Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet, coming at you live from Los Angeles and thankfully not from the Condé union rally; it’s getting really dark over there. It’s been a really full day of news, reported and unreported, so be sure to upgrade to the Inner Circle to receive my Thursday dispatch, featuring fresh intel.

Today, Queen Rachel “Rachel@puck.news” Strugatz is back with a look at Victoria Beckham Beauty, which has become an overwhelming favorite with the Violet Grey crowd. (As in, women across ages who get stressed out in Sephora and are in need of an easy-to-apply eyeliner.) Beckham, more beloved than hated in popular culture, has spent the last few years reengineering her namesake brand across both fashion and beauty. Rachel explores the opportunity.

Up top, some quick thoughts on Antonin Tron’s appointment at Balmain (!), Mayhoola and Kering’s reported Valentino infusion, and ABG’s interest in Missoni. Tomorrow, I’ll have more on LVMH, the Skims funding round, and a lot of other stuff.

Also, thanks to everyone who came out last night to listen to my conversation with How to Be Well author Amy Larocca. She and the book are both so great. Additional thanks to the folks at the Brentwood Country Mart (I love my customized merch), the bookstore Diesel, and Laura Vinroot Poole and Meredith Carter from Capitol for hosting us. And Lizzie Kaupas from Irene Neuwirth, too. (Laura is honestly one of the most beautiful women alive and looked amazing in head-to-toe Auralee, just so you know.)

Tonight, I’m returning to the Westside with Bobbi Brown to discuss her life and new memoir, Still Bobbi: A Master Class in Resilience and Reinvention, at the Ann and Jerry Moss Theater at New Roads School in Santa Monica at 8 p.m. (Get tickets here.)

Mentioned in this issue: Victoria Beckham, Lauren Edelman, Chanel, Nordstrom, Tom Ford, Estée Lauder, Sephora, Ulta, Antonin Tron, Balmain, Kylie Jenner, Kering, Valentino, Alessandro Michele, Marc Jacobs, Jamie Salter, Missoni, Authentic Brands Group, and many, many more…

Three Things You Should Know…

Balmain’s new boy: Yesterday, I started hearing whispers that Antonin Tron had been appointed creative director of Balmain. I knew it was probably true: Atlein, Tron’s own brand that’s favored by the likes of Balmain-adjacent Kylie Jenner, took a break from showing in Paris this past fashion week. For now, Atlein is still operating, but I assume it may wind down in the coming months given the weight of a job like Balmain and the very real expectations for a turnaround.

After its years with Olivier Rousteing, it makes sense that Balmain went with a young, lesser-known creative director with proven chops rather than a name brand. (Tron has been in the running for big, high-profile jobs, and yet his name hasn’t typically been batted around in the press when there were openings at major houses.) The strategy is clear: Mayhoola-owned Balmain has stagnated, and Tron will hopefully appeal to current clients while attracting new, hipper ones. Atlein’s dresses are sexy but never vulgar, and they’re reasonably priced, so he’s already wooing that entry-level customer.

At Balmain, Tron will have access to a real atelier, archive, and all the other trappings he’s utilized as a designer-for-hire under creative directors at megabrands. One day soon, we’ll get into whether this is Mayhoola’s last chance at making Balmain work—or if success under Tron might facilitate the exit that the Qatari-backed group has desired at different points in its ownership journey.

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Valentino’s $100 million lifeline: Reuters is reporting that Valentino co-owners Mayhoola and Kering are injecting an additional $100 million into the brand, which has struggled to achieve profitability in recent years. As a refresher: Kering is supposed to assume control of Valentino from Mayhoola, but the deadline got pushed back again when new C.E.O. Luca de Meo arrived in September.

The cash infusion also comes amid questions surrounding Alessandro Michele’s future at the company—although, for what it’s worth, his last collection was well-received and performed with certain retailers, and the problems at Valentino predated his arrival. Perhaps this capital injection is an opportunity for new Valentino C.E.O. Riccardo Bellini to make things right with his creative director.
ABG’s post-Marc zag: The Marc Jacobs deal may not have gone through, but Authentic Brands Group C.E.O. Jamie Salter hasn’t given up on high fashion. The licensing behemoth is now zeroing in on Missoni, which has been on the market for a long time. (Salter has also probably looked at the Italian label Etro, but we all know that Missoni is the real gem.)

With less than $200 million in annual revenue, it’s a scale-up waiting to happen: Everyone in the world can recognize the zigzag, and the category expansion opportunities are endless. Of course, landing at ABG would mean brand dilution in a way that the Missoni family, and fans of the brand, may find sad and depressing—or, as another potential investor said to me, “a complete travesty.” Missoni is such a good brand, though, that perhaps it’ll have another life someday.

And now, here’s Rachel…

Trend It Like Beckham

Victoria Beckham Beauty is winning discerning customers and finding new channels to grow into the luxury brand it has long aspired to be. It’s increasingly clear that if Beckham cashes out, it’s going to be thanks to makeup—not apparel.

Rachel Strugatz

Until recently, Victoria Beckham was primarily a fashion brand. It was only in 2019, after more than a decade slinging apparel, that the company launched its beauty line with a “Smokey Eye Wardrobe” of eyeshadow palettes, shadows, and eyeliners. But in the last year or so, Victoria Beckham Beauty has popped, as people like to say in this business. Suddenly, beauty is looking like the breakout category that could transform Victoria Beckham, the company, into the luxury brand that Victoria Beckham, the person, has long aspired to build.

There are a few obvious factors behind the brand’s recent momentum. The beauty line’s still-newish C.E.O., Lauren Edelman, who was elevated to the top job in January, has spent the last year focusing the company’s “three pillar” strategy around makeup, skincare, and fragrance. (I’ve heard recent speculation that Chanel was courting Edelman, where she worked for nearly a decade, but there’s no indication she has plans to return.) Meanwhile, Victoria Beckham Beauty’s first foundation product, launched in partnership with Augustinus Bader in September, seems poised to meaningfully change the brand’s trajectory. “The first time I said I want that or I need that was when I saw the foundation drops powered by Bader,” a discerning industry founder recently told me. “That grabbed me.”

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Fashion still drives the majority of Victoria Beckham’s nearly £113 million in reported annual revenue. But according to a Companies House filing for the year ending December 31, 2024, Victoria Beckham Beauty’s e-commerce business—its biggest channel—jumped 24 percent last year. Meanwhile, a person close to the brand told me that complexion is expected to comprise nearly 20 percent of the total business. The document also disclosed that the beauty business secured close to £5 million to support growth and facilitate the opening of more than 60 new wholesale doors. (The filing didn’t specify the source of the cash injection.)

By the end of the year, Victoria Beckham Beauty will be carried in more than 200 doors, including Bluemercury, Nordstrom, Bergdorf Goodman, Violet Grey, U.S. Bloomingdale’s, Space NK, Selfridges, Harrods, Le Bon Marché, and others globally. This is an ideal distribution pipeline for a beauty brand that sits on the higher end of prestige. (When my partner Lauren Sherman attended the recent Hermès opening in Nashville, she had multiple conversations with women of different ages and standings about Beckham beauty products.)

Has Beckham finally hit her stride? The products are beautiful, people like them, and they’re happy to pay a premium that’s still far less than a designer handbag or shoes. Beckham’s measured approach, as opposed to venture-backed competitors racing to cross $100 million in sales, means that her beauty business is definitely smaller than its peers, many of which are rumored to be acquisition targets. But if Beckham is going to cash out on her namesake brand, it’s almost certainly going to be from beauty—not fashion.

The Missing Ingredient

There were at least a few early signs that Beckham’s beauty portfolio could end up driving the business. Close to a decade ago, the Estée Lauder brand partnered with Beckham on two incredibly successful makeup capsules. But ELC was already 10 years into a wildly lucrative partnership with Tom Ford, and I’ve been told that Tom Ford threatened to pull his brand if Estée Lauder continued to work with her. After all, there were ambitions of turning Tom Ford Beauty into a billion-dollar brand, and Lauder couldn’t afford to lose that opportunity. “There was no option but to pull out,” a person with knowledge of the situation said. (Ford and The Estée Lauder Companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Despite these short-lived tensions, there are several instructive parallels between Beckham and Ford. Of course, both founders are stars, and can appear in their own campaigns without it being weird. They’ve also had enormous influence over how people want to look: Ford introduced the idea of dressing sexy to much of the culture; Beckham evolved from Posh Spice to the Met Gala red carpet. And, perhaps most important, glamour has always been central to their brands.

One major difference between the two: Victoria Beckham Beauty isn’t available at Sephora, the biggest prestige beauty retailer in the world. In the U.S. especially, retailers like Sephora and Ulta are really the only way to build a mega-beauty business. Sure enough, a person close to Sephora told me that the retailer “has been courting Victoria Beckham very hard for a while,” although I hear there are no immediate plans for a Beckham and Sephora union.

There could be a number of reasons why the partnership hasn’t been consummated: First, it’s expensive to do wholesale in a big way, and even more expensive to do it well. Most brands wait until they’ve crossed a certain distribution threshold before entering the LVMH-owned retailer. But the person close to Sephora intimated this may have less to do with scale, and more to do with the fact that Sephora doesn’t feel “luxe” enough for Beckham. Indeed, despite being the most powerful seller of prestige makeup in the U.S., I’ve heard this refrain more times than I can count. But eventually, it seems likely that Beckham will have to cave to the Sephora machine if she actually wants to realize her dream of massively scaling beauty.

What We’re Reading… and Listening To…

LVMH is opening new stores in Beijing for Dior, Louis Vuitton, Loro Piana, and Tiffany in the hopes that spending in China is going to pick up. [Bloomberg]

The powers that be at Jacquemus were DMing people all day about its new campaign featuring Charlotte Le Bon and a new bag named after Simon Porte Jacquemus’s mother, Valérie. [Instagram]

The Chrome Hearts founders have bought a 20-room hotel in Malibu for $37.5 million. [Instagram]

i-D is launching a beauty zine and hired Marcelo Gutierrez to run it. [Inbox]

Congrats to Annie Kreighbaum, Into the Gloss’s former editorial director and one of Glossier’s first employees, and co-founder of Soft Services, on the launch of her new brand and first solo venture, Kraum. It’s beautiful. [Feed Me]

Skims raised $225 million at a $5 billion valuation. More on this tomorrow. [New York Times]

Rachel’s B.F.F., Starface co-founder Julie Schott, on 35-year-old facelifts, girlbosses, and keeping your eyelids. [Bustle]

This Cathy Horyn interview with Jefferson Hack is great and I will discuss more in a future issue. [Where It’s At]

Until tomorrow,
Lauren

P.S.: We use affiliate links because we are a business. We may make a couple bucks off them.

Puck fashion correspondent Lauren Sherman and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you deep behind the scenes of this multitrillion-dollar biz, from creative director switcheroos to M&A drama, D.T.C. downfalls, and magazine mishaps. Fashion People is an extension of Line Sheet, Lauren’s private email for Puck, where she tracks what’s happening beyond the press releases in fashion, beauty, and media. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Friday.

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