Lauren Sherman: I actually wasn’t! I was more focused on getting out of school and the South Hills of Pittsburgh, where I grew up. I didn’t drink or smoke weed because I was too preoccupied with not messing up and navigating my exit. Thinking about it, I guess I was pretty gossipy. Everybody knew me but I wasn’t super popular, though I wasn’t uncool either.

I was the editor-in-chief of the high-school newspaper, but I wasn’t what you’d call a storyteller who craves being the centre of attention. What I did want from a very young age was to be a journalist. My uncle had been in the US Naval Academy and was in the Gulf War, so I watched the news very closely growing up.

Well, mine was a single-mom household with no television filter. I was allowed to watch whatever I wanted and became obsessed with TV news and the morning shows. I desperately wanted to be an anchor on Good Morning America until I realized I didn’t actually like people looking at me, and I didn’t want to have to get my teeth fixed. Luckily, I was always interested in writing from a young age, so I could hide behind a byline.

I always had an interest in fashion, just wanting to pick my clothes out and feeling a connection to how they made me feel. Then, when I was about ten, I asked my mom if I could buy a fashion magazine, and she said, ‘You can buy Sassy; it’s a feminist magazine.’ That was right before [founding editor] Jane Pratt left – or got fired, or whatever she did – and I just remember seeing this pair of mustard-coloured Converse on one of the market pages and feeling a deep connection to what this magazine was saying. Prior to that, I’d watched House of Style on MTV, and the Tim Blanks show2, but there was no language around fashion where I grew up. So, I quickly became obsessed with magazines, and by the time I was 14 I’d decided I wanted to live in New York, go to fashion shows, and become a fashion- news writer at W. So that was that!

I graduated from high school in 2000 and went to a college called Emerson, in Boston, which was focused on media and performing arts. They had this programme called ‘Writing, Literature and Publishing’, which was essentially a magazine-writing course. So, I did that. These days, people have to have those skills right out of the gate because everyone’s looking at your stuff so closely [on social media]; there’s no time or space to just find your voice and develop your skills.

I’ve always had an opinion and a pretty decent tone of voice, but things like sentence structure weren’t my strong point. So, at college I was thinking, am I even capable of doing this? For a moment, I actually thought about going into costume design instead. I was working at the school bookstore and the sister of the woman who ran it was the costume designer on Dawson’s Creek3, which sounded like a really cool job. But I didn’t have a driver’s licence – I only got it a couple of years ago when we moved to LA – and I remember thinking, I can’t go intern on a film set because the one thing I’ll need to be doing is driving around. So instead I ended up interning at this company in London called Quintessentially.

Yes. They had a magazine with an editorial director and an art director, but they needed an assistant. They liked me, and said, ‘Why don’t you move back full-time after you graduate from school?’ So a week after I graduated from college, I moved to London to work at Quintessentially for two years

I was on 16 grand a year! I was also working weekends in a shop selling underwear, getting paid cash under the table. I was renting a room in what was essentially a boarding house in Finsbury Park, and living off canapés at work events. I was mainly writing ‘listicles’, like, ‘The Five Best Places in London for Afternoon Tea’ or ‘Daylesford Organic Christmas Baskets’. It was actually really interesting and useful, because I got to see how people spend their money. As I’ve always loved consuming, I love thinking about the psychology of why people buy what they buy, and how that links to perceptions of status. After that I moved back to the States at the end of 2005, found a room in Washington Heights in New York, and got a job at Forbes, which is where I got my real training.

Prior to moving to New York, it had been Anne Slowey at Elle. I didn’t know who people like Cathy Horyn were before then because we’d never had a newspaper subscription growing up. Once I got the job at Forbes, the managing editor there told me to read Teri Agins’ book, The End of Fashion, which was the ‘ching’ moment in my life. I was like, this is way more interesting than the lifestyle stuff I’m writing. I just figured, Teri Agins is pretty much the only person writing about fashion in this analytical, business-minded way, and at the same time fashion businesses are becoming huge, so I might as well make that my thing.

Yes, by 2006 the consolidation was starting to happen. So, I just figured I might as well become an expert in this. By that point, I was reading the Times a lot; I loved Cathy – she’s the best writer – and Eric Wilson, who is a really great reporter.

For me, it’s all about the insight that writers are able to share, the stuff that lies beyond the straight facts, and that requires a lot of background reporting. I don’t think many people do that these days. Eric Wilson broke a lot of news, but I particularly remember a review he once wrote about liking Christian Siriano, this super-commercial designer in America who makes pretty dresses. He’d been on Project Runway, and I think Eric’s piece really changed the opinion – or shifted the attitude – of a lot of other writers and editors. It wasn’t that he was super serious about it, but he had so much knowledge, and was comfortable, honest and clear about his opinion, which was, ‘Actually, I like this.’ For many seasons after that I think more people attended Siriano’s shows. Besides that, I was reading a lot of stuff by the classic New York Times fashion critics: Bernadine Morris, who was a real straight reporter, and Amy Spindler, who I think had a really good way of saying hard things without being cruel. But in terms of how I personally learned reporting skills, I have always just instinctively been interested in knowing the reality of what’s going on. Like, I want to know what’s actually happening. I don’t like feeling deceived. Because that is why people gossip.

I kind of accept that everything in fashion is bullshit – it’s all a construct – so from that point I try to look within the bullshit and say, ‘Well, are they doing it the right way?’ One of the reasons I wanted to do this kind of analytical reporting is that it would drive me crazy being at the shows and everybody – in particular the British press, who I was sat among during my time at BoF – would just be like, ‘Oh, this collection is so shit. It’s disgusting.’ Then five minutes later they’d be posting on Instagram, ‘Fabulous show!’ I was just like, these people are such assholes. I know they have jobs to do and advertisers to please, but part of me wanted to expose that hypocrisy a bit. But, to be honest, I don’t get that upset about this stuff, not in the way that some reporters get profoundly angered by the overall state of the industry.

They think there’s too much product, too many consumers, too much greed… Like, ‘When is it going to end? It needs to stop!’

I do think the industry is at an impasse right now and that things are changing, like, after great consolidation comes decline. And I don’t think we’re as far away from that as we realize. But I’m also like, I don’t want to change anything; I don’t feel like an activist.

Forbes was quirky; they called themselves ‘the theatre critics of business’. But the one thing they were hardline on was not allowing you to quote analysts. You could speak to them, but you weren’t allowed to quote them because you were supposed to be the expert. So that forced me to develop opinions. The other thing I learned was the importance of picking up the phone and calling people. The Forbes newsroom was full of reporters who’d been doing it for a long time, and they’d be calling sources all day long. Which is what I now do at Puck.

Yes. I was full-time at BoF for seven years, and a contributor for ten. I moved to LA in 2020, had my baby in May 2021. I’m sitting there on maternity leave when someone forwards me this new newsletter called ‘What I’m Hearing’ by Matt Belloni, a big entertainment reporter who’d been at the Hollywood Reporter. That newsletter wasn’t even called Puck at the time because they’d yet to properly launch Puck, but I really loved it. I felt like Matt was doing exactly what the trades needed, which was writing about things that everyone else would have been very careful about, and doing it in a super straightforward way. He’s also an ex-entertainment lawyer, so he’s comfortable knowing what he can and cannot say. I really liked the tone, and the idea of ‘follow the power’, which mirrored the business journalism approach of ‘follow the money’. I remember thinking to myself, there are so few new publications in the past ten years that have a real point of view, personality and style of writing. Love it or hate it, Puck has all of those things.

Yes. At Forbes they’d always said to me, ‘no inside baseball’7, don’t exclude readers with insider industry chat – but the whole world is now inside baseball. What Jon Kelly identified was that trade news would be interesting to people if you package it like a glossy-magazine story. What Jon’s done is make B2B business journalism exciting. When I started in business journalism, it was not desirable at all. I didn’t even want to work at Forbes; I wanted to work at Jane or Teen Vogue or W. Jon applies the same delight in working at one of those grand places to business journalism.

I think Jon’s big thing was, ‘Why are people leaving careers in journalism?’ Because they’re not incentivized, it’s not fun, and there are all these infrastructures in place to discourage you from wanting to do it. So, he essentially hired a lot of very senior people, with the idea of building Puck’s business around journalism talent. The journalists or columnists – at Puck we’re actually called ‘partners’ – are at the centre of each of Puck’s verticals: entertainment, Wall Street, politics, tech, media, fashion, sport, art… It’s funny because people ask me why I’ve only really worked at start-ups – Fashionista, BoF, Puck – because, you know, it feels so risky. But I’d say the riskiest place you can work at right now is one of those legacy newspapers or magazines where there are constant layoffs, where you don’t make a lot of money, and where your role is diminished every single year.

Definitely, because he was covering an industry that is probably the closest to fashion. It’s not brands, but it’s studios and agencies, yet they have a much easier relationship with journalists in that there’s less gatekeeping. When I started at Puck it was mainly DC politics, Wall Street and entertainment. They’d hired Bill Cohan, a writer I really admire who used to write for Vanity Fair, and who’d worked on Wall Street for years. I don’t think fashion was the natural fit, especially in America, at a publication where the majority of the readership is men. It’s becoming more female now, partially because of me, and Marion [Maneker’s] art coverage, but it’s still majority men…

He had worked at Vanity Fair so he knew the dynamic between LVMH, Kering, and fashion media; he understood its value. Whereas every other generalist business publication I’d written for had dismissed it. At Forbes, I wanted to write a profile on Tommy Hilfiger, the company. I’d met with Tommy Hilfiger, and his company was doing really well. I was like, this company is going to get bought – I don’t know how I knew, I’d probably done some reporting – so I went to one of the managing editors to propose the idea. He dismissed it and jokingly talked down to me: ‘Tommy Hilfiger hasn’t been cool since the 1990s!’ And I was like, ‘This isn’t about being cool.’ Plus, this was 2009, and he was wearing dad jeans when they absolutely weren’t cool, so I was also thinking, ‘What the fuck do you know?’ Six months later, Tommy got bought for $3 billion by PVH8. I’d already left Forbes by then, so I just emailed him with a news link in the subject line. The fact remains, a lot of these publications in America are still run by guys who don’t take fashion at all seriously. In fairness, [Wall Street Journal editor] Emma Tucker has an incredible reporter in Paris covering this, and she has put fashion on A1 a lot, which I think reflects the fact she’s from the UK. But if you look at the New York Times, they still don’t have a business reporter exclusively covering the luxury industry.

Exactly. I also think those big publications are a little nervous about covering fashion and luxury in a serious way, because they rely on that advertising. But Jon just got it, and he really treats my coverage in the same way he treats everyone else’s – how much attention it gets on the page, how much they spotlight it. There aren’t a lot of people in his position who would be giving me the platform that I’ve been given.

I always say that I cover everything from Target to Hermès. I’m interested in brands that people care about, which could mean either loving them or hating them, but they care about reading about them. So I’m always asking myself, ‘Is this a brand that I’m interested in and care about? Are the people around me talking about it? Is it eliciting some sort of emotion?’ If it’s ticking those boxes then I’ll generally ‘follow the money’. Sometimes it’s about a brand not making any money, and sometimes it’s about a brand making so much money that you’re shocked. I’ve written about this brand Vuori, which has a massive amount of private-equity money behind it – I think it’s hundreds of millions of dollars9 – and has become ubiquitous in the US. Most of my readers are not wearing Vuori, but they are interested in it because it’s become such a phenomenon.

For sure. It’s more conversational at Puck. Essentially the mission was to write Line Sheet like you’re writing an email to a friend. Since I’ve been at Puck, it’s also more about personality, but I’m more interested in the psychology of who these executives and creatives are, and less about what’s going on behind the scenes in their personal lives. I just find the fashion industry so fascinating. It’s a bigger and bigger industry. Every year, the players are getting richer, becoming more powerful, more influential in government, and I feel a responsibility to communicate that to the people who read Line Sheet but who don’t work in the industry – because there are a lot of them. Alongside all the fashion insiders – CEOs, designers, basically everyone who I write about signs up – I also have Hollywood agents at CAA, teachers in North Carolina, and that’s been the interesting thing about this job.

Sure. It’s much more uncomfortable, and it’s not like I enjoy confrontation, but I just think it’s easier if people hear your voice, especially mine because I sound like a child. Though my basic rule is I won’t badger people. I probably should more than I do, but if someone is uncomfortable talking to me, they may not give me a straight answer anyway. I want to trust the people I’m speaking to, especially when it comes to some of the gossip that I’m reporting on.

I try to be really upfront and clear that I’m reporting on what people are talking about, not what is confirmed to be true. The transparency is really important because I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve learned that there’s so much that fashion journalists hide.

Because they don’t really care, because of the benefits of their relationships with brands, or because it’s just not how the industry is reported on. I was talking to a comms person from a big company the other day who’s also worked outside of fashion, and they’re like, people in our industry have no understanding that this is how tech and finance and all these other industries are covered.

I would not say something so definitively if I didn’t know for sure. So I did have it confirmed, just not in a press release. But do I think that all the rumour mongering online is negative? It has, in some instances, gone too far. I try to think of it like sports and player trading: you hear one player’s going to one team, then you hear about another player wanting to leave and go to another team, that sort of thing. I do think there’s a value in talking about it, whether or not something ultimately happens.

A current one is Dario Vitale, the design director from Miu Miu, who is leaving at the end of January. There was a lot of conversation about him maybe going to Bottega; WWD reported he might be going to Gucci. I don’t think he’s going to either of those places, but I cannot say for sure – and that’s what I wrote. On the other hand there was the John Galliano exiting Margiela situation. They had confirmed months before that his contract was up in October, but then waited months before confirming his actual departure, which just created lots of unnecessary speculation; it became the Wild West for everybody. I get it, sometimes you want the speculation, sometimes it’s helpful; they want people to talk because it gets people excited about things, but it’s not the way journalism works any more. And I think someone like Alex Fury, who has been a really great writer for magazines forever but who isn’t a news reporter, maybe doesn’t consider that a little more transparency from the brands would make this speculation go away. The Dries succession was handled perfectly: they didn’t wait super long to tell anyone; they sent out a press release; they gave an interview to Tim [Blanks], who was the right person10. The way they handled that was great.

You’re right. Sometimes these negotiations go up to the last minute, the contract doesn’t work out, and the whole thing falls apart. So, of course, brands need to be careful, and they can’t say it until they say it. Yet I still think in many of these cases, the brands are trying too hard to control the narrative, and they can’t control it any more. Instead of engaging, which would actually help them more, they tend to pull out entirely, and that is not helpful.

For sure. But that’s not to say I wouldn’t write about it, if it’s interesting. That’s sort of the point of Puck – I’m often reporting on the spin. I want people to call me and give me their spin.

As a B2B reporter I’m very interested in the tension between fashion communications and how broader society is shifting the ways that it’s seeking information. I mean, I have a friend who was messaging ChatGPT for love advice last night, so it’s like, you’re not going to need the press release to be regurgitated to you any more! Without naming the company, there was a big executive reshuffle last year, and I was talking to one of the executives the other night, who said to me, ‘When they announced this reshuffle internally, they told us, “Don’t worry, we’re not going to announce anything publicly for about a year”.’ One of the other executives said, “There’s no way that this is going to be contained, you’ve just told all of the senior management within the company that it’s happening!”’ But they are so used to having a relationship with the trades where they say, ‘I’m going to give you this exclusive, so please hold off on writing about it for six months.’ And the trades are OK with that because they’re obsessed with exclusives, which I think makes no sense any more.

I love getting scoops and being the first person, but I know that that’s not where my value lies. My value lies in being able to give a story context. A partner in a big PR agency said to me years ago, ‘We just don’t feel the urge to give exclusives any more’, because, for example, when the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Pharrell was going to Louis Vuitton, they got the scoop, but it was clearly not given to them as an exclusive. I mean, Pharrell and Louis Vuitton no longer require any of the big publications to do that. They can just announce it on their own Instagram accounts. You said your value lies in giving

Just sharing more insight on how things actually work, which I think will lift the industry up. Knowing the good and the bad often burnishes things. Whereas if you only know the good – the pressrelease version – it doesn’t feel real and so no one gets emotionally connected to what it is you’re doing. I often wonder, ‘Are the brands actually afraid of what I’m doing?’ But then I will see them, and they’ll be like, ‘I love what you’re doing.’ There’s been no one saying, ‘I can’t have a relationship with you any more because of all this stuff you’re exposing.’ I honestly think that many people are just very surprised by it.

That someone would have the nerve to do what Puck does. I did a story on a big European designer, a behind-thescenes of how their business is working, and a couple months later, Jon said to me, ‘Do you think they’d agree to talk at a Puck live event?’ And I was like, ‘First of all, they wouldn’t do it even if we were the New York Times, but also, no, because they don’t like that I’m saying all this stuff about how their business is working.’ Meanwhile, Bill Cohan has covered the trials and tribulations of Goldman Sachs for Puck, and yet the CEO of Goldman Sachs agreed to do a live event for us. It just speaks to the culture of fashion versus other industries.

They understand that if you’re not covered holistically it’s not real. As I mentioned, if the whole thing is covered, from good and bad sides, it feels more believable. Think about LVMH’s attempted acquisition of Hermès or the Arnault-Pinault rivalry; those things – regardless of which side you were on or however you saw it – made both sides seem more powerful, not weaker. But fashion is so much about being perfect, so showing any sort of wrinkle or imperfection scares people. That said, the brands that I think are doing a good job have generally been really supportive of me, even when I’ve written things that maybe they don’t want everyone to know. I just think it’s part of this wider re-education that is going to take a little time. I’ve received emails saying, ‘You’re doing a really good job’ from industry people who probably aren’t supposed to say that. Yet at the same time, I’m barely scratching the surface. There’s lots of stuff that a great reporter would find in fashion, but there just aren’t enough of them covering it.

When a story starts to touch the hiring and firing of lower-level employees. I’ve been dealing with this recently because there’s a lot of movement in the comms departments. I wouldn’t report on lower than head of department, or VP, senior level, just because those other people don’t make enough money to be written about. My general rule is, is this going to affect the business or the brand? Similarly, with personal-life stuff, sometimes that does affect the business, but that’s not something I would gossip about. It would have to be like, there’s an HR complaint against the CEO. Even then, I’d need to see the complaint. It’s not because I don’t want to get into trouble or I’m afraid, it’s because these stories aren’t just speculating about the future of a business conceptually. It’s nothing like, is the designer maybe leaving or staying? Of course, there’s a value in talking about designers moving because of what would happen conceptually to the brand, but I don’t want to ruin someone’s life. It’s really about, does this give context to the greater story of what’s happening in fashion right now? If so, then it’s worth looking into.

Of course. These are things I’ve written about in the past and I’ll continue if it’s important, but it’s much harder to be objective about personal ‘he said, she said’ things. I’m not going to write a story about ‘This person is mean to someone’, even though they probably are. If it’s not systemic, it’s not worth it. I think what happened during the #MeToo and Covid era – the peak of all those cancellation stories – was that a lot of the reporting was actually really sloppy. Some of it was just HR complaints about people being mean to someone else, yet that can destroy a company, even when the business is doing OK. Sometimes that stuff needs to come out in order to change things, #MeToo being the obvious example. It absolutely needed to happen so that people would start behaving better, but in fashion, the reality is a lot of that stuff hasn’t changed because the cultural mores in Europe are different than the US.

Absolutely. Most of the interesting luxury fashion and accessories brands are based in Europe. But I cover a lot of the department stores in the US, and I would say they are more comfortable with it, they understand it a bit more. At the same time, I have different experiences with the different European luxury groups. Kering’s whole mantra is being open and transparent, and they are more open to having a dialogue. That being said, there are people within the individual LVMH companies who are really helpful and open to me. Do I feel like I get closer to more important things for Kering? Yes. Do I think they benefit because they engage with me more? Yes. Because the more you know, the better the story is. At the same time, LVMH is a really well-run company and the people who do engage with me there are really helpful. Also, they communicate a lot by not communicating. There’s a lot that I can read into their annual reports just by certain language or words they use.

If they say something’s exceptional, that obviously means it’s growing and doing well. Whereas with, for example, Tiffany, they will say, ‘We had a great store opening’, without actually saying anything about how the business is doing. I had a background interview years ago with one of the big LVMH CEOs, and he said, ‘The reason we don’t share our numbers every year is because a) we don’t need to and b) it doesn’t matter if we don’t grow every year.’ You also see this with Chanel and how they’ve changed their strategy. As a private company, they obviously don’t need to share any financial information. But for many years Reuters, Bloomberg and all the wires were taking Chanel’s reports from the Swiss registrar and publishing them. So, they decided to start publishing their own information. But when you look at what they write and then you talk to people internally, their definition of how something is performing can differ.

I get a lot of Instagram DMs. I get a lot of WhatsApp because I put my phone number in [the Line Sheet newsletter] all the time. I get anonymous messages on Proton, which I rarely reply to; right now, I have someone supposedly ‘at LVMH’ messaging me who is trying to be Deep Throat11. I’m like, dude – or lady – you need to tell me who you are because I’m happy to take your feedback, but I need to know who I’m talking to. With the Vuori coverage, for example, I mentioned they have raised all this money that I’m sceptical of and I got feedback from a company CEO who was like, ‘I’m really bearish on it.’ Then there’s this activewear brand called Bandit Running that’s based in Greenpoint, and an investor, was like, ‘I don’t get much negative feedback. Maybe people are afraid or don’t care, or maybe I’m still in the honeymoon phase with readers, and it will switch.’ ‘I think a lot of the reporting during the #MeToo and Covid era – the peak of all those cancellation stories – was actually really sloppy.’

‘Man, I wish I was in it. It’s very real.’ Then I get a lot of feedback pointing me in the direction of things I wouldn’t have known. Like I did a piece on Bernard Arnault’s courtroom trial, and someone in France sent me a follow-up piece from Le Monde about him joining this learned society in France, which no American outlet would ever think to write about. So I would say a good amount of my coverage is driven by people sending stuff. Sometimes it is just tips, but generally it’s more of a dialogue.

To be honest, I don’t get a lot of negative. Maybe people are afraid or don’t care, or maybe I’m still in the honeymoon phase with the readership, where they’re like, ‘Oh my God, you’re doing all this great stuff’, and maybe it will switch. There was one item I wrote – about a magazine – and someone got very upset about how I’d positioned it, and sent me an anonymous hate-mail kind of thing saying, ‘You’re an idiot and you sound stupid!’ Which is fine. The best feedback is neither positive nor negative, but informative: I was talking to a senior-level person at Kering the other day, and they told me, ‘I just don’t want you to sound stupid. You won’t sound stupid if you say these things, but you’ll sound stupid if you say that.’ And that’s what I want. People always ask me, ‘How do you get your sources?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m just like any other beat reporter, and sometimes the information I get isn’t right.’ Which is why I’m always trying to call people to ask, ‘Did I get this right? Is this true?’ The other day, I think some information I had was true, but a very senior person denied it, so I let it go, because I was like, ‘You know what? I trust this person.’

I’ll often do background interviews with executives, with CEOs, other sources. I’ll tell them that I may use the information, but I won’t attribute it to them. Sometimes they want it attributed to them, but they just don’t want to be directly quoted.

Well, I think a lot of people feel that the truth will out.

Early on, I learned that the more people care about the company they work at, the more they will talk. Unless they have equity and it’s going really well, they will talk. When I really learned this was when J.Crew sort of started going to shit in the US around 2015. When I later found out that they had fired [creative director and president] Jenna Lyons – or she exited or whatever – the floodgates suddenly opened, and I realized that these people cared so deeply about this business and that they’d talk to me forever. A great example of a company where people didn’t talk for a long time was Glossier. Nobody wanted to talk because they all had a good amount of equity and so they all thought they were going to get super rich. It’s more impenetrable when things are going super well. A great example is Hermès. People have worked there for 30 years. It’s an amazing business. Why would anyone bother? Chanel is more challenged, and there are executives who are frustrated there. There’s obviously been a lot of change happening, things that have to happen. But as I said, these people really care. Because they see that a lot of fake stuff gets published, and people are sick of being lied to. It sounds so dramatic, but I think if you’ve been in the business for long enough, you don’t want to read this any more. So I do like to poke a little bit and make people a little more uncomfortable than they would like.

Sometimes, yes. I’m always like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s not bad…’

No.

I mean, it can be… Honestly, if it’s an upbeat story and I’m not doing anything with this new information, I’m not giving them a heads-up. Whereas if I’m doing a story where there’s no new information, but I’m saying something that is tricky, I do give them a heads-up as much as I can, because I do have a relationship with these people. I’ve known many of them for 20 years: some of them are my good friends. I just think… they all love Puck, when it’s not about them. Ultimately, publicists don’t have to do anything with me, but I think that having a relationship with me benefits them. Like, if I call and I say, ‘I’m hearing this thing…’, they can be like, that part is true, but this isn’t, and it’s helpful to everyone. I don’t take everything I hear from brands at face value either. Like a lot of times the publicist doesn’t know, and I’ve talked to someone way more senior than them already.

That email actually went out in January 2024, but there’s been no change in the way that I operate with anybody at LVMH since then, at least not on my side. No, I had not heard about it. It was only leaked in September, so at that point I reached out to people there who I really trust, and I obviously reached out to the official LVMH people, too, to talk about it, because I’m not going anywhere, and they know that. One person there said, ‘I don’t share anything with you about the family anyway, so nothing changes.’

I don’t really have an opinion about the fact that they did it, but it didn’t surprise me. It’s a family business, and suddenly everybody is examining them and digging into their dirty laundry – which isn’t even dirty, it’s actually very clean laundry – and it’s only going to get more intense for them. They’re so used to controlling every little thing, and they’ve been used to Bloomberg Businessweek puff pieces, but I think the industry is now too big for publications like the New York Times to ignore, and it’s just not going to be like that any more. I don’t want them to feel like they can’t come to me, but they are also not used to getting lobbed the questions I lob at them. We’re in a different era of journalism, and I appreciate that culturally things are different between France and the US, where big corporations send internal emails like that all the time.

I could write about it every day, forever – which I basically do – because it’s one of the biggest companies in Europe. They own 75 different businesses, so I can write about Patou one day, and Celine the next day, and Dior the day after. A producer in Hollywood messaged me about one of my Arnault succession stories and said, ‘Oh, this is the TV show. This is the movie.’ And I was like, ‘Do you know how many people have said that to me in the last year?’ And do you know how many people are currently writing books about that? I’ve been approached, but I’m not doing it, even though it is juicy. There are five kids; they hang out with celebrities; their Dad is the third-richest man on a good day, fifth-richest man on most days. It’s been a gift to me.

Ruthless in terms of my reporting, I would say a seven, because a lot of times I’m like, this is not worth the stress. But a 12 in terms of prioritizing the story and making it good over maintaining the relationship. The thing I do not do is bully people, which I have found to be a popular tactic across trades in every industry. Like, ‘If you don’t get me an exclusive, we’re going to…’, but I don’t feel that way. That said, does doing a story that I think is right come above all? Absolutely. As I said, I have relationships, I’m close with people, but a lot of the people that I’m close with are people who I’ve written about, like, broken stories about, who maybe didn’t want that information out there.

I think you can, but not that many people. I’m very careful about it. It’s not my real life, for sure, and it never has been. When I was about 27, I remember having lunch with a woman named Bonnie Morrison who has been a publicist, and worked at Men’s Vogue, and who is a great writer and very New York. She said, ‘Don’t wake up when you’re 35 and only be friends with fashion people.’ I really took it to heart.

It hasn’t come up for me. Maybe it will some day, maybe it won’t. It happens every day at reputable publications. The reality is that we offer special access, the highest quality audience, and advertisers want to be around that. The journalism never gets interrupted, but there are ways to manage things so that advertising partners feel safe. And it’s a matter of doing it in a way that doesn’t compromise the relationship with the reader.

As the luxury brands pull back on advertising, it’s going to change the dynamic between brands and publications again. For the past 15 years, especially the bigger publications in the US have been slaves to the luxury brands, but the dynamic is changing. Vogue World last year was sponsored by State Farm Insurance and Nike, not by, say, an LVMH brand. And so the question is, how much are the magazines and the more general news outlets willing to push? It’s a little easier for a newspaper, because they can have a business section that covers the serious stuff that the brands don’t like, and then they can have a separate lifestyle section that just has fun and doesn’t dip into the serious stuff. I do think Puck overall is pushing that dynamic in every industry.

Agreed. I think Imran [Amed, founder and CEO of BoF] has done an incredible job of building something that feels more credible in this era in terms of how to cover the fashion business. I should also say that he taught me a lot about how the industry works; there’s no one else who knows more about how these companies work, and to have learned from an [ex-]management consultant was invaluable.

It is influencing the way the more traditional outlets cover stuff. I think that they’re loosening up a little bit. You see it at WWD in particular. I think [WWD’s international editor] Miles Socha is the best fashion reporter working, and he probably knows eight million things more than everyone else. But he’s hemmed in by the way that they operate, and I see him pushing a little bit more, which I think is really good.

Well, PR is definitely changing. Someone like Lucien Pagès doesn’t call and yell at me. If something happens, he’ll say, ‘I can’t share anything with you’ or he shares the press release. He protects his brands, but he’s never threatening me about some stupid little thing because I think that culture of fear is going away. Similarly, the corporations are hiring more strategic comms people who are used to dealing with traditional reporters, and that in turn creates an environment where important topics are being covered. The result of this is that you’re now seeing someone like Sam Hine at GQ – I don’t know if he’s been inspired by me at all – writing about industry topics like designer changes or the state of men’s fashion, in a way that feels genuine. And I think that’s the word that audience wants – genuine. I’d say that’s why System resonates with people: you’re picking topics that you’re interested in, you’re doing it the way you want, with the right writers and photographers. Then you’ve got someone like @ideservecouture who’s on Instagram right now saying, ‘That Vogue digital cover with all the models looks like crap.’ And he’s right. I was just talking about it yesterday with two of my friends who are fashion editors. One of them said, ‘Why did this happen? They just did this amazing issue with Marc Jacobs, which reminded us all how magazines like Vogue can still make us feel, and then they go and publish this terrible thing!’ And @ideservecouture is able to go online and actually say it. I love that!

When the [ex-Abercrombie & Fitch CEO] Mike Jeffries12 thing came out, because I’d recently written a book about Victoria’s Secret with one of my old colleagues from BoF, Chantal Fernandez, I was able to immediately call a bunch of sources who’d worked with Mike Jeffries and get a unique perspective that no one else had. I was proud of the way I handled that one. A more recent one is the piece I wrote about the Arnault trial in France, with the spy. People really responded to that. It didn’t have a lot of additional reporting, but it did have a lot of context, and I don’t think anyone else could have written about it the way I did.

Back in 2023, I heard that Obama was going to be in Pharrell’s first Louis Vuitton campaign. I called people on the Obama side and it wasn’t true. I don’t think I even wrote there was a rumour.

Well, it would be a big deal if the former president of the United States starred in a Louis Vuitton campaign.

That’s true! But mentioning that I heard a rumour about Kendrick Lamar working with Chanel is not going to hurt anyone, whereas the implications for Obama being in a Louis Vuitton campaign are different.

Short term, I’m really waiting to see who’s going to run the LVMH fashion group. I don’t know how many people care about that other than me, but I’m very interested in how they manage that group. Because I think that group, which is all the smaller brands, is the key to their future. You put the newer designers and executives in that group, and then they might end up running Dior and Vuitton in a few years’ time. Besides that, the other big story for me will be Anna Wintour’s retirement. Although I’ll probably never get the scoop as it’ll be planned meticulously to be announced in the New York Times, and it’s not going to leak. I love writing about Anna; I’m obsessed with her! One time, about halfway into my BoF tenure, I was with someone from Vogue, and they casually asked me, ‘Would you ever want to work at Vogue?’ And I was like, ‘No, never! I love writing about Anna too much.’ It’s such fun! She’s so amazing and horrible and interesting and boring all at once. When she steps down, she’s going to leave a huge void. I just hope for everyone involved that she doesn’t retire for another five years, because, like, who am I going to write about if she’s no longer around?