Making Sense of the Galliano-Met Gala Bombshell

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2:38Hello and welcome to Fashion People. I'm Lauren Sherman, writer of Pucks Fashion and Beauty, Memo Line Cheat. And today with me on the show is Sam Hine, Senior Men's Style Editor at New York Magazine. We're talking about Amele Andor's exit options, Ibn Kamara's off-white bow, the Galliano Met Gala blow-up, and so much more. Happy Tuesday, everyone. Hope you're having a great week. It's been quite a busy one already. uh sam and i really get into everything that happened on monday but be sure to check out line sheet as well because i also have an interview with a bunch of college students talking about what they think about the fashion industry what's happening in fashion right now do they care about designers where do they shop how do they see it all playing out why do they want to work in fashion and then we did a survey with a bigger group of the fashion scholarship fund And I don't know, awardees, I don't know, recipients.

3:40And I'll publish the results of that later in the next week or two. But thanks to the Fashion Scholarship Fund and Peter, who runs it, for helping out with this and organizing this roundtable with a group of their scholars in August. It was really interesting. So more soon on that. And let's get going with Sam. sam hein welcome to fashion people hi lauren so happy to be here i can't believe you've never been on but i know i'm i'm finally a fashion person thank god i'm i'm so happy to have you and we have a big day today first first off though how was your weekend uh my weekend was great um i was on vacation last week so this is my first commitment back uh my first back to school commitment and uh so if i have vacation brain forgive me but um it was lovely i was um out on shelter island at my grandparents place and i played tennis and went to the beach and it was my birthday so we had a family birthday dinner for me my brother my sister whose birthday was on saturday and um yeah thank you so we have a virgo virgo late august virgo the best we have a I have a lot of friends who are late August Virgos.

4:56Yeah. It's my, my best friend from college, Pam Haley Phelan is a late August Virgo. It's a good, your cusp of Leo. It's a, it's a good group of people. Yeah. My brother, my, I mean, my, my, my brother and I are twins. So obviously we have the same birthday. And then our sister was born three days later. Wow. Five years, you know, she's five years younger, but we're August 26 and she's August 29. So the Hain children are all late August Virgo. So it's sort of all I know. Lots to celebrate. So I guess you were not at the Susan Alexandra wedding, which many people were. I was not, but it looked like a blast.

5:33It looked so fun. It was in Biarritz. The flowers were incredible. She looked beautiful. It looked really lovely. I love when people get married, who I know but I am not close friends with. and I get to see that I'm excited for your wedding posts. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, the wedding. So my fiance and I both took last week off but we basically just instead of doing normal work, we were doing wedding planning. Yeah. So I know that it's going to be all worth it. It was a little hard to drag myself out of bed every morning and hop on my laptop and figure out how to do a registry and I was vibe coding our website to add an RSVP field, like all this stuff that you don't think about when you're like, oh, yeah, we're going to do a chill New York City wedding.

6:23It's going to be easy. And then, you know, there's like a million decisions you have to make and things that have to happen. But yeah, I think it's going to be a really, really fun party. And yeah, Susan, you know, Susan's a great Susan always throws great parties. So I have no doubt that the wedding was was pretty fantastic. Yeah, the registry thing is tough. I mean, you are a little older than I was when I got married, but we definitely register for barber jackets. Nice, nice. I hadn't thought about registering for clothing. That was like a very silly thing. I don't think I own anything that I got for my wedding other than my Eva Zeisel plates.

7:04Yeah, we honestly, we hadn't even thought about it until my grandparents' neighbors confronted us and said, where are you registered? You know, we need to buy you something. And we thought, oh God, I guess we should, I guess we should throw something together. And, but, you know, my, my fiance, she put, she has amazing taste and she put Charve slippers for both of us, like his and hers Charve slippers on the registry. And then I think I took them off because. You should put them back on. Yeah, I know. Someone will want to, it's hard because people want to, will want to buy you stuff. And if you don't do it, then you're going to get stuff you don't want.

7:38Yeah, no, it's true. It's very fun. Well, good luck with that. So we have a lot to cover today, but before we get started, you're in the offices of New York Magazine because you have a new job there. I do. And you have a bunch of stuff launching, including a newsletter which launched officially last Friday, right? It's called New York Look. Yes. We announced it on Thursday. Thursday. The official first edition of New York Look will go out this coming Thursday on September 3rd. That's exciting. So basically right after I get off this podcast, I'm going to go out and start reporting that one. Fun.

8:18And I think, you know, it was always the plan to start a newsletter. I obviously had a newsletter at GQ that I really enjoyed doing. And, you know, it took us – we were, like, pretty deliberate about how we wanted to sort of put this one together. And we wanted to take our time and make sure that the name, the logo, the format all made sense. And so basically what people can expect is it'll be like one main story per week plus little, you know, mini scoops and tidbits and news reactions and things like that. And then there'll be kind of like a rotating rubric of different fun things with, you know, little interviews with people from, you know, the fashion world, maybe some retail reports, things like that.

9:03So, and my editor, Eric Mazza, who has a really good sense of these things, has really encouraged me to put my mirror selfie outfit pics in each edition of the newsletter. So I will probably be doing that. Although we, my fiance and I were moving at the end of September. So that mirror and like the backdrop that I usually use on Instagram will no longer exist and I'll have to figure something else out. But Sam, I really like your glasses. Where are they from? Oh, thank you. They're from Moscow. really interesting the white it's like a white rim it's so they're silver silver um you know the sort of silver filigree yeah moscott opticals yeah they're really really good thank you that sounds great i love the name i'm looking forward to the first edition and are do you feel like new york magazine is is so global to me now even though it's everything's through the lens of new York, there's still something, um, I don't know.

10:05It just feels like it's more about like global culture through the lens of New York city. But how do you plan on approaching that element of it as you, as you develop the, the vibe of it? Yeah. Well, you know, the fashion world is so global, obviously. In fact, you know, I mean, there's a reason why you're in Paris now. Uh, there's so much of the action is, is in Europe, um, at least at the luxury level. But I think, you know, so much of, you know, the more time I spend in Milan and Paris, and sometimes London, you know, reporting on the fashion world, the more I hear, the more I'm basically reminded that so much of what happens in the world of, maybe not the world of fashion, but the world of style, like starts and ends in New York.

10:49you know it's so hard to meet a French person who has like a fabulous life in Paris but doesn't dream of moving to New York City or talk about their time in New York City as like the best time of their lives or whatever and you know there's I think we've all seen also in luxury like so the sort of turning back towards America in recent years you know for commercial reasons but I don't know I think you know I think New York at least especially for men you know New York is a really really sort of menswear-y town now. That wasn't really the case like 10, 15 years ago, but I was at the U.S. Open last night, and, you know, like every boyfriend was wearing Amy Leandor, and, you know, half the guys I saw had the polo merch bags sort of in tow.

11:33And people really were, you know, the guys, I think to an extent, that like even I was a little bit surprised by, were really dressed up for the first night of the Open. And I think that's sort of just emblematic of, you know, New York is a place where men really care about how they dress now. And whether they're good at it or not, you know, they're thinking about it a lot. And it's something that they're very concerned with. Yeah, I think the sort of hashtag, the hashtag menswear thing that happened 15, 20 years ago was a big driver of that of like suddenly it was okay to have an interest in fashion again if you were a guy.

12:13And then in the last 15 years, the amount of money people in New York making just skyrocketing if you are one of the high earners. And so GQ had a lot to do with that. Your time at GQ, like Bodhi, all these guys in finance wearing like Bodhi and Amelie on door, like that, it became, that became part of like how you showed your wealth and, and all of that stuff is, is showing that you had an interest in an understanding and fashion. So that makes a lot of sense to me. And that brings me to what I guess will be our first topic, which is that Amé Leandr has, there was a report by this journalist, Astrid Wendland, who's based in Paris and used to work at Reuters, about they hired JP Morgan to raise money.

13:07I haven't been able to confirm that it was J.P. Morgan, but I know for sure that they've been trying to raise money. They want someone to take potentially a majority stake. They have investors including LVMH Ventures, which is a venture capital arm of LVMH. and that they usually don't invest that much money. Like it's like one to$10 million or usually it's not a crazy amount. Like their investors in Gabriella Hearst and Matt Happy and a bunch of stuff like that. But this would be a more strategic exit type thing for Teddy, the founder, not that he would exit, but that he would get a bunch of money if he did it.

13:56I'm just curious what you think about I wrote a bunch in Monday's newsletter about that that's a business that makes like in the vicinity of like a couple hundred million dollars a year probably a little less than that but probably over a hundred at this point but to me the challenge with that kind of brand is there just aren't a lot of interested buyers right now even if you're a private equity firm because like if you if you're generating 40 or 50 million dollars a year a private equity or venture capital firm might want to invest in you and get you to 200 but then right now the problem is you can sell it to someone to get it to 500 but then how do you what do you do after the 500 like premiera bought reformation to get it to 500 million and then they ipo'd eventually or it was already close to 500 million and then they IPO but the the point being that Amelie Andor needs a strategic an investor who could sell it to a strategic or IPO it five or ten years from now and I think there's going to be very few investors who have the confidence that Amelie Andor is capable of that like are they the next Ralph Lauren or not I personally don't think that they are but I'm curious what you think I'm sure you've cover the brand really closely and what you think its potential is as a global entity?

15:27I mean, look, I would love to see Teddy Santas ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. I think that would be great. After years of like semi reclusiveness, somehow turning, you know, you know, getting ALD or setting ALD public would be would be, I don't know, I think that would be sort of surprising outcome. But look, I think, you know, ALD, I remember when I think it was probably 10 years ago, it was like a tiny store on center street, maybe, um, with like a handful of pro, you know, like a shirt and a couple other things. Like there really wasn't much to it. And there was some, like, it was like a coffee element.

16:03And so I think the, the brand has grown really, really fast sort of in concert with this, like men's bar boom that we're talking about. Um, you know, it has drafted off the sort of like cultural, like men's, you know, the men's style sort of cultural convergence. And it's also kind of fed back into it. So, you know, how, whether that still has legs, like, you know, I, it's, it's a little hard for me to say, but, you know, I think there was definitely a time where ALD was considered like, quote unquote, cool by sort of like, you know, the, the sort of bleeding edge tastemakers of New York. You know, no brand is going to sort of be able to kind of capture that energy forever.

16:44you know people have i think those that sort of consumer has moved on from ald but you know that's a small number of people and i think you know again i was i was like i saw so many guys wearing amelie on door last night at the us open and like that is the customer that that they should be going for and that they clearly are a guy who can spend you know six hundred dollars on us open night tickets um you know is a guy that's going to buy a bunch of ball caps and sweaters and maybe a suit or something, you know, so I also think that there's, you know, I think ALD kind of, I think outside of New York, it represents something about New York that is very appealing to people who don't live in New York.

17:24Um, and you know, whether that can continue and like build, you know, drive, you know, double or triple the business, you know, I'm not really sure, but, um, I think there's, you know, clearly to get to this point, like they have done something really smart about the product. And I think that, you know, because I don't think that, you know, all these guys who, you know, work at J.B. Morgan and were wearing ALD at the U.S. Open, you know, they are basically, you know, they are basically sophisticated consumers. They read GQ, you know, they subscribe to New York Magazine. They, you know, they listen to your podcast, maybe, and they, or they have some puck subscriptions, whatever.

18:05But, you know, they, They, you know, they, you know, they walk into a store and if the product doesn't feel good and or isn't sort of like speak to them somehow and the quality isn't nice, they're not going to buy it. So, you know, I think ALD has, you know, I haven't been in the store in a while. I walked by the other day and it was like quite busy. But, you know, you know, they've clearly kind of figured out a way to sort of become like the staple brand for a generation of guys. and I think at a time when J.Crew is like pulling back from menswear um you know there is a big opportunity there to you know see some more territory yeah I am not as bullish on this brand I think I'm not saying it's going to be a 500 million dollar company you know I don't really know but you're you're making a lot of really good points I think um the challenge with these kinds of brands and I think fear of god is going to have the same issue is when you are very like like you're very merch driven, eventually the consumer will get sick of it.

19:05Whereas if you look at something like a Bodhi, which is probably small, a bit smaller, not that much, but a bit smaller than Ami Landor. But like Bodhi also has kind of gone through this where the finance bros are into it. But because of the way they're managing it, it will last that. So what he, the reporting I've done is that a frustration among people within that world has been that he like went too hard on the New Balance stuff, which I think actually the New Balance stuff's amazing. like the thing I like the most about the brand is is the New Balance stuff but I think he there was too much of focus on it and the question for me is like I don't know what Amelie Andor is known for other than the logo and I should I know enough and pay enough attention that I should be like they're best known for their sweaters or they're best known for something other than New Balance.

20:10Like, and I don't, there's not a product that I think they are, like, everybody's like, I'm gonna go to Amelandor for a Chino or whatever. Like, and that I think - It's the white and green hats that Jacob wrote about. Yes, but this is the issue, is that like, it's a white and green hat that will be 30 years from now, it'll be cool again, or 20 years from now, but will eventually feel so annoying that, I mean, so, so I think for me, the, the question is, what kind of partner can he get this guy, Teddy, that who can, because he seems extremely ambitious and look like when John Caramonica wrote that story, I barely know John, but I remember I had a conversation.

20:57I was like, do you really like that brand? And John Caramonica, I do like think he's, he's smart and has good taste and, and is interested in interesting things. So he really, he was like very pro pro that brand when he wrote about it. I was very surprised. So there's obviously something to it, but I think if they do, they'll get an, they'll get an investor, but it has to be the right investor. And hopefully that investor can like help them figure out how to, because if he really does want to be the next Ralph Lauren, like, yes, that Ralph Lauren ebbs and flows and all that. And right now it's very cool with fashion people.

21:40But I think the thing is you have to have a go-to product. And also you have to still do something that appeals to the inner circle or the edge of the inner circle or whatever, or you lose it. It's complicated. it's um but i feel like that was i feel like that actually was that the new balance stuff was still yeah sort of appealing to the inner circle you know i believe john teets was working on it um for for a bit maybe he still is i'm not sure um but you know that stuff is you know those sneakers are great um i don't really you know i don't wear sneakers of any kind of balance no i really don't i'm really not a sneaker person um you were wearing some low profile uh jill sander pumas during Fashion Week.

22:26Yeah, those I like. But, you know, I like... You like a low-profile shoe. I like a low-profile. And I do like a driving shoe like that, so it is nice. It's sort of the opposite of the chunkier New Balance. Now that the school year is officially underway, families are getting a clearer picture of where students are thriving and where they might need a little extra support. It's the perfect time to reinforce what they're learning in class and build confidence along the way. That's where IXL comes in. IXL is an award-winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand their schoolwork.

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24:37Can I just tell you I have more breaking news? Venn Space is now carrying Common Projects. wow that's actually the biggest breaking news of the morning this the galliano thing pales in comparison yes what do you think about that um i got a on the ground report from someone who went on sunday i mean look i i used to work common projects i wrote projects i wore i wore the ones that were sort of like the skate shoe or like the low profile like basketball shoe version do you remember those like not the not the ones that not like the white ones with the thing but there were these black ones i bought them at a one of those comb sample sales that they do every like 10 years yeah um i mean my sister was wearing common projects this weekend you know i mean the quality of that product has always been really high um it's like a and what's funny is that you know i'm actually not i'm not mad about this news um a because i think chris green really knows what he's doing.

25:38And B, I think, I think that I mean, you know, you go to that store, and it's like, there's always 100 people actually buying stuff, 100 men actually buying stuff. But I think a lot of this, a lot of the sneakers that came kind of after Common Projects that tried to sort of replicate that thing were just not as good. So if people want a like minimalist, sort of sleek like leather sneaker, you know, why not go to the brand that kind of invented that category for men or sort of nailed that product, like made the emblematic product for men. Yeah, it's interesting to see. It's kind of like the skinny jeans thing coming back and are people ready?

26:19We'll see. We'll see. So you mentioned the other breaking news. So right before we were about to record this, which great timing, maybe not great for everybody involved, but great for us. So there was a New York Times report by Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein this weekend about the Met just getting a lot of pressure from people in the art world, people in the Jewish community, wealthy donors, wealthy people who have contributed art to the Met being pissed that they're having galliano be the subject of the met gala and the exhibition the costume institute exhibition lots of pressure the thing i was gonna write for for monday's newsletter was that like one thing was that they need to figure out if it's worth it to keep doing this because it the it raises 40 million dollars but you know the the met gets 500 million dollars in donations every or so like, is it worth it to go on?

27:20And then also the like, why did Anna Wintour to decide to do this at this time? Like, personally, I think that John Galliano is worthy of an exhibition. And I think we should confront things that are challenging and hurtful and painful. And that's how you get through stuff. Like, that's how you make progress in society. So to act like he didn't exist is not a thing to do. The question for me was like, why does it have to be this year when everything is going on? And so then as we were about to record, Galeano issued a statement being like, I'm not going to do this. And then the Met issued a statement saying, we're not going to do this.

28:03His statement made it sound like he made the decision not to move forward. I don't know. But what do you think about all this? Well, I mean, I was, I have to say I was looking forward to the exhibition because I think, because it was going to be a really good one for menswear. Galliano's menswear is amazing. Obviously not what he's primarily known for, but some of the stuff he did, especially at Bargello, was just sort of out of control. But I think, you know, I think the Matt and John Galliano had to confront, and I haven't done, I haven't done any reporting on this, but had to confront the possibility that this would have been one of the biggest blockbuster Costume Institute exhibitions in history.

28:46I mean, I think the biggest one they've ever done was McQueen. And, you know, this one has like, you know, it has that sexy, dangerous frisson around it. And there's the layer of controversy. I mean, this would have been an absolute smash um but it might have opened with a like a smaller met gala you know i think there was a there i'm sure that um you know it's still too early for any of the invites and things to be to be going out but i'm sure people's publicists were starting to freak out and would have thought you know i think it would have been i think i think people would have probably um just sat this one out because not because they don't like galliano or don't want to support the met or the Costume Institute or believe in the mission of the Met Gala.

29:30But, you know, I think if you are the type of celebrity who gets invited to the Met Gala, like you'll probably get invited next year. And this one just carries, you know, this one, like the controversy surrounding this one might have just proven too hot for some people. And so I think that I think there's that part from the sort of Met Gala organizing side. And then, you know, when I read Vanessa and Jacob's story over the weekend, you know, my first, my, my, my honest reaction was, God, I wonder if John Galliano actually wants to do this because, you know, the scrutiny wasn't going to let up and, you know, he's basically every day, you know, of every year since, since the, you know, really horrible incidents, um, you know, happened that got him fired from Dior and got him indicted and, you know, charged in France, you know, this has been sort of haunting him.

30:21And, uh, I think it was pretty clear, especially, you know, during the Margella years of fashion, people had forgiven him and moved on. And, and, you know, there was not, there was not like not tension around him, but I think everyone had pretty much decided, at least in the industry that, um, Galliano had, had done the work and had, um, and had done the things that he needed to do to be forgiven and had genuinely, you know, um, learned, owned his mistakes and, um, and, and, and, uh, move past them somehow. And, um, you know, so, and I think, and I think now, you know, and I'm sure he felt that way too.