the adult influencers in the front row at a show. OnlyFans itself already engages with fashion: It has launched, no lie, a fund for fashion creators. (In 2022, Law Roach and Sir John judged the competition. Rebecca Minkoff was a mentor.) Anyway, if a big, cool, brand were to do it—they’d need to pick the right creator, and have the correct tone and attitude about it—it could make for an interesting media moment. I see this working for Nicolas Di Felice or Jonathan Anderson.

No Man’s Lanvin

News, notes, and the current discourse on the appointment of Peter Copping to lead Lanvin, France’s oldest house, which needs an injection from a real adult.

LAUREN SHERMAN

Today’s appointment of Peter Copping to the role of artistic director at Lanvin, the oldest operating French fashion house, was at once completely unexpected and entirely obvious. Copping has had a strangely transparent career. His behind-the-scenes work—with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton and, most recently, Demna at Balenciaga Couture—is almost as well known as his headliner appointments at Nina Ricci (Puig’s long-suffering brand where he turned out perfectly fine collections) and Oscar de la Renta (a catastrophe, by all accounts, it just wasn’t right). Copping isn’t a self-promoter; I’d even say he possesses reserve, which has served him well.And yet, I doubt name recognition had anything to do with this choice. Copping has depth of experience making clothes that people actually wear. Today, the fashion executives recruiting creative directors must decide between hiring a curator—a person who knows how to build a world—or a designer, who’s more focused on the clothes than the concept. Very few candidates are a combination of the two, and in recent years, the curators have won out.

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Although it’s certainly not a new idea. In The Beautiful Fall, the book about Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s, author Alicia Drake talks about the difference between Lagerfeld the styliste and Saint Laurent the couturier. As the business became more and more about marketing—it was always about marketing, yes, but now there are billions of dollars to be made—world builders have been prioritized.And yet, you can’t build a world if there is nothing to build upon, and at Lanvin, the need right now is to re-engage the fashion customer. Lanvin still sells sneakers, and its stretchy ballet flat, developed under the late Alber Elbaz, is back in the commercial conversation. But when Elbaz was designing, this was a flou brand; you went to Lanvin for dresses. I had predicted that Lanvin deputy C.E.O. Siddhartha Shukla, who joined the brand in 2021, would hire a woman for the long-empty role. After all, it’s a heritage brand, and I assumed he would want to counter the very loud discourse around creative director jobs going only to white, gay men. Then there were the Stefano Pilati rumors, undoubtedly spurred by the fact that Shukla worked with the designer at Yves Saint Laurent. But the reality of the matter is that the lack of female creative director candidates is systemic and needs to be remedied at the assistant level, and the Pilati rumors were nothing more than wishful thinking. Copping may not be a woman, but he can design feminine clothing, into the flou. He also has a curiously close relationship to the Lanvin brand, despite never having worked there. It’s a bit convoluted, but there’s a karass of designers with whom he shares houses. He worked for Oscar de la Renta, who also designed for Balenciaga, Copping’s most recent post, as well as Lanvin under Antonio del Castillo. And now, Copping shares both Nina Ricci and Lanvin with Jules-François Crahay. Those synapses were created over decades, and offer another explanation for why Copping was the right choice.

The Adults

In recent years, the industry has favored the energy of youth, but I predict the tides may turn back in the other direction, with houses investing more up front in experienced creative directors in order to better ensure a fruitful outcome. When has a big risk on a young kid worked out? Remember that Alessandro Michele, Demna, and Nicolas Ghesquière were seasoned by the time they were installed at Gucci, Balenciaga, and Louis Vuitton. Jonathan Anderson was given a small project in Loewe that he transformed into a big one over the course of a decade. As a friend said to me recently, it’s not that Jonathan suddenly transformed the brand into a force; the culture simply caught up to him.These jobs not only require good ideas and a deft hand, but the ability to navigate the increasingly complex corporate culture that is overtaking the industry, and the only way you know how to do that is if you have been a manager of some kind or another. For his part, Shukla understands that in order to sell more sneakers, and more ballet flats, there needs to be a core constituency who buys dresses, too. Copping will need to act as a servant to this dream customer.

In the past, I’ve categorized his work as severe, and he’ll need to push back against that instinct, and lean instead into the romance. Lanvin is still dragged down by the weight of Elbaz’s 14 years at the firm—then owned by Shaw-Lan Wang, the Taiwanese media magnate. It’s now the property of Lanvin Group, a subsidiary of the Chinese conglomerate Fosun International, which made a perhaps ill-advised decision to I.P.O. its fashion collection (which includes Lanvin, Sergio Rossi, St. John, and others) in the U.S. in 2022. The stock is underperforming, like many in fashion, trading at around $1.82 per share. The brand actually fared pretty well in its most recent fiscal year, surviving the comedown from a massive Covid bump with just a slight dip in sales. Overall, the group was profitable.Of course, even if Copping’s collections are as ravishing as they need to be to generate industry and insider interest, he and Shukla have plenty of hardship ahead of them. With a small brand, fortunately, there are fewer rules. And sometimes, limited budgets force creativity. As more of these empty creative director positions are filled, the executives in charge of the appointments will have to remember that taste—and product-market fit—do matter. It’s Richemont’s Alaïa, LVMH’s Loewe, The Row, Kering’s Bottega Veneta, Phoebe Philo, the in-process reinvigoration of Versace, and the surprise of Bally, that are exciting people. Perhaps Copping can add Lanvin to that list.

What I’m Reading…

Ganni co-founder Nicolaj Reffstrup and Brooke Roberts-Islam wrote a book about how not to be an idiot as a fashion operator. It’s good! Nicolaj is coming on the podcast next week. [Order It Here]Thrive, Josh Kushner’s venture capital firm, invested in A24 and the billionaire is joining the board. The production company (Euphoria, Beef, Uncut Gems, Moonlight, Civil War, Everything Everywhere All at Once) is a premium brand, and everyone wants to be the A24 of something these days, the same way they used to want to be the Uber for something, or the Glossier of something. There may be synergies, as folks like to say, between A24 and Bedford Media, his wife Karlie Kloss’s ambitious magazine project, but I think this is really just an example of the couple accumulating cultural capital. [Variety] Amazon is building an on-site Temu competitor. My eyes are glazing over. [CNBC] SPORTS! Inside the WNBA tunnel walk. [BoF] LVMH-linked L Catterton and a group of Birkenstock employees raised $756 million to buy 73 percent of the company. [Bloomberg] Love the forever collaboration between Marc Jacobs and his publicist, Michael Ariano. [Instagram]

And finally… How has this not been made into a movie, Natalie?Until Monday, Lauren

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