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And now on to the main event…

The wedding of long-suffering Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and billionaire nepo baby Alex Soros was made possible by all the expected brands. Abedin-Soros wore Erdem, Oscar de la Renta, Givenchy, and Marchesa fashions to various sequences of the affair; Soros wore a Dior tux. Met Gala florist Raúl Àvila designed arrangements; the stationery was procured from St. Louis’s Cheree Berry. To be honest, I found Vogue’s depiction of the affair a little melancholy and suitably weird. (Abedin-Soros recalled Anna Wintour and Clinton choosing the wedding date. And Soros, who was supposed to be in Europe at a conference on the same day, was said to have acquiesced.) The only surprising element of the proceedings, in my view, was the last-minute procurement of a pile of Quince blankets, provided to guests during the cold and rainy Hamptons ceremony.

There’s certainly a chance the Quince blankets were gratis, called in by a Vogue market editor, or some such, at the last hour. Regardless, the blankets were a symbol of Quince’s convenience and practicality. And perhaps those attributes help explain why Iconiq Capital—a hybrid family office with $80 billion in assets under management that invests money from L.P.s such as Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, and Jack Dorsey—recently became Quince’s new lead investor. Iconiq led a $200 million round of funding that valued the San Francisco–based maker of said blankets, and a whole lot of other things, at $4.5 billion.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

The Lyst Index is essential intelligence for fashion people.

Powered by fashion search, sales and social media data from 160 million shoppers across 27,000 brands, this isn't trend forecasting - it's trend confirmation. Discover which brands are hot, the products that broke the internet, and the categories that are primed for growth.

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The promise of Quince isn’t all that bad. The company endeavors to deliver luxury products—cashmere sweaters, leather handbags, diamond earrings, etcetera—for half, sometimes a quarter, of the standard market price. And yet Quince, which is decidedly not for rich people, is becoming a thing among the ultra-wealthy—as a fashion choice, a so-called investment, and now a wedding tchotchke. In its own way, it’s also become a meta commentary on the passing age of quiet luxury: The cohort that wears Loro Piana knit polos has been educated to know a deal when they see it. No one wants to be viewed as a sucker who overspends on clothing, or misses out on a business opportunity.

Founded in 2018 by Sid Gupta, a serial entrepreneur, Sourabh Mahajan, an engineer, and Becky Mortimer, a supply chain and sourcing expert, Quince was a fast follower to the likes of Everlane, Buck Mason, Naadam, Cuyana, and M.Gemi, which promised high-quality garments and accessories at a fraction of the typical price. The first-movers achieved varying degrees of success (and credibility). Those companies—save for shoe brand M.Gemi, which produces in Italy—rarely deployed the word “luxury” at first. Quince, however, aggressively pursued the luxury customer, claiming that it used the same factories as some of the biggest brand names in the world. Like Trader Joe’s or Kirkland Signature, the idea was to impart value.

Mainly, though, Quince spent—and spent, and spent, and spent—on marketing. And in this regard, it has been something of an outlier. For the last decade, a series of fashion companies have found themselves upside down on customer acquisition costs, as the dollars required to find a new user outpriced a pair of, say, Allbirds sneakers or an Away roller bag, even without the added fees of a department store. But Quince continued to spend through the deluge, apparently finding positive, or positive-enough, unit economics. Today, Quince generates something like $700 million a year in revenue. Remarkable, given that it’s been in business for fewer than 10 years. (Quince did not respond to a request for comment.)

Naturally, everyone in fashion hates Quince. (At least everyone who’s ever heard of it.) Unlike that first generation of e-commerce fashion companies, Quince has made no effort to build a brand. Everlane told a story about transparency. M.Gemi’s narrative was about Italian manufacturing. Italic offers cheaper “atelier-grade essentials” from the same manufacturers as luxury brands. Naadam had some yarn about taking a bag of cash to Mongolia to buy… yarn.  These brands all still exist, and some generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year in sales, but they never scaled sufficiently enough to make up for the margin lost by charging less than their predecessors would have.

To save money as it scaled, Quince kept headcount low, and focused on the supply chain and technology. When I sent smoke signals up to the Bay Area last week, nobody knew anyone who works there. And no one had a real opinion of Gupta and his team, which includes his engineer wife. One person who did business with them told me that they didn’t remember liking him very much. (Mahajan is based in India; Mortimer left the business in 2021.) “It’s Shein with an American skin on it,” said one person once briefly connected to the company. “Everything—everything—is derivative, and has already worked for someone else.”

Of course, several fashion brands have threatened, or taken, legal action against the company. In April 2025, Tapestry-owned Coach accused Quince of copying its “iconic” Rogue and Soho Flap bags, while Deckers-owned Ugg said in 2023 that Quince’s version of Uggs was too close to the real thing. (Quince has denied the allegations.)

Even its name is a knockoff. In 2024, Gupta & Co. were sued by another Quince, a well-regarded fine dining restaurant in San Francisco, which had been receiving returns and fielding customer service calls for Quince.com. Originally, Gupta denied the connection, but then a podcast surfaced wherein he admitted the opposite, as a March 2024 Eater article pointed out. “We were eating at a sister restaurant to a three-Michelin-star restaurant called Quince in S.F., and we really love the name,” Gupta said. “And the restaurant we were eating at was not nearly as fancy, but quite good food. And so we said, ‘If it was good enough for a three-Michelin-star restaurant, then it might be good enough for us.’” The two parties settled out of court.

Quince, after all, is comfortable spending its way out of a problem. Instead of fretting about the costs of Google advertising, the company went all in. Search for any Jenni Kayne sweater on Google, and a Quince sweater surfaces. Looking for a dupe of the Toteme blanket-scarf coat? Quince has one for a tenth of the price.

Quince’s Toteme knockoff isn’t going to tank Toteme’s sales. Everyone knocks each other off. Once upon a time, however, there was an illusion that each brand was at least trying to do something different. As one impacted brand rep told me, the one-two punch of adjacent advertising, and including the price of the original on the Quince product page, feels “mechanical” and “extortion driven.” Another brand rep told me that “when Quince copies an ad of ours and our product, we have to reset our ad strategy, and make new content, so we lose the gains and momentum of the ad.”

Sinister to some, savvy to others, the company is certainly unworried about decorum. But more than anything, Quince is a product of its time—an era when the acceleration of artificial intelligence is making us acutely aware that everything is a ruse, that nothing is real, that luxury is a construct, and everything can be replaced by technology for a fraction of the price in a fraction of the time. The company’s actual name, after all, is Last Brand Inc.

As for whether this particular construct is profitable? That’s harder to believe. A large portion of Quince’s products are made in China and Cambodia, the latter of which has settled with the Trump administration on tariffs, but the policy has been a financial headache for the company. Also, if all this tariff nonsense went away, the margins still aren’t there, even at double the scale. Amazon’s volume play works because it sells everything, and loses money on many things. As one observer noted, “Quince is undercutting price in a way that doesn’t feel real.” One of the failures of the D.T.C. era was that investors who typically bet on technology didn’t understand that product companies don’t scale in the same way as software companies. Seems they may not have learned their lesson.

Bill Cohan just can’t quit Saks Global, and neither can you! For what it’s worth, I recently heard from a luxury brand that just received a large payment from the group, so that’s something. [Puck]

I love the Mert Alas–shot Saint Laurent campaign starring Kate Moss, Chloë Sevigny, and Frankie Rayder. [Hypebae]

Emma Rosenblum, who used to run editorial at Bustle Digital Group, wrote another book, this time a sendup of a certain flavor of New York mom. A few of the characters seem to be inspired by Line Sheet superstars, and there is actually a Line Sheet/Puck callout. I did not write the fictional item that is included, but I do think it’s funny. [Amazon]

Liz Goldwyn, who is something of a lingerie expert, on the return of pointy bras—and more. [Starf*cker]

Dylan Scott has a nice state of the union on GLP-1s. There’s growing evidence that these drugs may aid in preventing a lot of different diseases. But what is the world going to do with all these people who are living longer, because they’re avoiding diabetes, heart disease, liver and kidney failure, and Alzheimer’s? Surely another terrible disease will emerge to take them. [Vox]

Until tomorrow,
Lauren

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