Lauren Sánchez’s Dress, Capri-Tapestry Woes & Saks-Neiman Talks

Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. What did you buy this weekend?

Friends, our cup runneth over—thanks to everyone who spent time during the past few days helping me decipher what’s happening in the fashion world right now, from the state of the Neiman-Saks maybe-merger to the Tapestry-Capri deal stall. I’ll clue you in on these topics, among others, in this issue.

🚨🚨 A programming note: Fashion People, my new podcast produced in partnership with Puck and Audacy, goes live tomorrow. Subscribe here. For the inaugural episode, The Wall Street Journal’s Jacob Gallagher and I will be talking expensive clothes, Challengers fashion, and those Galliano-LVMH rumors. (Shoutout to Fashion People’s launch sponsors, Lyst and Netflix’s award-winning The Crown. How fab.)

And before we get started: I wanted to invite you to an event I’m attending on Wednesday at the Tory Burch Los Angeles store at 8483 Melrose Ave. My bffs Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo started a new company, 831 Stories, which is essentially a publishing platform for modern romantic fiction. Think of it as the A24 of romance.

They’ll be hosting a conversation between How to End a Love Story author Yulin Kuang and writer and filmmaker Priyanka Mattoo. It starts at 6 p.m., and you can ping [email protected] to let them know you are attending. This has very little to do with fashion—although you can shop the latest Tory collection while you’re there (thank you, Queen Frances Pennington)—and I gain nothing at all by telling you this. I just love everyone involved and would be thrilled to say hello to as many of you as possible before I go to my dinner at Ètra.

Mentioned in this issue: Lauren Sánchez, Oscar de la Renta, LVMH, Anna Wintour, the Met Gala, Keith McNally, Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter, Zendaya, Law Roach, Lina Khan, the Tapestry-Capri maybe-merger, Coach, Michael Kors, Joanne C. Crevoiserat, Versace, VF Corporation, 831 Stories, Richard Baker, Matches, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Geoffroy van Raemdonck, the Air Mail store, and many more…

• Sánchez’s Met Gala move: Who is walking the steps with whom on May 6? I’m hearing that Kering-owned Balenciaga is bringing a whopping 10 people—another major endorsement for Demna. The big news among my whisper network, however, is that Oscar de la Renta will be dressing none other than Lauren Sánchez: pilot, entrepreneur, philanthropist, new Daily Beast chew toy, and Jeff Bezos fiancée.

  Remember, Bezos has previously co-chaired the Met Gala, and Amazon Fashion almost always buys at least one table, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, populating it with young designers and their dates. But this is about Sánchez, and why she chose Oscar de la Renta. And yes, she chose, I’m told: This didn’t come from Anna Wintour like it usually does. At least, not only from Wintour.

  My educated guess is that Sánchez went with what she knows: Many of her good friends, including blogger/socialite-turned-U Beauty entrepreneur Tina Craig and Nicky Hilton Rothschild, are close with Oscar designers Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia. And, really, Sánchez and her ilk are the traditional Oscar customers—ladies who lunch, and still have jobs, and don’t take any shit. I don’t expect this to be some sort of makeunder situation—Sánchez appears secure in her aesthetic choices, Keith McNally’s Instagram ambush be damned. And I also think that she understands that wearing Oscar signals her ascendance into society proper. I wonder if she has any fashion ambitions.

• Is the Mytheresa + Net-a-Porter thing real?: I reported on this rumor several weeks back, and heard more recently through the retail grapevine that Mytheresa does indeed want a merger. On Friday, the Cowen analyst Oliver Chen even speculated that it might be on the horizon in a note, artfully titled, “Profitable Digital Luxury Leader Positioned for 2H Acceleration & M&A.” Chen laid out a persuasive, if unoriginal thesis: The specter of Mytheresa “combining or partnering with Net-a-Porter and/or Neiman Marcus could be prudent given synergies across physical and digital assets, customer engagement and loyalty programs, and geographical focuses,” he explained. Look, I think it’s very, very unlikely that the Neiman Marcus piece would happen given the advancement of the HBC/Saks Fifth Avenue deal and a dozen other reasons that we can get into another time, but Mytheresa is in a mighty good position regardless. The company didn’t comment.
• We need to talk about Zendaya’s red carpet strategy for the Challengers press tour: I know, I love her, too, but overall, it has not been good. The tennis theme, as engineered by her Image Architect®️, Law Roach, was ill-conceived. On Instagram, Roach expressed outrage regarding a line in a WWD piece that suggested he “took a page” from stylist Andrew Mukamal, who dressed Margot Robbie as a Barbie for that film’s press tour last summer and has since published a book with Rizzoli about the experience. (The line has since been tweaked in the WWD piece.)

  Roach is right—you can’t compare the two. Mukamal was exacting, using each brand to create a new Barbie. The looks were sophisticated. You can’t say the same about Roach on this Challengers tour.

  Let’s start with the positive. I loved the re-make of the black and white Carolina Herrera gown first worn by the Williams sisters, which Roach recently posted on his Instagram. It’s majestic but still nods to the sport—the sort of thing she should have been wearing this entire time. And I liked the Thom Browne polo dress worn at the London premiere because it looked very Thom Browne, and also good on her. The white Calvin Klein suit from the Rome premiere that had nothing to do with tennis? Also great. But the Celia Kritharioti halter-gown in tennis ball yellow, fastened with a yellow tennis ball? No. The pink and black Vera Wang dress worn to the L.A. premiere? No, a bad design, full stop. The recent Jacquemus two-piece? Cool look, wrong hair and makeup.

  Zendaya is one of the most beautiful people in the world, and she has an incredible body, but her star power was not communicated through this lineup, which often made her look amateurish. It’s a shame, especially given how closely she worked with Roach: As I’ve written before, their celebrity-stylist relationship is unique. He is often written into her brand contracts—a rarity that suggests the degree to which she relies on him.

  I’d say the tour started going off the rails when she stopped wearing Louis Vuitton, with which she has a big contract. Perhaps she will return to the brand for the final premiere in New York.

Everyone in our world is speculating about what happens if the merger falls apart. Many are focused on the Versace outcome—it’s so valuable, it’s luxury, they should sell it! But Versace is still small, with just over a billion dollars in sales in 2023. In reality, the F.T.C. doesn’t care about Versace, or the shoe businesses—Tapestry’s Stuart Weitzman, Capri’s Jimmy Choo—which are also relatively tiny. Instead, the agency is fixated on the consolidated power of Coach and Michael Kors, two leaders in the mid-priced North America handbag market and, most importantly, its off-price handbag market. (I’ve heard some estimates suggesting the two brands comprise upward of 70 percent of the latter.) That market position could allow Tapestry to raise prices by, say, $5 per bag, which could potentially increase their profits by hundreds of millions of dollars and arguably screw real Americans. A $5 bump may not sound like much, but it’s something. Anyway, the F.T.C. is all about consumer empowerment. And Khan, a mid-30s ideologue without much experience beyond the ivory tower, has made this one of the frostiest periods for corporate mergers in a generation.

Of course, merging Kors and Coach is the deal thesis here. So, are there any workarounds? Selling off Kate Spade, which Tapestry bought in 2017 for $2.4 billion and generates about $1.5 billion a year, wouldn’t really solve the off-price problem. (This issue also explains why Japan and Europe approved the merger: Coach and Kors don’t have much of a foothold there in discount stores.) If everyone has to walk away, Idol may try to reverse engineer a merger with the likes of PVH (owner of Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein) or Ralph Lauren, which can definitely afford it but is definitely not interested. Crevoiserat and Tapestry will be fine, no matter what. Coach is a good, steady business. And if Crevoiserat wants, she can probably figure out another acquisition strategy. Sure, Tapestry has to reimburse Capri for expenses up to $50 million if Khan brings down the hammer, but nobody’s losing their third home over this.

Regardless, the tragedy beneath it all is that the goal of the merger was never scale for scale’s sake. What American executives, and regulators, don’t understand about strategic groups is that they aren’t simply hellbent on hunting for synergies. Sure, standardizing human resources and tech, and sharing a few factories is helpful, but there are a lot of intentional back-of-house redundancies at LVMH—the group that Tapestry and Capri are aping—that foster competition and create unique cultures within the greater corporate structure. (Yes, LVMH is becoming more corporatized as it recruits more executives from the C.P.G. and agency worlds, as befits the necessities of supporting Europe’s largest company. But there’s still a lot of independence…)

If Crevoiserat wants to be strategic, she could consider buying something in a different category, like an Alo Yoga—which, by the way, never found the money at the $10 billion valuation it was looking for at the end of last year. The problem with something like Alo, though, is that the management team is unproven, and members of Tapestry’s board, who are risk-averse, will bristle at bringing them in. And Crevoiserat knows that she doesn’t have the internal executive bench—in terms of expertise but also brand management—to take it over herself without killing it.

What should she buy? The clear answer here is VF Corporation, currently valued at about $5 billion. That’s a steal—it was valued at nearly $40 billion in December 2019. Crevoiserat wouldn’t get the synergies of Kors—different supply chains—but she would get strong underlying businesses and great brands, run by operators who understand cost-cutting and generating the profits that make Wall Street analysts happy. VF hasn’t been able to do that in the past year or so as activist investors have pressed management to shed Supreme and Dickies and focus on troubled-but-invaluable brands, like Vans and The North Face. Tapestry C.F.O. Scott Roe, who was the C.F.O. of VF for six years, presumably knows how to make these problems go away.

Neiman Marcus C.E.O. Geoffroy van Raemdonck, who previously was not totally sold on the deal, has apparently become persuaded that it is inevitable, I hear. (A rep declined to comment.) PIMCO, the biggest investor in Neiman Marcus, also wants the deal to happen. And while this certainly won’t be a blockbuster exit for the investment manager, with its $2 trillion in assets under management—and which helped drag Neiman Marcus out of bankruptcy at the top of the pandemic—it’s respectable in this trading environment. Out of the other two investors, Davidson Kempner Capital Management and Sixth Street, I’m told that the latter is the most wary, but they may not be willing to unite with the former to block the mighty PIMCO. After all, the other liquidity option is to wait a couple years for an I.P.O., when the trading environment is more favorable.

The lawyers on both sides might also be worried about triggering the sort of antitrust headaches that Tapestry and Capri are suffering through. In this case, though, the F.T.C. would likely be looking out for the brands, who would be burdened by HBC owning both Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. And that probably makes it less of a layup case for the government—perhaps even one not worth pursuing.

So what happens if Baker gets his deal? There are a lot of rumors circulating about partnerships with Amazon Luxury, store closures, and the like, but the reality is that in order for this to pass, it has to be a straightforward transaction. I don’t expect that Baker would be able—or inclined—to close stores, even if that’s what everyone thought was going to happen. (A rep for Saks declined to comment.)

What people should be looking at, however, is the Saks.com piece. That’s currently a separate company, which HBC/Saks Fifth Avenue pays for services such as marketing and buying. In the past, people connected to the companies have insisted that Saks.com will remain separate. But if you look at Saks.com’s competitors—Farfetch, Net-a-Porter, Matches, et al.—it’s clear that the model, in its current state, does not work. The two pieces—online and offline—will inevitably be put back together. Perhaps Baker and Saks.com C.E.O. Marc Metrick, a company lifer, have something figured out that the others don’t. Whatever happens, the story of multibrand retail is one of constant transformation. Change is the status quo.

In the -mall-as-we-knew-it-is-dead news: Express has filed for Chapter 11. (AP)

Gucci’s London show will take place at the Tate Modern. I’ll be there—if you want to hang while I’m in town, email me: [email protected]. (WWD)

LVMH now exports more from France than the entire agricultural industry. (FT)

Essence’s parent company ended up buying Refinery29. Thoughts? (Axios)

Taylor Swift wore a design from New York fashion’s current rabble-rouser, Elena Velez. (Instagram)

Air Mail opened a store. Ruth La Ferla is correctly on the case. (New York Times)

A place I would never be, so I am glad Steff Yotka took me there: Michèle Lamy’s 80th birthday. (Ssense)

One of my favorite movies to watch on a plane. (Vogue)

And finally… Let’s hear it for the morning suit!