Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

— Arthur Ashe

Fan Week opened Sunday, and it opened bigger than the tournament itself was ready for. The US Open’s own RSVP system for Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day closed before the weekend even started. The tournament said so itself, in the fine print of its own sign-up page.

I felt two things reading that, at the same time, and they didn’t cancel each other out. Vindication, because this is the exact demand Erick and I bet on before anyone in tennis was building for it. And frustration, because that much demand deserved a better answer than it got.

Fan Week is free. The tournament that follows is not, a day-one grounds pass alone runs well into the hundreds of dollars, and that’s before a seat, before food, before bringing more than one person. For most families, the free week isn’t a bonus lap before the real event. It is the only week they can afford to come at all.

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That surge last Sunday didn’t come from nowhere. Tennis participation in the U.S. has grown 54% since 2019, from 17.7 million players to 27.3 million. Nearly 10 million new players in six years. Roughly 70% of them came from Latino, Black, and Asian communities, whose growth rates outpaced everyone else’s by a wide margin.

The USTA is not treating this as a plateau. Its stated goal is 35 million American players by 2035, 10% of the population, enough to make the U.S. the number one tennis-playing nation on earth. Worldwide, the story matches. The ITF’s most recent global count puts participation at 106 million people, up 25.6% in five years.

This is the audience that filled every stadium on the calendar this year. Not the 6% who belong to country clubs. The other 94%.

This is not a comeback story. Tennis did not fall and get back up. Every tournament checked, the four Grand Slams and the sport’s biggest tier below them, the Masters 1000s, has been setting new attendance records for multiple years running, some for three years straight.

January. The Australian Open pulled in 1,368,043 fans across three weeks. A record. The one before it, in 2025, was also a record. So was the one before that.

March. Indian Wells: 527,626 fans. Third consecutive record year in the desert. Miami: over 420,000, another record, up from 405,000 the year before.

May and June. Roland Garros: 727,500 fans, up 6% from a 2025 total that was itself a record. The tournament’s qualifying week alone drew 138,000 people, an increase of 35%, largely because organizers cut ticket prices and expanded free seating instead of raising them.

July. Wimbledon: 550,151 fans, a new high on grass, in a summer competing for attention with a World Cup.

August. Toronto and Montreal, combined, drew 525,364 fans. Both cities individually broke their own records. In Toronto, tickets to Filipino star Alex Eala’s first match sold out in 30 minutes once it was announced. The tournament director called it something he’d never seen that early in a tournament. Tennis Canada’s own ticketing director said the surge was coming from people in his own community who don’t normally follow tennis at all. Montreal broke its own record despite rain delays and several top stars sitting out. The crowd showed up for the sport, not just the marquee names.

Cincinnati: 300,288 fans, over 300,000 for the first time ever. Its third consecutive record year, up from 285,571 in 2025.

2026 so far: eight tournaments, eight records.

And the market isn’t just filling up existing tournaments. It’s building new ones. This week, Philadelphia hosts its first-ever WTA tournament, launched by promoters who watched a sold-out women’s basketball event draw over 21,000 fans and decided tennis could do the same. One of four brand-new WTA events launching across the U.S. this year alone.

And still, the biggest stage in tennis is also the hardest one to walk into.

The USTA’s face value for a grounds pass ranges from $65 to $135, depending on the day, with $65 the cheapest, opening day. Roughly in line with Wimbledon’s $45 and Roland Garros’s $45. That’s not the number causing the outrage. Verified resale tickets on the tournament’s own resale marketplace are currently running $235 to $450, before taxes and fees, on any given day. Opening day alone, that $65 pass is going for $363, nearly six times face value.

So who’s actually pocketing the difference? The USTA’s own explanation covers only part of it: full-series subscribers, fans who bought season-long packages, some running well over $2,000 a seat, are reselling individual days at a markup, legal in New York. Read that twice. The rest is the same story as any high-demand event, bots and professional resellers moving fast enough in the general sale to buy low and flip immediately. Either way, the pattern holds. The winners are the ones with the money or the tools to move first. The people excluded are the ones responsible for the increase in tennis participation, which the USTA claims to be fostering.

The other majors simply don’t allow this. Wimbledon bans grounds pass resale outright. Roland Garros caps it at face value. Australia caps it at 10% over. Four majors, three different answers to the same problem, and the US Open’s answer is no answer at all. That’s not a market failure the USTA is powerless to prevent. It’s a policy choice, sitting right next to three working examples of the alternative.

Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund investor and a serious amateur tennis player himself, called it out plainly on X: “The idea that a day one ground pass is $363 is absurd. The USTA’s mission is to promote the sport of tennis. How is a $363 ground pass consistent with this mission?” Run the arithmetic on a family of four at that resale price. $1,452, before a single seat or a single meal. This isn’t a pricing problem. It’s exclusion, plain and simple.

The door is only the start. One drink, the Honey Deuce, brought the USTA $17 million last year in concession sales alone, priced 57% higher than a decade ago while inflation rose 29%. That’s the USTA’s own cut, before whatever Grey Goose pays separately for the right to be the only vodka on the property.

Even Fan Week, the one week built to be open, has quietly gotten less free. A Fan Access Pass is now required just to walk the grounds, new for 2026. The marquee free exhibition that used to anchor the week now costs money too, this year’s Federer, Roddick, Agassi, and McEnroe lineup sold out at $238 and moved straight to resale.

Put it all together and it stops looking like a business problem and starts looking like a choice. Tennis has spent a decade trying to shed its reputation as a rich, white sport played behind a hedge. The USTA says it wants 35 million players by 2035. Pricing its own biggest stage out of reach isn’t how you get there.

Tennis is having its “basketball in the 90s” moment.

In 1984, the year before David Stern became NBA commissioner, the league brought in $165 million. By 1999, revenue had climbed to roughly $1.75 billion. Tenfold growth in fifteen years.

None of that happened because basketball got better. It happened because the culture around basketball did. Hip-hop, streetwear, sneakers, a generation that wanted to dress like the players and not just watch them, all of it collided with a sport that had spent decades marketing itself narrowly. You didn’t have to play basketball to belong to basketball. That was the whole trick. The league didn’t build that collision. It just stopped standing in its way, and the business exploded once it did.

Somebody made that collision happen on purpose. Not the NBA. Not one team. Nike turned one player’s signature shoe into a cultural symbol on its own. Karl Kani, a Brooklyn-born designer who launched his label from the culture side, not the league side, dressed Tupac and Dr. Dre in the silhouette that came to define basketball off the court entirely. Different starting points, same instinct: build for the culture forming around the game, years before the money followed.

It’s worth saying plainly: basketball didn’t stay affordable once it got there. NBA Finals tickets today run into the thousands, resale into the tens of thousands. The culture built the audience. The business, eventually, priced a lot of that same audience back out. That’s not a reason to doubt the pattern. It’s a warning about what happens after the growth arrives, and exactly the moment tennis is standing in right now.

That’s the seat FURI is reaching for in racket sports. We’re not there yet, and I’d rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. But we built the technology first, and the game’s own reviewers noticed before the culture caught up to us. That’s the harder order to do things in, and it’s the only order that earns the seat instead of borrowing it.

It’s not incidental that every FURI racket carries the New York skyline. I was born in Queens. Erick, in Brooklyn. We’re not commenting on the US Open from outside it. This is our hometown’s tournament, and we’re a hometown brand.

Basketball needed its culture makers before it became a billion-dollar industry. Racket sports is still finding its own. We intend to be one of them.

I spent many years in corporate attending weeks like this one differently. Someone else built the calendar. Secured the badge. Decided which dinner mattered. You showed up, performed the role, went home.

Founder life doesn’t work that way. Nobody hands you a schedule or the budget. You watch what’s happening. You notice who’s in town. You decide, on your own, whether it’s worth showing up for, and what you’re actually there to do. The US Open isn’t officially a business event. But tennis is genuinely on everyone’s mind in New York right now, and a founder in this category would be foolish not to be part of that.

Tennis is standing exactly where basketball stood forty years ago, one step from becoming a much bigger business, if it decides who that business is actually for. The demand has already answered that question. The USTA is the one restricting access. It’s a shame, an organization built to grow the sport, choosing to gatekeep the newcomers instead of welcoming them. I hope, sooner than later, the US Open caps resale prices the way the other three majors already do, and lets in as many people as it’s working so hard to attract.

Erick and I made this bet before anyone could prove it. We’re building on that same conviction today: the other 94% aren’t tennis’s future, they’re its present. We built FURI for exactly that, gate or no gate.

Enjoy,

Michelle

“Everyday luxury has been our value proposition and brand proposition since day one.”

— Jennifer Wong, CEO of Aritzia

The Occasion

My goddaughter Emily is the daughter of my dear college friend Ellen, so when she got into Wellesley, our alma mater, who better to get her wardrobe-ready than her fashion auntie. Ten hours in SoHo last Saturday, budget in hand, a list I’d built back in May after going through her closet piece by piece.

And it’s what happened at Aritzia that stopped me in my tracks.

I’d wondered about this brand for a while. The numbers. The buzz. The way it kept pulling ahead of everyone around it, and nobody could tell me why. I had to experience it for myself.

The Experience

We walked into Aritzia’s SoHo store on a Saturday. Packed. And somewhere in those first few minutes, it clicked.

A sales associate named Drew greeted us almost immediately. Not the glazed “let me know if you need anything.” Not “Welcome in,” a phrase that makes me cringe every single time I hear it, because it isn’t even correct English. An actual conversation. What we were shopping for. Emily’s next chapter, starting at Wellesley. She went to work like she’d been handed a puzzle she actually wanted to solve.

Then we got to the fitting rooms, and that is where it all started to make sense. A beautiful space, lush seating in the center, built for the people who came along, not just the people trying things on.

I sat there and watched. Daughters stepping out to show their mothers. Girlfriends consulting boyfriends. Everyone consulting their stylist. Nobody rushed. Nobody standing in a hallway holding bags like a pack mule, which is where I usually end up.

The stylists had phones in hand the entire time, requesting sizes, requesting other options, and things arrived, fast, like magic. New sizes. Different colors. Something they thought might work better. It reminded me of shopping with my friends for their wedding dresses. That quality of attention. Minus the sales pressure that usually comes with it.

Once we’d locked in what Emily needed for classes, her mother texted. One more thing. Something appropriate for internship interviews and networking cocktail hours, the kind of dress a college freshman doesn’t know she’ll need yet but will. I asked Drew, and Drew disappeared and came back with pieces we hadn’t even seen on the floor. We headed back to the fitting room, and the woman managing it looked up and said, “You’re back.”

On a Saturday. In a packed SoHo store. She remembered us anyway.

That’s not one great employee having a good day. I told Drew as much, and a couple of other stylists on the floor, genuinely impressed. Every one of them called it the same thing. The system. Not their system. The system, like it was an institution they’d all been inducted into. Everyone on that floor was fluent in it, committed to it, moving like it was muscle memory. And that’s the part I couldn’t stop thinking about. Not the clothes. The choreography.

The Choreography

I needed to know more about this “system.” Turns out Drew wasn’t exaggerating, and neither was anyone else on that floor.

Aritzia runs something called a Personal Styling Appointment. Free. No minimum spend, no velvet rope, no membership tier you have to earn your way into. Book ahead or just walk up, which is presumably what happened to us without either of us realizing it. And the stylists aren’t limited to what’s hanging on the sales floor. They can pull from inventory that isn’t even out yet, up to ten pieces at a time, and bring it straight to the fitting room.

That’s the choreography I watched. Not improvised. Built.

And it’s not one flagship doing this to impress SoHo foot traffic. It’s the model. Every Aritzia store trains toward the same standard, which is the only explanation for an entire team, working together, pulling second opinions from each other in real time, all describing their job using the exact same word without stopping to compare notes. A system only earns that name when everyone inside it is running the same playbook, together, without needing to be told which page they’re on.

That level of consistency doesn’t happen because a room full of people independently decided to be lovely. It happens because Aritzia measures it. Sales per hour. Conversion. Clienteling targets. All tracked individually and reviewed constantly. What I experienced as effortless is, on the other side of the counter, a performance metric. And by most accounts it’s an intense one to work under.

Which tells you something else, if you know how to read it. Every stylist on that floor is essentially running her own business within Aritzia’s business. Her own book, her own numbers, her own accountability for turning a stranger into a repeat client. That kind of individually tracked, bonus-incentivized clienteling has always lived at the luxury tier. Chanel. Hermès. The houses where a single client relationship can be worth six figures a year. Aritzia is running a version of it at contemporary price points, and that mismatch is exactly why it feels so unusual when you’re standing in the middle of it. You’re getting luxury-level clienteling infrastructure attached to a price tag that doesn’t usually come with any infrastructure at all.

The warmth wasn’t incidental. It was engineered, incentivized, and enforced. Most retailers hope for good service. Aritzia built a machine that manufactures it, and gave every person inside that machine a reason to run it well.

And they don’t just want you to buy and leave. Spend over a certain threshold and you get a token, redeemable at the A-OK Café tucked into their flagship stores, SoHo included. It’s a small thing. A coffee, a matcha, fifteen minutes off your feet. But it’s one more amenity nobody asked them to build. A retailer secure enough in its margins to give something away for free, on purpose, as a thank you rather than a promotion.

The Leader

Jennifer Wong, Aritzia’s CEO, started as a seasonal sales associate in 1987, hired for evenings and weekends while she studied economics. She got rejected the first time she applied and came back anyway. Style advisor. President. Chief Operating Officer. Seven years chairing the executive committee, before she got the top job in 2022. She didn’t inherit this company. She grew up inside every part of it.

Compare that to retail’s most well-known cautionary tale: a financier who took over a legacy department store chain with no merchandising background, ran it like a real estate portfolio instead of a business people actually shop in, and steered it straight into bankruptcy. Spreadsheets instead of instinct.

A director who can also perform every part gets a different result than one who only calls the steps from the wings. Wong knows the sales floor. The fitting room. Buying. Production. Operations. Finance. It all makes perfect sense.

The Proof

Experiences are compelling. Numbers are undeniable. Here’s what’s actually happening underneath what I watched on the floor.

Aritzia’s most recent quarter: net revenue up 43.4% year over year to $951 million. Comparable sales up 35.1%. Gross margin hit a record 50.3%, the ninth consecutive quarter it’s expanded. Net income more than doubled, up 176.6% to $117.3 million. That’s not a good quarter. That’s a company compounding. That’s a system working.

Compare that to the neighborhood. Urban Outfitters Inc., which owns Free People and Anthropologie, both stores on our list, posted a record quarter too. Sales up 11.4%, net income at a record $115.7 million. Genuinely strong. But margin actually narrowed slightly getting there, and they leaned on heavier marketing spend and a $300 million stock buyback to make the earnings-per-share number shine. A real business, run well. Just paying more for its growth than Aritzia is.

Abercrombie and Hollister, after years of a blistering run, posted comparable sales down 1% this past quarter, with operating margin slipping from 9.3% to 8.0%. American Eagle’s namesake brand saw revenue fall 2.2%, comps down 2%, saved entirely by Aerie, which grew comps 25% and now does more business on its own than the flagship it’s named after. Even Zara, the company that basically invented moving fast in this category, only grew mid-single digits this spring, accelerating into low-double-digits by early summer. Solid. Disciplined. Not pulling away from anyone the way Aritzia is.

And here’s what makes it personal instead of theoretical. Aritzia got more than half our total budget on this shopping trip. Not because the clothes were better than everywhere else, they weren’t, not dramatically. It’s because by the time we left, Emily and I both wanted to keep shopping there. We wanted an excuse to go back. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the system working exactly as designed, on two customers who didn’t know they were being worked on at all.

Why It Matters

Here’s the lesson, if you’re trying to understand why some retailers are thriving right now while others are quietly hollowing out.

Product used to be the differentiator. It isn’t anymore. Everyone has good fabric now. Everyone has a design team that can chase a trend within a season. What Aritzia figured out is that the actual scarce resource left in retail is attention, real, trained, accountable attention, and most companies still treat it like a soft cost instead of the architecture it actually is.

They took a model that used to belong exclusively to luxury and rebuilt it at contemporary prices. That’s the transferable idea. Not the specific tools, the phones, the fitting room layout, the café. The idea underneath all of it: measure the experience the way you measure the product, staff it the way you’d staff anything else you actually cared about protecting, and stop treating service like an intangible.

Round Two

Aside from spending a wonderful day with Emily, I got the answer to a business question I’d been pondering, and knew I had to write about it.

The clothes were fine. The system was the story. Built, measured, and repeated by people who’d clearly been told exactly why it mattered, and who believed it.

Emily starts Wellesley in a few weeks. Half her wardrobe is already hanging in her dorm-bound suitcase. The other half waits until she’s found her footing, which was always the plan. When we go back to fill in that second half, we’re doing it in Boston. Aritzia has a flagship there too, café included. I already know which token I’m cashing in first.

Enjoy, Michelle

A Jalen Brunson jersey from Game 1 of the Knicks’ championship run went for just over $1 million, weeks after the win.

Neither jacket nor jersey is rare the way a museum piece is rare. What sold wasn’t the object. It was the fact that a specific, identifiable person had worn it, at a specific, identifiable moment, and someone wanted a piece of that moment more than they wanted the object itself.

There’s a name for what’s happening here, and I picked it up from a creator named @glovejones, who broke it down on Instagram better than most trade press has. The financialization of hobbies. People aren’t just collecting anymore. They’re building portfolios out of what used to be enthusiasm.

If you want proof of how real that shift has become, look at Whatnot. The livestream marketplace that started out of a rental house full of Funko Pops just closed a $545 million Series G at a $20 billion valuation, nearly doubling its worth from less than a year ago. Multiple outlets are calling it the largest funding round live commerce has ever seen. Venture capital is currently obsessed with almost nothing but AI. Whatnot just proved you can still raise half a billion dollars selling people their own nostalgia back to them, live, on camera.

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THE MONEY

Sotheby’s just posted its best first half in 282 years of existence. $4.4 billion in sales, up 58 percent from last year. Christie’s had its best first half since 2021, at $4.5 billion, up 71 percent. Between the two houses, that’s nearly $10 billion in six months, and eight individual lots that sold for more than $50 million apiece. In 2024 and 2025, there were none.

Jewelry is where I’d point you first, because right now it’s the one category driving growth in both resale and full retail at the same time. In 2024, a 1929 Van Cleef & Arpels diamond tie necklace, Art Deco, geometric, unmistakably a piece of its era, sold at Sotheby’s for $3.6 million, triple its high estimate, after seven bidders spent six minutes fighting over it. Sotheby’s did $270 million in jewelry that year. Nobody in that room paid for a gemstone. They paid for 1929.

Then there’s Gus. Sotheby’s sold a Tyrannosaurus Rex this year for $50.1 million, the most expensive fossil ever auctioned, after seven bidders fought over him for ten minutes. He is 38 feet long and 67 million years old, and somewhere right now, someone is figuring out where in their house he goes. Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart put words to what all of this actually is. It’s not just that these buyers have made the money, he said. They’re looking at market valuations and making a judgment about store of value. Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan told CNBC’s Robert Frank, who covers this world closely in his Inside Wealth newsletter, that people are willing to sell great objects, and people are spending great amounts of money to acquire them. Confidence, she called it. I’d call it something closer to relief. After two flat years, someone finally showed up to buy.

A NEW BUYER CLASS

This is AI wealth. Tech IPOs. SpaceX and whatever comes after it. A buyer class that didn’t exist five years ago, looking for somewhere to park a fortune that feels more permanent than a stock chart, or a second home they might flip in five years.

And it’s a young buyer class. Thirty percent of Christie’s first-half buyers were new to the house. Forty-seven percent of those were millennials or younger. This isn’t a handful of eccentric billionaires collecting the way their grandfathers did. It’s a generation deciding, early, what permanence looks like to them, and deciding it early enough to build a $20 billion company around the idea.

PADDLE TO PHONE

It used to take a paddle, a house, a relationship with a specialist. Now it takes a phone.

TikTok Shop did an estimated $15.8 billion in U.S. sales in 2025, up more than 120 percent year over year, and Bloomberg reported the platform has started stocking real luxury to match, Hermès and Chanel bags, fine jewelry, rare Louis Vuitton sneaker drops, with live auction tools built into the feed. Whatnot, fresh off that $20 billion valuation, has expanded well past trading cards into luxury watches, handbags, and fashion, taking the format across Europe. One reseller, 17th Street, runs a dedicated livestream host broadcasting bags five hours a day, seven days a week. They sold a Hermès HAC Birkin live for $20,000. Their Sunday shows clear $30,000 in a day.

Then there’s The Refind, out of Seattle, guaranteed-authentic live shopping that’s built a following of 185,000 on Instagram alone doing exactly this, one bag, one bid, one camera at a time.

WHERE DID THEY GO?

Some of you read my piece on this year’s luxury earnings. Jewelry didn’t just do well, it outperformed every other category by enough to post real, positive growth while handbags and ready-to-wear posted declines, or gains so marginal they barely counted, against a brutal prior year. I wrote about that from the corporate side, quarterly filings and investor calls. This is the same shift, showing up at auction instead of on a balance sheet.

Retail analyst Michael Zakkour put it in a sentence I haven’t stopped thinking about. High-end jewelry and watches, the hard luxury, the ultra-luxury, is doing well, he said, but the middle has fallen off, and the bottom is falling out. The aspirational luxury buyer has virtually disappeared.

Bain and Altagamma have the number behind that. The active luxury buyer base went from 400 million people in 2022 to 330 million in 2025. Seventy million buyers didn’t just stop spending. They went somewhere. Knight Frank’s Luxury Investment Index shows where. Watches rose 5.1 percent in 2025, Patek’s Aquanaut and Nautilus leading, Rolex holding steady behind them. Handbags, which had topped that index every year since 2019, slid to seventh place out of fifteen. Nearly flat.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, though. Why jewelry and not handbags. Both are supposedly timeless. Both get passed down. The difference comes down to something the industry did to itself, not something that happened to it.

When prices had to go up after the pandemic, the handbag houses and the jewelry houses made different bets. Louis Vuitton and its peers raised prices as much as 10 percent in a single move, according to UBS. Cartier raised its prices too, but closer to 3 percent, and gradually enough that shoppers never felt the floor move under them. Bernstein analyst Luca Solca said jewelry’s appeal has stayed clear and untarnished by the aggressive price increases everyone else made. That’s a nice way of saying jewelry never broke its promise to the customer. Handbags did, repeatedly, and luxury pricing only moves in one direction. Once a bag costs twice what it used to for the same amount of leather, there’s no walking that back.

Trend cycles do the rest of the damage. A handbag has a season. A silhouette gets hot, gets copied, gets everywhere, and eighteen months later it’s the thing your closet is quietly embarrassed about. Jewelry mostly refuses to participate in that calendar. The Cartier Love bracelet looks the same today as it did when it launched in 1969. The Van Cleef Alhambra hasn’t meaningfully changed since 1968. Bain’s Claudia d’Arpizio has pointed out that jewelry brands are increasingly courting mothers and daughters together, banking on a piece bought today getting worn, then inherited, then bought again for the next generation. Nobody markets a handbag that way. A handbag is styled. Jewelry is entrusted.

I have my own version of that. My brother gave Tiffany Elsa Peretti Alphabet charm necklaces, blue pouch and all, to every woman in his wedding party, twenty-one years ago. I still wear mine every day. This year, both of my nieces, five years apart, hit milestones of their own, and it turns out their first initials are the same as mine. So I found each of them a certified pre-owned Tiffany Elsa Peretti charm, one through myGemma, one through Etsy, and now the three of us wear the same letter. That’s not sentiment dressed up as an investment thesis. That’s the investment thesis.

Hermès is the one house that breaks this rule entirely, and it deserves its own line. In July 2025, Sotheby’s Paris sold Jane Birkin’s own original Hermès Birkin, the actual prototype made for her in 1984, scuffed, stickered, monogrammed “J.B.,” for $10.1 million, the most expensive handbag ever sold at auction. Nine collectors fought over it for ten minutes before it went to a Japanese reseller. That’s not a bag holding its value. That’s a bag whose most damaged, most personal, least pristine version is worth more than any showroom-fresh one could ever be, because Hermès has never made enough of them to satisfy demand in the first place. That’s not timelessness. That’s engineered scarcity, the same lever Cartier and Van Cleef pull, just applied to leather instead of gemstones.

Chanel is worth a beat here too, because it’s clearly playing the same game, just half a step behind. The Classic Flap hasn’t meaningfully changed since Karl Lagerfeld redesigned it in 1983, Chanel caps how many bags you can even buy per boutique visit, and prices have climbed so aggressively that a bag from a few years ago is often worth close to what it originally cost. But it isn’t Hermès. Most Classic Flaps still resell for somewhat less than current retail, not more, condition and configuration depending. It’s scarcity and continuity doing real work, just not enough of either yet to flip the market the way Hermès has. The exception proves the rule rather than breaking it. The handbags that hold value are the ones that behave like jewelry, and the ones that behave most like jewelry are the ones a house refuses to make enough of.

WHAT GOES AROUND

The resale market that ordinary shoppers actually touch is having its own record year, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence sitting next to everything above.

The RealReal just posted its fourth straight quarter of GMV growth above 20 percent, $617 million in the second quarter, an all-time high, revenue up 17 percent, active buyers up 11 percent, guidance raised. CEO Rati Sahi Levesque said something on the earnings call that stuck with me. We take possession of every item, she said, we authenticate it, and we stand behind our work, a standard most marketplaces structurally cannot match.

Authentication is doing the same job there that provenance does at Christie’s. It’s the same promise Rolex is now selling through its own Certified Pre-Owned channel. Whether the price tag has six figures or two, the buyer wants the same reassurance. Proof that the thing is what it claims to be, and proof that someone stood behind that claim before they did.

Knight Frank noticed something else. Demand is rotating toward pre-owned, visibly worn handbags, so-called beater bags, prized because they look used. Not despite the wear. Because of it. Apparently the whole industry just discovered what my closet has known for years.

I have a personal stake in that particular detail. In 2012, one of my dearest friends opened a vintage handbag store in Paris, on rue de Lille in the 7th arrondissement, just off rue du Bac. She called it La Gallery. For over a decade, nearly everything vintage in my closet came from her. Dior. Gucci. Goyard. Céline. Delvaux. Balmain. A few unnamed pieces so extraordinary they didn’t need a label to prove what they were. Erick has a watch from her store too. She sold to American retailers as well, including What Comes Around Goes Around, which tells you everything about how good her eye was.

She closed La Gallery after Covid. I so miss shopping there, and meeting Tania for a coffee across the street at Les Antiquaires after.

Nobody could have predicted the surge that was coming, not the AI wealth, not the auction records, not a TikTok host holding a Birkin up to a phone camera at 7pm. If she opened that store today instead of 2012, I don’t know that she would have ever closed it.

GETTING INTO THE ACT

Rolex isn’t sitting back and letting this happen around it. Its Certified Pre-Owned channel is growing fast, over $530 million in revenue in 2025, up from $319 million the year before, 67 percent growth last quarter alone. That’s a legacy house institutionalizing the shift rather than watching someone else profit from it.

The same appetite is showing up at a completely different price point, too. Seiko and Citizen each crossed a billion dollars in annual watch sales for the first time this year. Fossil’s stock is up 75 percent in six months, largely on the back of a $195 reissue of a 1999 design. Casio built an entire pricing ladder for it, resin G-Shocks at the bottom, premium MR-G models at the top, meant to walk a new buyer up and keep them there.

A $50,000 Patek and a $195 Fossil reissue have nothing in common on paper. In practice, they’re making the same argument. Both reject the undifferentiated middle. Both are a bet on nostalgia with a name attached to it, whether that name is Patek Philippe or 1999.

TANGIBLES FOR THE WIN

Artsy and Artnet CEO Jeffrey Yin said people are spending money on fun, collectible items that they want to have. That’s part of it. But I think what’s really driving this is something simpler. A stock ticker doesn’t feel like anything. A cryptocurrency wallet doesn’t either. A Van Cleef necklace on your neck, a Patek on your wrist, a Birkin on your arm, those are real. You can hold them, wear them, hand them to your daughter someday. They’re tangible in a way a portfolio isn’t, and lately, they’ve appreciated the way a portfolio should. That combination, an asset you can actually touch and one that’s actually going up, is rare enough right now that people are paying record prices just to own a piece of it.

The earnings reports told you jewelry was winning. The auction houses, the resale platforms, and now the livestreams are telling you why. Seventy million buyers walked away from luxury, and the ones who stayed have more money than they’ve ever had, and less interest in anything that isn’t, in every sense of the word, real.

Styled goes out of style. Entrusted doesn't.

Enjoy,

Michelle

After six years since closing his original three stores, Jeffrey reopened in Atlanta this past Sunday, on founder Jeffrey Kalinsky’s own birthday, a tradition he began with the very first Atlanta opening, kept with New York in 1999, and honoring again in 2026. If you already know what that means, you know exactly why I am thrilled. If you don’t, here is what you need to know before I take you down memory lane myself.

The Merchant

Jeffrey Kalinsky grew up in his father’s Charleston shoe store, Bob Ellis, working every job in the building, sales floor, cash register, whatever was asked of him. That is where his education in retail began.

He went on to Bergdorf Goodman as an assistant shoe buyer, then to Barneys, where at twenty-seven he became the women’s shoe buyer, the jobs that trained his eye before he ever ran his own floor.

In 1990, at twenty-eight, he opened his first store, a Bob Ellis location at Atlanta’s Phipps Plaza, essentially a satellite of his father’s Charleston shop. Accessible lines like Stuart Weitzman sat next to luxury names like Ferragamo and lesser-known European shoemakers like Robert Clergerie and Stéphane Kelian. It worked immediately, doing $2.5 million in its first year and climbing toward $5 million within a few years.

By 1994, he wanted to expand beyond shoes, into ready-to-wear. He arranged two deals at once, a Jil Sander boutique for Phipps Plaza, and alongside it, a Prada store. The Jil Sander deal held. The Prada deal collapsed at the last minute. Kalinsky was left holding a warehouse of ready-to-wear with nowhere to sell it, so instead of scrapping the plan, he put his own name on the door. That is how Jeffrey was born, not as a grand vision, but as a workaround. He introduced designers most Atlanta women had never heard of and did not know they wanted, Manolo Blahnik, Prada, Dries Van Noten, alongside newer names he championed before anyone else would, Jil Sander, Ann Demeulemeester, Helmut Lang, Richard Tyler.

New York came next, five years later, in the Meatpacking District. Picture it in 1999: cobblestone streets that belonged to meat processors and butchers by day, hauling carcasses through the early morning hours, and by night, a completely different world took over. Hogs & Heifers, the biker bar famous enough that Julia Roberts once threw her bra up on its wall, was already a legend by then. Underground clubs operated in buildings most people wouldn’t have looked at twice in daylight. Jeffrey opened there anyway, 12,000 square feet, drawn less by the neighborhood itself than by what he could afford and the handful of fashion insiders already gathering nearby.

The rest followed him. Hermès moved in. So did Christian Louboutin, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney. Pastis opened down the street and became the kind of restaurant people planned entire evenings around. The Whitney Museum eventually built its new home a few blocks away. The High Line, nothing but rusting scaffolding when Jeffrey moved in, became the destination it is today, all built on the foundation laid by Jeffrey.

More Than a Store

The store became something bigger than a store almost immediately. Christina Ricci showed up for a Fashion’s Night Out appearance there. Saturday Night Live parodied the place more than once, Jimmy Fallon playing a snobby sales associate, cracking that even our labels have labels. Kalinsky was mortified the first time it aired, feeling like he was being mocked for something his staff worked hard at, genuine care for every customer who walked in. He came to see it differently over time. A store does not get parodied on SNL unless it means something.

In 2003, Kalinsky started Jeffrey Fashion Cares, an annual charity fashion event that drew people like Anna Wintour and raised real money, close to eight hundred thousand dollars in a single year for breast cancer and AIDS charities.

He was known for a rare kind of honesty on the floor, willing to tell a customer the truth even when it cost him the sale. As he put it himself, sometimes I’m the one who goes into the dressing room and it kills the sale.

What We Lost

Twenty-one years after that first New York opening, none of it was supposed to end. But it did.

Jeffrey held on until 2020, when Nordstrom, the majority owner since 2005, closed all three of his stores for good, New York, Atlanta, and a much newer Palo Alto location that had barely been open two years and that most people never even knew existed. Kalinsky did not pretend the business had failed on its own terms. He has said directly that he believes the stores would have survived if not for the pandemic, that Nordstrom simply decided not to make the investment required to get through it.

For six years, that was where the story ended. Until this past Sunday.

A Friend on the Inside

Jeffrey’s reopening is precisely the kind of moment this series was built for, a pilgrimage returning after years away. The extra gift was getting to pick up the phone because of it and call the person who actually lived inside that world.

I have built a life around fashion, and somewhere along the way, fashion built me a family I never expected.

P is one of those friends that became family, though we started out as something much simpler, salesperson and customer. We met around 2008, on a work trip to a major West Coast city during my Calvin Klein years, when I wandered into a store and ended up with a salesperson who understood what I wanted before I finished describing it. That was P. I kept coming back, and eventually did all my shopping through him, calling from wherever I was and trusting him to find it. He became one of my people, and the friendship outgrew the store completely.

He had never been to New York. So I did what you do for someone you love. I invited him.

A week before his flight, my phone rang. He wasn’t coming.

I said okay. I meant it. No drama, no interrogation, just, I understand.

Don’t you want to know why, he said.

Only if you want to tell me, I told him.

Because I am moving there, he said. I just took a job at Jeffrey.

I screamed. He was not visiting my city anymore. He was about to live in it.

Almost twenty years later, I have officiated his wedding, celebrated our birthdays in Paris, and watched him grow from a “kid” with unbelievable taste into someone who managed some of the best stores in the world. He has since left retail entirely and become a successful real estate investor.

What follows are his memories, filtered through a phone call and over twenty years of trust. I had heard most of these stories before, back when they happened. Reliving them again was every bit as much fun the second time.

Five People for One Outfit

P started with what actually made the Jeffrey experience different: the merchandise and the service, working together, never one without the other. Personalized attention, a team assembled just for the customer, no single salesperson juggling five categories to hit a number. If you needed a full outfit, you got a shoe person, a bag person, a clothing person, a cosmetics person, each one earning their own commission on their own category. Jewelry was the one category anyone on the floor could sell, which is exactly why it turned into chaos when the right customer walked in.

P’s own role sat above all of it. He wasn’t on commission. He was the conductor, making sure the customer’s experience stayed seamless no matter how many specialists were working with them at once, coordinating the handoffs so nothing felt disjointed or transactional.

The buying was just as tight, and just as personal. Jeffrey and two others went everywhere and bought everything themselves. Sometimes they bought with a specific customer in mind, building toward something across an entire season. And the curation itself was the point, not the full line, not what the brand wanted on the floor, just what Jeffrey thought was the best of it. When they carried Chanel, it wasn’t a full boutique assortment the way other retailers were required to buy. One bar. Six pieces. Chosen because Jeffrey liked them.

For all that hands-on buying, Jeffrey himself was rarely actually on the selling floor. He was integral to the buy, and he’d work with his own personal customers when they came in, but day to day, that was someone else’s job. This makes what he’s saying now, that he plans to be on the floor himself in the new Atlanta store, a real departure. The first time around, he built the assortment. This time, by his own account, he wants to sell it too.

The Memories

This was a store built on relationships, not just transactions. You became a regular the way you became a regular at your favorite restaurant, recognized on sight, remembered by name. Some scenes P described stayed with him exactly as they happened, the kind of moments that made Jeffrey what it was.

Two women in their thirties, on a ladies’ shopping trip from the Midwest, walked in wearing Chanel chains and spent eight hours shopping. By the end of it they’d worked up a serious appetite. P ordered hamburgers, and the three of them ended up eating together on the fitting room floor, a true New York moment.

Then there was the day Saudi royalty came in, a husband and wife, with a butler dressed the part, an attaché case, two or three ladies in waiting, and nine bodyguards. P offered them something to drink. The husband said no. The butler opened his attaché case, pulled out Fiji water and a silver tray, and served the prince himself. You cannot make this stuff up. Before it was over, the pair had spent a quarter of a million dollars in forty-five minutes.

Then there was a woman who lived in a penthouse at the Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park, a view of the Statue of Liberty from her bedroom. She relied entirely on the store to dress her, head to toe, for every occasion in her life. Before big events, P would coordinate her stylist, her seamstress, and her makeup artist all at once, then sit with her making small talk to keep her calm while everyone worked.

I could go on. The store’s regulars sat alongside actual boldface names. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West shopped there. Lauryn Hill was a customer. Not every name gets a story, but the room they shared with the ladies from the Midwest and the everyday local regulars was the same room, no velvet rope separating one kind of customer from another.

The Comeback

He is opening again, in Atlanta, on his birthday. Sole owner. No outside investors. “It’s the perfect women’s closet,” he has said of the new store. “It’s very head-to-toe.” Tom Ford, The Row, Gucci, and Loewe anchor the assortment, alongside harder-to-find names like God’s True Cashmere, Valextra, Courrèges, Dosa, and Rier, several of them exclusive to Jeffrey in Atlanta.

He has described the pull back to retail as something he could not ignore, a calling he had to answer. Being a designer merchant, he has said, is simply in his blood.

I would love to ask him myself what he sees as the same and what he sees as different, then and now. Maybe if enough of you subscribe, I will have the clout to actually reach out.

Pilgrimage Worthy

Jeffrey belongs to a lineage that never actually disappeared, it just became harder to find. L’Éclaireur, Paris, 1980, no storefront window, no sale, ever. The Webster, Adidas next to Palm Angels, because a real point of view doesn’t care about category. Dover Street Market, Kawakubo refusing to explain herself, because the discovery is the whole point.

He belongs on that list. He always did.

Jeffrey knew that in 1999, in a neighborhood nobody else would touch. He is betting on it again now, in a city that’s been waiting for him to come home.

Enjoy, Michelle.

I entered the founder world in 2017, right as everyone seemed to be raising enormous rounds and getting written up for it. I was obsessed with the brands doing it: WeWork, Glossier, Casper, Allbirds, Outdoor Voices. I studied them the way I used to study a P&L, except none of their P&Ls made sense the way a P&L is supposed to. Companies kept raising money and kept not performing, and somehow the raise was the story, not the performance. After over 25 years of leading corporate fashion brands, I felt like I had to unlearn things just to follow along.

Erick, my business partner, helped. He reads everything and retains all of it, and he’d been in this world longer than I had, without my corporate lens sitting in the way. Slowly it stopped looking like magic and started looking like a pattern.

Then I saw it from the inside. A private equity firm brought me in to do diligence on a company they were considering, then kept me on after the deal closed. The business was missing its numbers, not because the product was wrong but because nobody had built the infrastructure to forecast accurately or plan against it. Worse, the growth targets on the table assumed a timeframe the business had no real path to hitting, set by someone who needed the deck to work, not by anyone who’d looked closely at what the company could actually do. I built their strategic operating model, and the processes and team for sales and planning, over the following year, against numbers that were aspirationally realistic rather than fantasy. They made their numbers. What I learned staying inside that company for eighteen months: most young, well-funded businesses don’t fail from a bad idea. They fail because someone sets the timeline before anyone builds the plan and infrastructure to hit it.

For FURI, Erick and I made a deliberate choice early on: friends, bootstrapping, and our accelerator, rather than straight venture capital. That’s not a verdict on venture money. It’s a decision about fit and stage. Ours is a physical product business on a timeline that doesn’t map cleanly to a ten-year fund clock, and family offices and angels can move at a pace that matches how we’re actually building.

I don’t want this read as an argument against venture capital or private equity. It isn’t, and it’s not a case for one being right and the other wrong. Venture money built the infrastructure everyone in my life, including me, now depends on without thinking twice. Cloud computing, the chip supply chain behind every phone I own, the payment infrastructure FURI’s own checkout runs on every day, most of the biotech that has quietly extended people’s lives, all of it exists because someone was willing to make a genuinely risky bet on something built to scale fast enough to justify it. None of that gets built on a bank loan and a five-year plan.

Private equity has real costs too. It has gutted companies, hollowed out entire categories, and reshaped markets, housing among them, in ways that carry real consequences for real people. I’ve also seen it work well up close: a firm that recognized a company had outgrown its own infrastructure, without the processes in place to deliver the growth being asked of it, and brought me in, an experienced operator, to build them.

Neither instrument is a hero or a villain. Both are tools, and the damage shows up when the tool doesn’t match the business it’s handed to.

Venture funds are not patient by design. They are closed-end vehicles with a ten-year clock, and limited partners expect real cash back by year seven. To deliver the 3x net return LPs require, a fund needs a handful of its bets to return far more than that, because most of a portfolio fails or barely breaks even. That math doesn’t ask whether your business is ready to grow at the rate required. It just requires it.

I made up a joke years ago, and I still think it’s funny. Match every funding round to a grade, letter for letter. Series A, you get an A, congratulations, you’re building something that’s a genuine, growing opportunity. Series B, you get a B, and no, that’s not automatically bad, maybe the opportunity actually grew and you’re funding real expansion. But if you’re back for a B against the exact same opportunity you started with, that B is your report card, and it’s not a good one. Series C: a C. Series D: you know where this is going. By E and F, you’re not fundraising anymore. You’re repeating a grade.

It’s not an entirely fair assessment, and I tell it anyway, because in a lot of cases during those years, it was accurate. Raising more was treated like winning. Half the time it was just the transcript of a business that never learned to perform on its own.

Casper is where this shows up first.

Casper

Casper was founded in 2014 and raised more than $340 million on its way to a $1.1 billion valuation in March 2019. The trouble was built into the category from the start. People buy a mattress once a decade, so there’s no repeat business to lean on, only the relentless cost of finding someone new. A former Casper employee once described monthly customer acquisition spend to us that she called outlandish, numbers with no relationship to what the product could support. The company wasn’t just losing money. It was spending real money to answer a question, how many mattresses can we sell online, that had a much smaller number attached to it than the valuation assumed.

A generous 100-night return policy made the math worse, costing around $80 million and erasing nearly 40% of margin on anything sent back. By 2019, more than 170 mattress-in-a-box copycats were chasing the same buyers, driving acquisition costs higher every year. Losses climbed accordingly: roughly $73 million, $92 million, and $70 million across 2017 to 2019. By the time Casper filed to go public, it was losing over $300 on every mattress it sold.

None of that stopped the company from describing itself, in its own IPO filing, with the language of a technology company before it ever mentioned mattresses. That was the clock talking. A mattress company earns a mattress company’s valuation. Casper needed to sound like something else to justify what it had already raised. The IPO landed at barely half its private valuation in February 2020. By November 2021, it was gone from public markets entirely, sold to private equity for about $286 million, less than what it raised to get there. No scandal. Just a business that ran out of ways to sound like something it wasn’t.

Glossier

I loved Glossier when it first launched, or more precisely, I loved the experience of it. Going to the Lafayette Street headquarters was an event in itself, waiting in line for the elevator up to the penthouse, stepping into what felt like Glossier Land, every surface built for the brand, down to a bathroom mirror and medicine cabinet that mirrored the whole thesis of Emily Weiss’s blog, Into the Gloss: yourself, reflected, ready for a photo. I remember taking an intern there once on a brutally hot day. An employee came outside and handed everyone in line a red umbrella to shield them from the sun. I bought a Boy Brow that day, their best-selling product. I didn’t love the product, if I’m honest. It didn’t matter. This was a cult brand, and the cult wasn’t really about the eyebrow gel.

Emily Weiss launched Glossier in October 2014 and raised money across several rounds in the years after. The last of them, in July 2021, brought in $80 million and valued the company at $1.8 billion, on the strength of a story rather than a balance sheet. If you want the long version of everything that happened next, journalist Marisa Meltzer wrote an entire book about it, Glossy, worth reading. Here’s the short version, in service of the argument at hand.

Like Casper, Glossier described itself internally and to investors as a technology company, setting expectations for tech-level margins that a beauty brand selling lip gloss was never built to hit.

The reckoning came in January 2022: 80 employees laid off, a third of the company, hardest in the tech team the brand had built to justify its valuation. Weiss stepped down as CEO that May. Her successor, Kyle Leahy, inherited a company that had already proven, through the layoffs, that shrinking wasn’t going to satisfy anyone. So the mandate wasn’t “fix the brand.” It was “make the number make sense again,” fast. Launches accelerated from every ten weeks to every four to six. The brand expanded into deodorant, body care, and fragrance, and tried to become what Leahy called “a true quadruple threat.” A brand that stands for one very specific point of view can’t stand for everything at once, so it stopped standing for anything in particular. That summer, Glossier also struck its first wholesale deal, with Sephora, reversing the exact distribution model the brand had built its identity by rejecting.

This is the part worth sitting with: the clock doesn’t disappear when leadership changes. It just becomes the next person’s problem. Leahy didn’t choose category sprawl because it was good brand strategy. She chose it because growing the top line was the fastest way to move the number everyone was actually watching, not a plan for strategic, sustainable growth.

Revenue did recover, reaching $275 million in 2023. But recovery and health aren’t the same thing. Reported acquisition talks with LVMH in 2024 went nowhere; by 2025, Glossier was reportedly trying to raise $100 million just for shareholder liquidity. Its valuation now sits somewhere south of a billion dollars, roughly half of 2021. Three CEOs in four years. Weiss set the number in a single afternoon in 2021. The next two, Leahy and then Walsh, a beauty veteran from P&G, L’Oréal, and DevaCurl, spent their tenures managing against it.

Meanwhile, Rhode and Merit did something different: they mostly stayed off the clock entirely. Rhode never took fund-scale venture money, Bieber kept majority ownership, and it sold to e.l.f. Beauty for up to $1 billion with no fund timeline forcing the outcome. Merit raised one small round in 2021, never returned for a second, and became profitable on its own terms by 2024. Neither one ever called itself a tech company.

WeWork

This is where the tech company move actually started, and you likely already know some version of this story. It’s been a podcast, two books, a Hulu documentary, and an Apple TV+ miniseries starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway. Casper and Glossier were both watching by the time they made the same move themselves, calling a mattress company and a beauty brand something they weren’t, because it appeared to be working spectacularly well for WeWork. What looked like the smartest strategy in the room turned out to be a disaster for all three of them.

Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey opened their first WeWork in SoHo in April 2011: lease long, sublease short, pocket the spread. Neumann described it instead as a company that would “elevate the world’s consciousness,” and investors, led by SoftBank, bought the framing along with the desks. By January 2019, SoftBank had pushed WeWork’s valuation to $47 billion.

That is exactly when the red flags really went up for me. I did the math myself: $47 billion divided by roughly 425 locations comes out to about $110 million per location. Per building. That’s the kind of number you’d expect from a healthy, profitable middle-market company, or a well-run regional bank, not a single leased floor of shared desks. Not a technology multiple. Not a real estate multiple. Just a story wearing a number. Doing that math myself was the moment I understood I wasn’t the one who was confused. The system was.

The public market agreed with me months later, when the IPO filing forced its finances into daylight: billions in losses, governance red flags, a founder who had never expected anyone to check. The $47 billion valuation was under $10 billion by October. WeWork went public anyway, via SPAC in 2021, at $9 billion, a fifth of its peak, and filed for bankruptcy two years later. It emerged in 2024, smaller and privately held, roughly $4 billion in debt erased. The clock didn’t just run out on WeWork. It ran out on the idea that a company could talk its way into a different category of valuation and never be asked to prove it belonged there.

Neumann himself never really answered to any clock at all. He walked away from the wreckage with an exit package worth up to $1.7 billion, while SoftBank wrote off $14.3 billion of its own money to zero. Nobody else made a dime. He then tried to buy WeWork back out of bankruptcy for more than $500 million, backed by financing partners including hedge fund manager Dan Loeb. Andreessen Horowitz, apparently undeterred by any of this, handed him $350 million to launch a new real estate company, Flow, before it had even opened its doors, at a billion-dollar valuation. In 2025, they doubled down again, another nine-figure round, pushing Flow to $2.5 billion. He’s reportedly eyeing an IPO next. His own words on the timeline: “We don’t need to rush.” Somewhere, a group of very rich people looked at all of this and decided the smartest move was to write him another check. Guess logic and business math don’t always have to make sense.

Outdoor Voices

Ty Haney founded Outdoor Voices in 2013, straight out of Parsons, and built it into the brand that made “doing things,” not winning at them, into a cultural moment. The company raised more than $60 million and was valued at $110 million by 2018. The board brought in retail veteran Mickey Drexler as chairman, a signal of what was expected next: professionalized, scalable growth.

It didn’t come. By 2019, Outdoor Voices was burning more than $2 million a month against roughly $40 million in annual sales. Drexler quit mid-year amid reported clashes with Haney. A 2020 round valued the company at just $40 million, a third of its 2018 peak. That February, while Haney was on maternity leave, the board stripped her of the CEO title; she resigned entirely the next month.

This is the clock’s other symptom. WeWork, Casper, and Glossier each inflated their own category to satisfy their valuation’s growth rate. Outdoor Voices shows the pressure running the other direction: a board brings in an outside operator to force the metrics into shape, and when that doesn’t work fast enough, the founder absorbs the cost, timed here to the most vulnerable moment possible in her life.

Outdoor Voices reached profitability in 2021 under new leadership, though many longtime fans didn’t recognize what was left of the brand. The stability didn’t last. In early 2024, the company closed every store and laid off dozens before Consortium Brand Partners acquired it that June and cleared its debts.

Haney quietly rejoined as an owner that August, and in July 2025 announced a full relaunch, this time as a partner and co-owner rather than a founder answering to a board. Her stated plan is a decade-long path to a billion dollars in revenue, the opposite of the timeline that broke the company the first time.

But the strategy behind that patience looks nothing like the brand Haney originally built. A nationwide Sam’s Club partnership, lower prices, expanded sizing, big-box shelf space, is a long way from the premium positioning that made Outdoor Voices a cult brand. The DTC site still sells near original pricing; Sam’s Club puts leggings that cost $78 to $118 on outdoorvoices.com on shelves for under $17. The sequencing makes its own argument: a niche, premium brand couldn’t outrun the growth it needed on its own, so this version bets on volume instead. Whether both channels survive under the same name is the part we won’t know for years.

Allbirds

I owned two pairs of Allbirds once, back when Erick first introduced me to them, right around when their first New York store opened. One has been demoted to a house slipper. The other I donated, because I would not be caught in public wearing them now. Erick still has a limited-edition pair he wears regularly, and people compliment them to this day. Too bad Allbirds didn’t stick to whatever they were doing when they made those. Meanwhile I own six pairs of Rothy’s. Nobody planned that split, and it turns out my closet was tracking this story years before the headlines caught up to it.

Erick’s limited-edition Allbirds, the other pair demoted to house slippers, and six pairs of Rothy’s still in rotation.

Those headlines were hard to miss this spring. Allbirds sold for $39 million. Four years earlier, it had been worth $4 billion. Then it renamed itself twice in two months trying to become an AI company.

Allbirds launched its wool sneaker in San Francisco in 2016 and, for a while, earned its cult status honestly: comfortable, understated, the shoe that signaled sustainability without needing to say so. It IPO’d in November 2021 near a $4 billion valuation. Then it took a specific, narrow thing people loved and tried to make it big enough to justify the number.

Stores went from 27 in mid-2021 to 58 by the end of 2022. The product line expanded into performance running shoes and apparel, $250 puffer jackets included, categories with no connection to the wool sneaker that built the brand, most of it marked down to move. A 2022 push into wholesale at Nordstrom and REI burned cash without a clear path to margin. Across the five fiscal years ending in December 2024, the company lost $419 million on $1.24 billion in sales. Hoka and On ran past it while Allbirds chased categories that had nothing to do with why anyone bought the shoes in the first place.

Allbirds didn’t inflate its category. It inflated its mission. Sustainability was the story, not the shoe, and a story can justify almost any valuation right up until the customer notices the product isn’t keeping pace. The stock jumped nearly 600% in a single day when the AI pivot was announced this April. By the time the rename finalized to Smartbird this June, the company had a new CEO from Amazon and, by its own admission, no employees, no customers, and no revenue in the business it had just declared itself to be.

The contrast is Rothy’s, a company with every reason to make the same mistakes and didn’t. Same category, same sustainability pitch, different materials, recycled plastic bottles instead of wool. Rothy’s stayed close to what it was, expanding only into handbags and a men’s line, categories its own logic could stretch to cover. Its capital structure matched its restraint: a $1 billion valuation in December 2021 came from Alpargatas, the Brazilian owner of Havaianas, a strategic industry partner, not a venture fund with a fund life to satisfy. In 2024, under CEO Jenny Ming, Rothy’s posted its best year on record: sales up 17% to $211 million, and, unlike Allbirds at any point in its public life, positive EBITDA with double-digit margins. One company chased a valuation and sold for pennies on the dollar. The other built a business with a strategic partner, combining sustainability, style, and actual profit.

A Failure of Fit

None of this makes the slower path easy. Family office and angel money is harder to find than it looks from the outside, no accelerator pipeline for it, no warm-intro machine. For FURI, that path has meant friends, bootstrapping, and our accelerator so far, and some days that genuinely feels like falling behind.

But going slower isn’t the same as building something small, and choosing to be patient isn’t the same as sitting still. What the five companies in this piece actually bought with their fast money wasn’t growth, it was a deadline. Every one of them eventually answered to a number that had nothing to do with their customer, their product, or their actual health as a business.

That’s the whole case: don’t let hype pick your path. Pick the capital that fits the company you’re building.

Know What You’re Building

These five companies were never confused about what they sold. A mattress. Office space. Lip gloss. Shoes. Running tights. They just dressed their businesses in something that didn’t fit to raise as much money as they could, without considering the strategic ramifications. None of it ended well. Money is never without expectations, and venture’s expectation depends on a growth model that some categories simply cannot deliver.

Know what you’re building. Find the money that supports it.

Postscript

This piece publishes the same day Reformation prices its IPO, with trading set to begin tomorrow on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker REF, in a deal that could value the sustainable womenswear brand near $1 billion. It’s backed by the private equity firm Permira, buying into a business with more than half a billion dollars in real revenue and twenty straight quarters of double-digit growth, not a venture fund betting on a growth rate the company would have to invent. Reformation was solidly profitable as recently as last year; its most recent quarter posted a loss, as it spent ahead of the IPO on stores and expansion. Whether that’s discipline pausing to invest, or discipline slipping, is the one part of this story still unwritten. It’s the first California fashion company to test public markets since a San Francisco shoe brand did it in 2021, at $15 a share, under the name Allbirds.

Enjoy, Michelle.

There is no single road to funding a company. There are many, and most founders don’t know that until they’re standing at the fork having to choose one. You can bootstrap and grow on your own revenue. You can raise from friends and family first. You can go straight to venture capital. You can crowdfund. You can do an accelerator, a short structured program that trades some equity for money, mentorship, and access over a few months. Y Combinator is the name most people know. Techstars runs in cities worldwide. Some are built around a specific industry or kind of founder. None of these roads is the correct one in the abstract. They’re just different roads, and the right one depends entirely on what you actually need at the moment you need it.

Erick and I took ours in order. We bootstrapped first. Then friends and family. Then an accelerator. Now we’re raising a pre-seed round, which means I’m writing this from inside the process, not looking back at it from the other side of a clean success story. I don’t know yet how this next road ends. I know what the accelerator road taught me, and I know it wasn’t the road I expected to take.

It started at a FURI event we hosted for influencers in Miami, in October 2022. Our advisor, Jesse K., was there and wanted to introduce us to Chris L., a partner at a16z. Chris is a tennis player, and Jesse thought he’d be interested in what we were building. The timing worked out, and we set up a date to meet Chris on a court in his neighborhood outside Miami. We brought Chris a FURI racket. Erick, Jesse, and Chris all played. Chris is the person who founded a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund, and he’s the one who told us about Talent x Opportunity, an accelerator the firm built specifically for founders changing culture and making impact. He thought we’d be a fit. He was right.

We applied, and we got in. Then came the acceptance packet, and the terms.

I know how to build a team. I know how to hire, develop, maximize. I have a network of experts in product, marketing, production, and to some extent distribution. So when I did the straight math, valuation based on investment against ownership percentage, I got offended. Money is my trigger. Twenty-five years of never having to fight for capital will do that to you.

Erick and Wendy both told me I was looking at one facet and missing the bigger picture. Normally that’s my strength, not my blind spot. This one had me all out of sorts.

I asked for a call to discuss, to respect Erick and the people who’d gotten us the connection. We were at the Brooklyn Museum for inspiration that day, standing in front of pieces from Virgil Abloh’s archive, “Figures of Speech,” his retrospective, up through that January. Erick and I were there with my friend Bonnie, the kind of afternoon built around looking for ideas rather than planning to find them. My phone rang in the middle of the exhibition, and I stepped just outside the gallery to take the call.

Kofi Ampadu, the partner running the accelerator at a16z, was direct. The terms were non-negotiable, the same for every company in the cohort. He heard my concern and walked me through a different way to look at it. We’re not valuing your company, he told me. The investment isn’t just the dollar figure. Look at everything: the mentoring, the connections, the programming, the advising that doesn’t stop when the accelerator does. The a16z name behind you. The money, he said, is the least valuable thing we’re offering.

I still wasn’t sold right away. I asked to speak with two alumni and both the program and partnership directors before I’d say yes. Looking back, I might have been seen as knocking a gift horse in the mouth. But that’s also the diligence you do before partnering with anyone, for anything, in your company. Everyone I talked to was honest with me about both the good and the hard parts. Caitlin Glazebrook, the partnership director, talked about her job as making sure we got connected to the right mentors and stakeholders, and into rooms that were expensive and gatekept otherwise. The program director at the time, Tauri Laws Phillips, told me if a session covered something I already knew cold, talent assessment, hiring, I could either contribute to it or skip it. I appreciated that she’d thought about who I actually was, not just what the cohort required.

Then she said: “My job is to take care of you.”

Something came out of me before I could stop it. I told her no one had ever said that to me before. Not in twenty-five years of corporate. I was at least twenty years older than everyone in that cohort except Erick, and that line changed the entire footing I walked in on.

We were Cohort 4, February 2023. What we got wasn't just the check. It was community that has outlasted the cohort itself, including the founders from cohorts before ours. It was mentors, real ones, and doors that don't open just because you knock. It was a program director who's now an official advisor to FURI and who runs a nonprofit that sent us three interns this summer.

In October 2024, a partner at the Cultural Leadership Fund called to ask if I’d moderate a panel at one of the firm’s events celebrating genius across fields, not just tech: health, fashion, music. It was an incredible experience and one of the best networking opportunities I’ve had, and in the middle of it, I found out my friend Arianna, whose hospitality company, House of Sinclair, had been hired to run the event, was there too. One of my people, in the room, without either of us knowing in advance. I said yes to a lot that came out of that accelerator. That was one of the best yeses.

We also went to Hawaii for a cohort retreat, which turned out to be one of the true highlights of the whole program. We worked with our performance coaches there, bonded with the rest of the cohort away from the pressure of building, and genuinely let off steam. It’s easy to think of an accelerator as pure grind, decks and calls and deadlines. The retreat was the reminder that the community part isn’t incidental. It’s the actual infrastructure.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to. The process itself, the deck, the pitch, the whole apparatus of “how you’re supposed to fundraise,” is where the real education was.

You get flooded with advice the second you start. Expert newsletters, templates, the same five slides in the same order every time: problem, solution, team, market, ask. I looked at so many decks that people sent me, or that showed up in my inbox from newsletters, and none of them impressed me. Eventually I understood why. That entire format is VC-driven. If you’re raising from angels or family offices instead, it can look completely different.

Costco has a rule for vendors: you get five feet and five seconds to get a customer’s attention. The same is true for a deck. But the template everyone’s handed doesn’t actually accomplish that. It accomplishes looking like everyone else.

Almost every accelerator ends the same way: a pitch day, in front of a room of investors, on a clock. Ours was held at Facebook’s LA office. We worked for weeks with a pitch coach, Maura Atari, a Yale-trained actress who was exactly right for our personalities. She dug deep into who each of us actually was and what we each contributed, so the pitch came out authentic instead of performed. We’re still friends to this day. I’m glad I did it. I learned how to pitch at a demo day, even though I haven’t done it again since. But I’ll be honest, pitch days aren’t the best format for everyone, and it depends on the story you’re trying to tell and the kind of partners you’re looking for.

One of my most critical takeaways came from Kofi, after he sat with us and went through every slide of our own deck, line by line. That’s where the true learning happened, not from a newsletter, from someone in the room with me. He told me the deck is just the invitation. You should never present a deck. Coming from corporate, where a deck is the whole presentation, that broke something open in me. I truly believe every company has to find its own way to say who it is and why it matters, and that can take a dozen different forms. Decks have become as eye-glazing as resumes. I always let Erick take the lead on ours. He has the patience for it.

This is the part that took me years to actually believe, not just say. There is no formula to raising. I’ve heard the advice: build a spreadsheet of five hundred investors, kiss a thousand frogs, someone eventually says yes. That’s the tale everyone tells. I don’t think it’s smart, and I don’t think it’s true for everyone. I don’t have a fundraising background. What I have is a long resume of running businesses, and I’m finally trusting that instead of trusting the template.

The most important thing isn’t the deck. It’s choosing the right road and finding partners on that road who understand you and add value beyond the check. That’s a different search for every founder, and no amount of formula-following replaces doing that search honestly.

That’s what the accelerator road taught me. It’s not the only road, and it isn’t always the right one.

The accelerator landscape is bigger than most people realize when they start looking, and knowing its actual shape matters before you pick a lane. Y Combinator comes up in almost every conversation about accelerators, and it earned that reputation honestly. Paul Graham and three co-founders started it in 2005 as an experiment: fund startups in batches instead of one at a time, treat founders like a cohort instead of a gatekeeping ritual. The first batch funded Reddit. Since then it’s backed Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, and DoorDash. It also quietly reshaped how nearly every early-stage company raises money, not just its own portfolio. In 2013, its counsel, Carolynn Levy, invented the SAFE, short for Simple Agreement for Future Equity, because founders were burning weeks negotiating convertible notes they barely understood. That document is now the default instrument almost every accelerator and early-stage round uses, YC’s included. It’s a useful reference point for how much this whole landscape has grown and standardized, not necessarily where any given founder should look first.

Techstars is the more human version of the same idea, mentorship-heavy, run in fifty-plus cities instead of concentrated in one. ERA in New York is smaller and sharper still, four months, a roughly 1% acceptance rate, and alumni who’ve collectively raised over two billion dollars, the kind of program where you’re a name, not a batch number. a16z’s own newer accelerator, Speedrun, started under the firm’s gaming fund but has since pivoted hard into AI, its most recent cohort was almost entirely AI-tagged companies, and it’s now open to founders building in any category, not just gaming or AI. It writes checks up to a million dollars, proof that the model keeps evolving even inside the firms that helped invent it.

None of them are better or worse on their own. What matters is knowing which kind of founder each one is actually built for and being honest with yourself about which one you are.

We’re choosing our next road right now. For this raise, we’re going the family office and angel route instead of venture capital. FURI isn’t a pure software company. We’re building physical product in equipment and apparel, and that takes strategic partners with longer timelines than most VCs are built to offer. We watched what happened to companies that raised big and fast on the venture model, chasing growth over revenue, and it’s part of why we’re choosing differently. That decision deserves its own piece, and it’ll get one.

The question isn’t which road is the best one. It’s which specific gap you’re actually trying to fill, and whether the people on that road will tell you the truth about it before you commit.

I wouldn’t be as far along without the road we already took. Not because of the check. Because someone told me her job was to take care of me, and meant it, and because I finally learned there was never a formula waiting for me to find it. Just the work, and the right people willing to do it alongside you.

Enjoy, Michelle.

“Couture may not offer solutions, but it can keep wonder alive.”

— Robert Wun, to Vogue

I said it in April. The most valuable thing a creative director brings to a house is not their name. It is their time.

Quick rewind, since this is a direct follow up to When Luxury Forgot What it Was Part 3: “The Most Expensive Game of Musical Chairs in History” (April 29) about the same fifteen or so names, rotating through a small handful of houses. Often the same training grounds. Often the same resumes. New talent waiting outside with nowhere to go. Kim Jones. Hedi Slimane. Riccardo Tisci. Unplaced then. Still unplaced now. Floriane de Saint Pierre, the executive search veteran who runs her own firm in Paris, is betting the current wave of appointments will finally settle the carousel down: “All recent nominations will be highly successful, limiting the great game of musical chairs.” Keep that in your pocket. Couture week was the first real test of it.

One name didn’t stay open long. Rabanne confirmed yesterday morning, July 14, that Olivier Rousteing is its new creative director, succeeding Julien Dossena after thirteen years there. Rousteing spent fourteen years at Balmain before leaving last November. His runway debut for Rabanne isn’t until March 2027, so the chair was filled well before anyone sees what he actually does with it.

So, five houses, five answers to the same question. Not who is talented. Everyone who showed last week was talented. The question is who actually knows the house they’re standing in, and who’s just borrowing its name for a season.

Paris ran thirty shows last week. I watched five: the ones actually mid-transition. Two debuts, Piccioli at Balenciaga and Chiuri at Fendi, and three sophomore outings from designers still proving the job is theirs, Anderson at Dior, Blazy at Chanel, Silvana Armani at Armani Privé. Everyone else on the calendar was working from a settled chair, which doesn’t test my thesis. Duran Lantink’s Gaultier debut technically qualifies too; six houses was one too many for a single sitting, so he stays a name to watch, not a sixth section.

Balenciaga: the heretic who did his homework, or just Valentino with new signage

Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Balenciaga debut, the house’s 55th couture collection, was my favorite of the five. I was never a Demna fan, loved his Vetements work, never loved what he did at Balenciaga, and it is genuinely good to see this house back to something else. Piccioli revived Cristóbal Balenciaga’s original 1958 fabric, gazar, and engineered his own version, silk and wool blended together so it flows more than the original’s stiffness ever allowed. He also brought something new to the house entirely: AMSilk, a lab-grown silk alternative built through DNA editing instead of spun by a silkworm. Real innovation, not decoration, sitting on top of the house’s own material history rather than replacing it.

But two critics independently said his real instincts, the jeweled masks, the restrained drama, are Valentino habits wearing Balenciaga’s name. Tim Blanks disagreed on Business of Fashion’s podcast, tracing the same handwriting back to Piccioli’s celebrated Spring 2018 Valentino collection and arguing this house finally gave him the room to do it properly: grandeur and ease, the two things he does best in couture.

As many of you know, I’ve never met an opinion I didn’t have, and I wouldn’t want to disappoint now. So here it is: The collection is a beautiful synthesis of Balenciaga’s own heritage and everything Piccioli does best. Not a costume of Valentino. A designer finding his balance. Elegant, not street, which is what this house actually was before Demna. The color alone was a symphony, reds, purples, aquas, greens, burgundy, pinks, staged in the finale walk so the palettes read like chapters in a story book. No theatrical hair or makeup, so the clothes did all the talking. And when Piccioli closed the show by walking his entire atelier out for the bow, as he did throughout his years at Valentino, he shared the ovation with his team, not just the name on the door. Not every import is a compromise. These are the traditions I love, the ones that fit into any house.

Dior: the honeymoon, tested

Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore couture collection at Dior is the one everyone had been waiting on. I called him the counterpoint in Part 3, the one name in the current rotation who did it the right way: eleven years building real expertise at Loewe before ever touching Dior, arriving with his own handwriting already earned, not borrowed. The instinct behind this collection traces to sculptor Lynda Benglis, and she is not new to Anderson, he has used her for years, jewelry, campaigns, sculpture, across his entire Loewe tenure. Her fans, knots, and sunray sprays of metallic pleating ran through the wider collection, her fingerprints, not the house’s. But working with a single outside artist is not new at Dior. Marc Bohan referenced Jackson Pollock. Galliano built an entire show around painters. Simons had Sterling Ruby. Chiuri had Judy Chicago and Faith Ringgold. Anderson continuing that tradition isn’t surprising. What’s different is that his predecessors each picked an artist new to their own era at the house. Anderson picked one already central to his.

Anderson’s effort to intertwine Benglis’s inspiration with Dior’s own heritage is evident, particularly in the reworked Bar jacket, the fitted, sculpted piece from Christian Dior’s original 1947 New Look that put the house on the map. He remade it in several incarnations, such as the fern-green tweed with a frayed fringe and the gray houndstooth folded into a giant bow. The pleating that ran throughout the collection traces straight back to the original Bar Suit’s own famously voluminous pleated skirt, and the bows go back to the New Look’s own finishing.

Since John Galliano left in 2011 after fifteen years, Dior has had three more creative directors, with gaps of a year or more in between while the house searched for replacements: Raf Simons for three years, Maria Grazia Chiuri for nine, and now Anderson, eight months in. Tim Blanks and Imran Amed made the generous case on Business of Fashion’s podcast: this is a multi-year laboratory, and Loewe took years to become Loewe. Judging this house on one sophomore outing isn’t fair. I agree. It’s a shame this is just how the industry operates now. It’s a clear example of luxury forgetting itself.

Chanel: the fairy tale as the most literal answer yet

Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel is built around one question: was Gabrielle Chanel’s own life a fairy tale? She was an orphan who built one of the most powerful names in fashion. He built the whole collection around that idea, starting with something he found browsing her own library: a book of fairy tales collected by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

Chanel has only had two long stewards in over a century, not the musical chairs some of the other houses have been playing lately. Coco Chanel ran it, on and off, for 61 years, from 1910 until her death in 1971. Karl Lagerfeld then ran it for 36, while simultaneously running Fendi for 54 and his own label on top of that, a level of output nobody in fashion history has matched before or since. 97 years between the two of them. Virginie Viard held the chair for five years between Lagerfeld and Blazy, barely a blip against those tenures. Whatever Blazy builds from here, he is building on top of both Coco and Karl.

Blazy’s execution is extremely literal. One jacket runs the whole tale of Jack and the Beanstalk down its front in buttons: a bean, then a pod, then a climbing vine, then a tiny figure scaling it, then a castle, then a golden goose. Jacket linings are painted with scenes from Puss in Boots and Goldilocks, visible only if you turn the coat inside out.

This was one of my favorites too, and it read like exactly what it was: a fairy tale, and a fitting one, since landing this chair is its own fairy tale too. Heritage was everywhere, reinterpreted tweed, herringbone, houndstooth, gold buttons, gold chains, incredible attention to every neck detail. What wasn’t heritage was the trick itself, treating the whole collection like a hidden treasure hunt, which Blazy ran first at Bottega Veneta. The Ugly Duckling dress, embroidered with baby swans and one black swan flying across the chest, was magnificent, even if I am not sure how Chanel it actually was. It was the collection’s whole theme distilled into one garment, Coco’s own transformation rendered directly in embroidery. The scarecrow jacket was a little much, but it was part of the theater, and Blazy made the theater work because every piece of it traced back to a real idea, not spectacle for its own sake. The room gave Blazy an immediate standing ovation. I believed every second of it.

Blazy closed the show on a note worth naming directly. Chanel couture always ends on the bride. He sent the bride down the runway, then followed her with one more look: a black off-the-shoulder dress. “To close with that ‘revenge dress’ was the perfect summary of Chanel’s fairy tale,” he said backstage. “She never got married.” Gabrielle Chanel spent her life rewriting what a woman was allowed to want for herself. Blazy did not give her fashion’s idea of a happy ending. He gave her the one she actually chose.

Armani Privé: the cleanest proof point

Silvana Armani’s sophomore Armani Privé is not reinterpreting anything, and there is a reason for that. Giorgio Armani was known as fashion’s master tailor, and Silvana is his niece, 45 years working right beside him. So when she steps into his tailoring codes, precise cuts, high-waisted trousers, restraint over spectacle, she is not reviving them. They were hers, she inherited them. Never anyone else’s. She also cut the show down to 57 looks, against her uncle’s customary 100-plus. Business of Fashion’s mildest critique of that week, “well-edited and to the point,” is itself a tell.

I watched it with my screen brightness turned all the way up, and that turned out to be the actual point of the collection. The palette read as near-black, but underneath it was hiding deep greens, reds, and blues, only visible under real light. Deliberate, not my monitor’s fault.

This felt old-school in the best sense, a no-frills salon setting closer to the actual spirit of early couture than anything else I watched that week. Glamorous, timeless, stunning, classy. No jewelry needed, the clothes were the jewels. Earrings and rings, and that was it, chests and arms left bare so the tailoring did all the talking. Even the bomber jacket, reinterpreted here, read as a real garment rather than a runway idea.

And the trousers said something the embellishment never could: this is real clothing a real woman would actually wear, not a costume built for a photograph.

Fendi: the one that came home

Maria Grazia Chiuri’s couture debut for Fendi did not happen in Paris. It happened in Rome, where it belonged. Fendi has been a Roman family from the start, founded there in 1925 by Adele Casagrande and Edoardo Fendi as a leather and fur workshop, and the family never left the city. Silvia Venturini Fendi still calls it romanità. Chiuri staged her debut at the same museum that hosted a 1985 exhibition on Karl Lagerfeld’s Fendi furs, and recreated that same exhibition alongside her own show, walking models right past it.

Lagerfeld is worth pausing on here too, because he is the reason “heritage” means something specific at this house. He ran Fendi for 54 years, while running Chanel for 36, at the same time. Nobody gets that kind of tenure anymore.

Chiuri’s own timeline tells the rest of the story. She started at Fendi in 1989 as an apprentice, ten years there, then Valentino in 1999, seventeen years there, then Dior in 2016, nine years there. She is back at Fendi now as chief creative officer, the first person in this house’s last decade to actually leave and come back. In between, Silvia Venturini Fendi filled in twice, and Kim Jones held the job for four years, the same Kim Jones sitting in the unplaced column above.

There was nothing to import here, because there was nowhere else for her handwriting to come from. She built almost entirely out of Fendi’s own material vocabulary: fur, upcycled through the house’s Echo of Love program, and a restrained black-and-parchment palette, the parchment a direct callback to the house’s actual founding trade, leather goods and luggage.

Business of Fashion called it immaculate but curiously subdued. I would call it beautiful rather than a flaw. Sophisticated in a way that never needed to raise its voice. The glamour was sitting inside the material and the craftsmanship, not the spectacle. A palette this restrained only works if the construction underneath it is flawless. Here, it was.

The scorecard

Heritage showed up in some form in every single house. This game of musical chairs has been eroding what made these houses worth inheriting in the first place, and the numbers have shown it. Every group behind these five houses, LVMH, Kering, Chanel, and Armani, posted declines in 2024. That is not background noise. It is the reason the chairs moved in the first place, boards do not swap out creative directors when the numbers are good, and it is also a symptom of how often they have been moving them regardless, average tenure under three years, nowhere near enough time for anyone to actually prove anything. Which is exactly why time matters so much right now. Each of these five needs room to actually synthesize a house’s heritage with their own point of view, not just deliver a quick fix for a bad quarter. The real question now is whether this last round of appointments actually sticks, and whether these designers are genuinely committed to the heritage, their own twist layered on top of it rather than instead of it. From what I watched this past week, they all seem headed in the right direction. I just hope the boards let them stay long enough to prove it.

Three of the five leaned heavily on something imported: Piccioli’s Valentino instincts, Blazy’s Bottega trick, Anderson’s years-long Benglis fixation. But even those three carried real, native heritage alongside the import: Balenciaga’s own fabric and silhouette history, Chanel’s own tailoring and lace, Dior’s own pleats and bows. Two designers did not need to import anything at all. Silvana Armani never left, so there was nowhere else for her tailoring to come from. Chiuri left, and came back, and built from Fendi’s own vocabulary instead of the one she spent nine years building at Dior.

Enough analysis. Envelope, please.

A postscript on the one house that made its own calendar

Valentino was not in Paris last week. The house moved its couture calendar to January, so it is not one of the five above, but it is the closest thing I have to proof for everything I just argued.

Alessandro Michele’s actual debut, “Vertigineux,” January 2025, read as pure Michele: maximalist, borrowed from everywhere except Valentino’s own history. One review called it a “risky tendency to draw inspiration from cultures that do not belong to him.” Gucci’s aesthetic, wearing Valentino’s name. Revenue fell 15 percent that year, to €1.12 billion. The company swung from a €31 million profit to a €103 million loss.

Then came January 2026’s “Specula Mundi,” days after Valentino Garavani’s death, read by critics as a eulogy that happened to be a fashion show, close enough to Garavani’s own work that several outlets called it planned that way. He ignored the house’s own heritage in 2025, and the numbers dropped. That’s proof enough that heritage matters. Whether embracing it now is enough to bring the business back is a different question, and nobody knows the answer yet. Michele has always been one of my favorite designers, so fingers crossed.

Couture week did not change my mind about time being the scarce resource, not talent. It gave me five more ways to prove it, and Valentino gave me the receipts. And through all of it, wonder, the thing Robert Wun said couture could still deliver, showed up in all five houses, imported handwriting or not. That part, at least, nobody had to borrow.

Enjoy,

Michelle

I spent twenty-five years running businesses that measured success in the hundreds of millions. At Calvin Klein, I grew the business I led by nearly seventy percent. At DKNY, I ran a business at nine-figure scale. None of that was mine alone, and I want to be honest about that from the start. I had teams. Account executives, merchandisers, designers, marketers, planners, the best in the business, you know who you are. We became family. Together, we were unstoppable.

I never had to fight for capital. I brought a CFO my strategy and my numbers, and I over-delivered on the ask every time. I had an assistant who turned a scribbled outline into a boardroom deck by morning. Legal was one call away. A warehouse ran itself, and I never had to ask how. My success was never a solo act. It was a symphony, and conducting it was the truest expression of who I am.

You don’t think of oxygen as infrastructure. You just breathe.

It wasn’t free, even then. I spent that entire career watching companies tip, always in one of two directions. I watched one company I loved start with the balance exactly right, creativity and process in real conversation with each other, and then tip toward fear, not by accident, but by design, more approvals, more precedent, until caution had quietly become the whole strategy. I watched another company lean so far the opposite way, so committed to the bold and the unexpected that the guardrails never caught up, brilliant for a season, reckless for a decade.

Neither extreme is the villain. Losing sight of the balance is. I promised myself that if I ever ran the show, I’d keep creativity and process in a fistfight, forever, on purpose, never let one quietly overtake the other. What I pictured was doing that from inside a company someone else had already built. I never once imagined building one from nothing. The joke, as it turns out, was entirely on me.

What I loved, underneath all of it, was the people. And yes, the scale too, I won’t pretend otherwise. Leading them. Developing them. Building a strategy together and watching an entire team turn it into motion, fast, because we had a machine built to execute the moment something mattered.

Then I jumped off the cliff and became a co-founder.

The machine disappeared.

My co-founder is Erick Mathelier. No team behind him, no team behind me, no warehouse, no capital, nothing but a story we both believed and a market we could both see before anyone else could. He has a motto tattooed on his arm, “dream big and let it fly.” Some days, that tattoo does more managing than either of us.

The early days felt like freedom. No meetings I didn’t call myself, no one to answer to but the two of us and the work. Intoxicating enough that I didn’t clock what was missing. Then I sat down to build a plan, reached for Caroline, my planner, the person who used to sit inside every model with me and fight me toward a better number. She wasn’t there. Not because anything happened to her. Because I no longer had a company that could pay her.

So I called her anyway. Asking was its own kind of test. You find out fast whether the relationships you built were real once you have nothing left to offer in return. Caroline said yes before I finished the sentence. That is what strong relationships are actually for, the moment you need them, not the moment you can repay them.

Losing the team cost more than help. It cost speed. I decide and move, same day if I can manage it. That instinct doesn’t retire when the infrastructure does. It just no longer has a team underneath it to carry the decision out fast. An afternoon decision can now take a week, not because Erick and I got slower, but because the two of us are simultaneously the strategist, the executor, and the person answering the phone. Ninety people chase growth on one clock. Two people chase it on a completely different one, and some days, as Erick will tell you, I still forget which clock I’m on.

Shipping. Marketing. Business development. Legal. None of the work vanished, only the people who used to do it. So it became me and Erick, polybagging t-shirts on the living room floor. Loading our own boxes for shipping. Building a pop-up by hand at midnight because there was no install crew coming, and no one arriving in the morning to fix what we botched overnight. We have run entire tradeshow booths with a staff of exactly two. Nobody warns you about this part of the founder title: you don’t just decide what gets built. You become the labor. Skip that part and you don’t have a company. You have an idea with a business card.

What surprised me wasn’t any one loss. It was the math. For my entire career, my value was making a team add up to more than its parts. Now there was no team, just me and Erick playing every part ourselves, like directing a movie where the directors are also the only two actors.

Alone, in a way I had never been, even sitting a few feet from my own business partner. I’d catch myself doing, at eleven at night, a task I used to hand off without a thought and feel something close to grief. Not for the job. For the version of me who never had to wonder if she was enough on her own, because she never had to be.

I found pieces of infrastructure again in a few places. Chief, when it launched, built exactly around the peer group I was missing. Mostly, though, I got lucky, and her name is Wendy. My first counterpart at Calvin Klein, now building her own company on her own version of this same cliff. She is my second brain, the person I call before a thought has even finished forming. When we needed hands in Las Vegas for a tradeshow, she got on a plane without being asked twice. When her shows land in New York, I’m there. Neither of us keeps score, because all we want is for both of us to win.

Patience gets tested in more places than anyone warns you about. Covid was the obvious one. It wasn’t the only one. The quieter tests follow a pattern: you chase something certain it’s the one, you do everything right, and it falls apart for reasons that have nothing to do with your performance. Only later do you realize you weren’t losing. You were being redirected.

We spent months chasing a sponsorship deal with a professional tennis player. We got close enough to shake hands at an event, close enough that her management promised a real meeting. Then the manager vanished. She signed elsewhere instead, a deal that backfired publicly not long after. What felt like a loss was a bullet, dodged in slow motion.

Nordstrom taught a sharper version of the same lesson. Good meeting. Real advice. What we learned is that we weren’t ready, our assortment was too thin for what a department store needs, and I know exactly what that risk looks like when it goes wrong, because I once had ninety people whose whole job was managing it. Walking out empty-handed felt like failing. In hindsight, it was the meeting doing its job perfectly.

There’s a second kind of patience too, and it has nothing to do with deals falling through. It’s the patience required for the people around you who have never built anything themselves, and who will always assume you should be further along than you are, sometimes dressing that assumption up as concern. It rarely is. No one can see in your wallet. Let them wonder. What you and your partner actually know you’ve built is the only ledger that counts, and nobody outside the room gets a vote in it.

This whole ride has been, quite literally, a rollercoaster. On the down days: I read, I research, I pray, I question whatever specific thing has me stuck, and I let it go if the answer no longer holds. I call customers directly. I take a walk. And I have Erick, who pulls me out of a low exactly when I need it, the same way I do for him.

On the up days, the rollercoaster earns its name too. The Tennis Nerd named us Honorable Mention for Best New Racket of 2022, next to Yonex, a brand with a hundred-year head start on us. The Financial Times put Erick and me on a red couch with our rackets and ran a feature on the business of tennis. Blakely Thornton told New York Magazine our racket was something he couldn’t live without, and no marketing budget on earth buys that sentence, only a product good enough to earn it unasked. None of it arrived on a schedule we picked. It arrived on its own, once the work underneath it was finally strong enough to hold the weight.

If you’re standing where I stood, ask yourself honestly: would you rather be back behind a desk, with someone else’s infrastructure holding you up? If yes, that’s not a failure of nerve. That’s information, and it’s worth taking seriously, because the founder’s version of that desk has no walls. Every day is a workday. Vacation is a myth. The rollercoaster never fully stops, and nobody hands you a harness on the way in.

Here’s what nobody told me, and what I wish someone had: the infrastructure you’ll mourn was never actually yours. It was borrowed, other people’s hands, other people’s budgets, other people’s hours. You can conduct that orchestra beautifully for a quarter century and still not own a single instrument in it. The day it’s gone, you find out fast exactly which parts of you were real, and which parts were payroll.

I already knew I could lead, develop people, ideate, strategize, execute. Twenty-five years had already proven that. What I did not know, what no résumé could have told me, is whether I had what it takes to do all of it with nothing underneath me. I didn’t leap because I was confident I could. I leaped on faith, blind faith, the kind Steve Harvey talks about, and found out only afterward, one impossible week at a time, that the faith had been right about me all along. That’s not a discovery you get to make in a boardroom. You only get it on the floor, polybagging shirts at midnight and finding out you’re still standing at sunrise.

So if you’re thinking about making this jump: don’t leave to escape a bad boss or a rough quarter. Leave once you know, specifically, what’s still true about you when no one is applauding, funding, or organizing any of it for you. That answer is the only severance package worth having, and no negotiation gets you a better one.

And here is the part I want to be honest about, because this isn’t a story about choosing to stay small. We are finally starting to build real infrastructure, deliberately this time, and I am counting the days. Not because the two of us running everything wasn’t real, or wasn’t proof, but because a strategy this good deserves a team that can execute it at the speed it was built for. Erick’s tattoo says “dream big and let it fly.” Letting go of doing it all alone isn’t a retreat from that. It’s the only way the dream actually gets to fly as far as we always meant it to.

And the most important part is this: I wouldn’t change a thing.

Enjoy, Michelle.

“La culture de la différence est la colonne vertébrale de la mode.”
“The culture of difference is the backbone of fashion.”
— Armand Hadida, L’Éclaireur

Shopping as a Pilgrimage continues. Last week, the history. Bloomingdale’s in 1976, the Saturday crowds, Traub’s theater, the people who built it. This week, the argument. What that history actually proves, and why it matters more now than it has in decades.

What Happened to Saturday

Open every hour of every day. Nothing scarce. Nothing urgent. The one-day sale became a five-day sale. Then a week. Then a month. No FOMO. No reason to show up today instead of whenever.

That’s why Saturday isn’t an event anymore. There’s no day that holds anything, because every day holds the same thing. Bloomingdale’s made Saturday the only day available to host the whole week’s urgency. Retail today made every day equally unnecessary, and e-commerce finished the job. Convenience is permanently solved elsewhere now. The store’s only remaining job is the thing convenience can’t do: give someone an actual reason to walk in, on purpose, because something is happening inside that isn’t happening anywhere else, online or off. Stores have a safety net they didn’t have in 1976. E-commerce will always be there. Most stores started treating risk like the threat instead of the strategy. The ones still worth visiting never did.

The instinct didn’t vanish everywhere. Some of it resurfaced somewhere nobody at Bloomingdale’s would have predicted. Supreme’s Thursday drop wasn’t dreamed up in a marketing meeting. James Jebbia built the ritual around a schedule that already existed in his customers’ lives: Thursday was payday for the skaters who first walked into his store, the day an allowance landed and got spent before the weekend. He read his customer’s actual calendar the same way Traub read New York’s, then built scarcity around the day that already mattered. Limited quantities, gone within minutes, a line for whatever’s left. That’s what paying attention to an actual customer, instead of a forecast, looks like. It’s also exactly what’s missing almost everywhere else.

Selling Certainty, Revisited

Point of view isn’t deciding what you’re not. It’s deciding what you stand for, and telling that story like you’re the only expert in the room. Bloomingdale’s decided. The theater proved it. The team behind every counter lived it. The customer stopped deciding for themselves and just showed up. Not to buy something specific. To not miss it. To not be missed.

That’s a pilgrimage. In 1976, Bloomingdale’s was one.

Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: the risk is what made the numbers work, not the other way around. Traub put his flagship’s productivity at $350 a foot, in 1976 dollars, and we showed last week that no department store in America comes close to that today, even adjusted for inflation. He hit that number because he let D’Arcy build a cave out of foam, let a fashion office bet entirely on a designer nobody had heard of, closed the store at night to manufacture a feeling instead of a sale. Every one of those decisions was a risk. None of them showed up on a quarterly forecast as a safe bet. They worked anyway, and they worked precisely because nobody was managing them down to zero risk first.

Today’s retail is run by people who are excellent at protecting the downside and terrified of the upside. I understand the instinct. I’m a numbers person myself; numbers are not the enemy here. But the numbers Bloomingdale’s actually produced came from people willing to be wrong in public. Every one of those decisions was made by someone trained to trust their own eye before they trusted a forecast. An industry that stops producing those people has eliminated the only thing that ever delivered numbers worth bragging about.

The Training Ground

That kind of nerve had to be built somewhere. Department stores used to run real talent through real apprenticeships, sales floor to buying and merchandising, long before anyone got serious authority, and Bloomingdale’s also recruited the best of what that system produced elsewhere. Murphy went from executive assistant to vice president in five years, an unheard-of pace at the time. Ruttenstein came up through Princeton and a Columbia MBA, made his name as a VP at Saks, then ran Bonwit Teller as its president before Traub brought him to Bloomingdale’s. Mackay started in sales at Lord & Taylor, then crossed to Bonwit Teller herself, first as an assistant buyer, eventually a buyer, before Bloomingdale’s gave her a way into fashion coordination.

Whatever the specific route, retail in 1976 still had a working pipeline built to produce that kind of eye. Most retailers dismantled it decades ago. Enrollment at fashion’s own training grounds, FIT among them, has been declining for years, and internal recruiting teams were gutted during the pandemic and mostly never rebuilt. The Robin Report has documented the result and didn’t hedge about the cause. “We call that nonsense,” they wrote, of the idea that retail’s CEO shortage is just a talent shortage. “It’s better described as a self-inflicted wound.” Companies stopped running people through the kind of 360-degree training that used to be standard, real time on the floor and inside buying and merchandising, long before anyone needed to be ready for the top job. So, when that job opens, there’s often no one inside the building actually prepared for it.

I said this in an earlier piece, and I’ll say it again here: very few real merchants are left in most of retail, not just at the top, at almost every level below it. Traub was a merchant first. So were the people who built the magic with him. A CEO shortage is the symptom everyone talks about. The disappearance of the merchant’s eye is the real problem underneath it. That’s part of why concession spread as fast as it did. By the time it arrived, there was rarely anyone left inside the building with the authority, or the eye, to insist on something different.

None of this happened by accident. What worked is when the store and the brands were doing something together, deciding who a specific customer was and building an entire floor, an entire season, around her. That required risk on both ends. The store had to bet on a point of view instead of stocking everything. The brand had to trust the store to tell its story instead of controlling every inch of how it was told. Retail stopped doing the first part. Most department stores now run on concession, the brand owns the inventory, the store collects a commission, and nobody is betting on anything. Brands stopped doing the second part too, increasingly building their own stores instead of trusting anyone else to tell their story right. Sameness is the actual cost. A store with no point of view isn’t really a store. It’s a mall.

All Is Not Lost

Dover Street Market still closes and rebuilds itself twice a year, every single thing on every floor, gone and replaced. Kawakubo never stopped taking that risk, and it never stopped working.

What Dover Street Market shares with the two stores that follow isn’t luxury, and it isn’t taste. It’s discovery. Nobody stumbles into any of these places by accident. You hear about them from someone who already knows, the same way Bloomingdale’s regulars in 1976 already knew Saturday was the day to show up. None of these stores advertise their way to you. Somebody who trusts their eye hands you the address.

In 2006, on a trip to Paris, my friend Mireille, then head of design for Calvin Klein’s women’s underwear, handed me a set of hand-drawn shopping maps, one for each arrondissement worth shopping. I took one a day. That’s how I found L’Éclaireur, the location near Place des Victoires, just around the corner from my favorite Kenzo store, back when I was still loyal to Kenzo. There was no sign. The doors opened like a drawbridge, slow and deliberate. Someone behind them decided whether you belonged before you ever got inside.

Four years after that 60 Minutes segment aired, Armand and Martine Hadida opened a tiny gallery space on the Champs-Élysées and called it L’Éclaireur. Neither came up through any formal fashion track. Armand grew up in Settat, Morocco, and didn’t reach Paris until he was twenty, arriving with no degree and no savings after two years living on a kibbutz in Israel. He scraped by painting houses until a friend got him a temporary fill-in shift at a boutique during a frantic sale period. He had zero retail background and, in his own telling, a personality too shy for the job. He took it anyway. Within three years he was buying for the store. Martine had her own start nearby, a teenager working at a Champs-Élysées shop on Saturdays for spending money, back in 1972. Armand happened to be running a different boutique further down the same avenue. That overlap is how they met, two people learning retail from the ground up before either one had any idea what they’d eventually build together.

Bloomingdale’s had room for instinct like this, right alongside formal training. D’Arcy’s gift was, in Traub’s words, “not school-taught, but city-bred,” the same raw material that built L’Éclaireur. It is widely credited with inventing the concept store before anyone had a name for it. They were the first to stock Comme des Garçons, Dries van Noten, and Alexander McQueen, designers nobody else would touch. The store expanded across Paris over the decades that followed, and in 2016 the Hadidas’ daughter, Meryl, opened an outpost in West Hollywood, the only L’Éclaireur outside France. On their own site, the Hadidas describe their mission as committing to innovation and disrupting norms, on purpose, again and again. Hadida states the philosophy outright: “La culture de la différence est la colonne vertébrale de la mode.” The culture of difference is the backbone of fashion. It’s the same conviction Traub built his career on, just inverted. Traub wanted sixty thousand people walking through his doors on a Saturday, drawn by noise, by theater, by a crowd that fed on itself. The Hadidas wanted to be sought out instead, found rather than advertised to. Forty-six years later, Hadida still describes the store’s theater the way Traub might have described his own. “We close off the store, we lock the doors, we turn off the lights, and voilà,” he told WWD. He’s just as direct about what L’Éclaireur refuses: No window. No sale. No apology. That is not an oversight. That is the entire business model.

The same instinct built a very different kind of store in Miami. Laure Hériard Dubreuil came up the opposite way from the Hadidas, formal training from the start. Her family has made Rémy Martin cognac for generations, and she split her childhood between Paris and Cognac. At university she studied economics alongside Mandarin, then spent time in Shanghai to actually use it. She crossed to New York next for a merchandising degree at FIT, then went to work under Nicolas Ghesquière in the Balenciaga studio, followed by a stint as Stefano Pilati’s head merchandiser at Yves Saint Laurent.

She opened The Webster in Miami in 2009, the same year luxury sales fell roughly ten percent in the U.S. and excess inventory from bigger houses was getting dumped onto flash-sale sites for a fraction of retail. Launching a new luxury concept into a market that was actively liquidating was its own kind of bet. She wasn’t following convention. She was building a place where designer storytelling could be preserved and presented with intention, organized by mood instead of by brand, mixing storied houses with names nobody outside the industry had heard of yet. “Nobody’s asking me that they want their brand to be separate from the other ones,” she has said. “They actually love the way that I merchandise, because it gives a different point of view.”

Seventeen years later, The Webster has thirteen stores, and brands talk about it as a launching pad, not a landing spot. Designer LaQuan Smith calls it the first specialty store that picked him up, in the middle of the pandemic, when no one else would. Orlebar Brown’s CMO compares the curation to a sommelier, depth, discernment, and a sense of fun most department stores lost years ago. The business grew twenty-five percent in 2023 alone. The bet The Webster made in a recession, that point of view beats square footage, is the same bet Traub made every time he gave up prime selling floor for something like Casa Bella, an entire promotion built around Italian home furnishings, model rooms so striking they landed in Look magazine, floor space that could have just held more product instead. Both chose the story over the square footage, and both bet correctly.

I was introduced to The Webster right before the pandemic, while looking for partners for our streetwear line, TFP. A friend, Alex, suggested it. We spoke with the buyer, and there was real interest, before the pandemic shut the conversation down before it could go anywhere. I’m a native New Yorker and an avid luxury shopper, and I’d somehow never walked through the door. To this day I don’t know how. The SoHo building itself is a restored 1878 cast-iron structure, narrow enough across six floors that it never stops feeling like a home, which is exactly what Hériard Dubreuil intended. “It really feels like a home,” she’s said of it herself. You’re greeted the moment you walk in, the way you’d greet someone arriving at your home, then guided floor by floor. I flipped over the merchandising. This was point of view made real, curated by the store, not dictated by the brand.

When I walked through the Soho store, what stopped me wasn’t any single brand. It was watching Hériard Dubreuil and her team curate a story no designer had handed them, deciding what belonged next to what, the same instinct that once had Kal Ruttenstein stopping a stranger on the street to tell her he loved her outfit, then building an entire merchandising idea around what he’d just seen. That’s the job. Not stocking inventory. Deciding what it means.

The Verdict

Loro Piana’s new direction under Frédéric Arnault isn’t a vote of confidence in most retailers. It’s a vote against them. Pulling inventory, display, and story back in-house is what a brand does when it’s decided the store selling it can’t be counted on to tell its story right anymore. The risk in that logic is the same risk concession created in the first place. If every brand starts protecting its own story by controlling its own four walls, the few retailers still allowed to carry it can end up looking the same too. The brand's vision gets repeated identically at every door, with none of the local curation that made The Webster, L'Éclaireur, Dover Street Market, or Bloomingdale's in 1976 worth a special trip. Loro Piana still sells through what it calls “a selection of exclusive multi-brand retailers,” proof the company isn’t abandoning curation entirely, just deciding very few retailers have earned the right to provide it.

Bloomingdale’s in 1976, L’Éclaireur since 1980, Dover Street Market since 2004, and The Webster since 2009 are separated by decades and continents, and they are making the identical argument. A store with no point of view is just a warehouse with better lighting. Curation, discovery, the willingness to be wrong first, that’s what all four are actually selling. Everything else, the foot traffic, the SKUs, the algorithm, is downstream of it.

None of this is nostalgia for 1976. It’s a description of what’s still possible, proven right now by people willing to bet on a point of view instead of managing one down to nothing. The instinct that built Bloomingdale’s never disappeared. It just stopped being welcome in most boardrooms.

Tag the retailers and brands you think are getting it right. They’ve earned it, loudly, so the rest of the industry either tries harder or gets out of the way.

Enjoy,

Michelle

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Shopping as a Pilgrimage continues. Last time, Dover Street Market. This time, Bloomingdale’s in 1976, the year it may have been the most important store in America. The history comes first. What it means for retail right now comes next week.

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The Princess of White Plains

I was nine years old, in the fall of 1976, when my father became the general manager of the Bloomingdale’s in White Plains, New York. We were moving from Northern New Jersey to Armonk, and my mother wanted me starting fourth grade on day one, at the beginning of the school year, in the new district. The house wasn’t ready in time. So for those first weeks, I commuted into New York with my father instead.

In the mornings he’d drop me at school, and in the afternoons, he or someone from his team would come get me, and I would spend the rest of the day exactly where I wanted to be: inside Bloomingdale’s. I had a snack at the restaurant, the one that’s still there today. I walked the floors. The managers gave me little jobs to do, the kind that make a nine-year-old feel essential rather than babysat. And somewhere in those afternoons, I picked out my entire new school wardrobe, including two striped ombré turtlenecks I can still see clearly. One in greens. One in blues.

I was, without question, the best dressed fourth grader in Armonk.

What I didn’t understand at nine was that I wasn’t just a kid getting lucky treatment from her father’s staff. I was getting the full Bloomingdale’s experience, the one built for grown women on Saturdays, for tourists, for Queen Elizabeth herself. A store that knew exactly how to make you feel like the only person in the room who mattered, whether you were buying a designer suit or being handed a small task to feel important while you waited for your father to finish his day. That wasn’t an accident, and it wasn’t really about merchandise. It was a point of view, applied to every single person who walked through the doors, including a nine-year-old in turtlenecks who had no idea she was witnessing the whole philosophy in miniature.

The store was also only open certain hours back then. Late on Thursday nights. Closed entirely on Sundays. There was a rhythm to it, an urgency almost, because you couldn’t just go whenever you felt like it.

The Man Who Built the Moment

Marvin Traub joined Bloomingdale’s in 1950 and set himself a timeline before he’d even started: divisional manager in five years, vice president in ten, president in twenty, chairman in twenty-five. He hit the milestones that mattered most, right on schedule. He took over merchandising and sales promotions in 1962. President came in 1969, exactly twenty years in. Chairman came in 1978, right on plan.

From the moment he controlled merchandising, he ran the store less like a retailer and more like a cultural institution with a P&L attached.

He was my father’s boss, so I called my dad to get a firsthand account for this piece.

Retail is theater, my dad said. That was what Traub believed before anything else. Traub put it himself this way: “We developed the idea that a store should be entertainment, not just a place to buy a suit and a shirt or a tie.” He brought shows and celebrities into the store, paid attention every year to what was landing in theaters and pulled that entire industry’s energy onto the selling floor. When CBS came to film a segment called “Bloomie’s” for 60 Minutes, Traub didn’t take the interview in his office. He took it inside a pop-up built around A Chorus Line, the Broadway musical that had opened the year before to ten Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize.

He also had a talent for finding people, according to my dad. He developed the role of fashion coordinator, what would later be called a fashion director, and built out teams of five or six in every division. Names my dad felt important to mention: Barbara D’Arcy. Katie Murphy. Kal Ruttenstein. Bonnie Mackay. These weren’t back-office roles. They became central to how the entire store decided what fashion even was, season after season. The same instinct extended to buyers and divisional merchandisers, an eye for who could actually build a business, not just stock a department.

Underneath the talent for people was a talent for attention. Traub understood PR as a business tool, not an afterthought. In 1960, he’d built an entire promotion called Casa Bella around Italian home furnishings, with model rooms so striking they landed a story in Look magazine. By the late 60s, he was running country promotions built around India, Thailand, and the Philippines. He paused the format for most of the 70s, then brought it back even bigger in 1978, starting with India again, a promotion so popular it was extended two weeks so India’s prime minister could attend.

And he never stopped working a room. He went to Europe twice a year to see the collections firsthand. If you looked at his actual calendar, he was out every night, dinners, events, the New York scene and the European scene both, because he knew everybody and made sure he stayed that way. At the end of each European trip, he’d gather everyone, VPs, GMMs, buyers, divisionals, fashion directors, and they’d leave already knowing what the next season was going to be.

That kind of connection is exactly how Traub pulled off his biggest coup. In July 1976, he convinced Queen Elizabeth II to choose Bloomingdale’s over Macy’s, Saks, Tiffany, and Bergdorf’s. It was her only stop at an American department store. The visit took her past the store’s signature model rooms, into the china department where staff had a Sioux peace pipe waiting for her, and finally to a display built specifically for the occasion, showcasing American design talent through pieces from Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, and Louis Dell’Olio.

There’s a photograph of Traub standing beside her, the look of a director who never missed a rehearsal, and never missed a curtain call.

Saturday’s Generation

CBS decided the story was worth fifteen minutes of national television. Even Safer wasn’t immune. According to Blair Sabol, the Village Voice columnist who guided him through the store, he smoked through the entire shoot, fifty cigarette butts on the floor after forty-five minutes of filming, by her count, the posture of a man who didn’t want to be there. By the end, he’d enjoyed the tour anyway. If Bloomingdale’s could win over a journalist fresh off a war assignment who’d already decided the story was beneath him, the theater wasn’t just working on the willing. It was working on everyone. What he found, and what he filmed, was sixty thousand people walking through Bloomingdale’s on an ordinary Saturday.

There was no Sunday to spread that crowd across. New York’s blue laws still banned non-liquor retail sales on Sundays in 1976. So if you wanted to be part of whatever Bloomingdale’s was that week, Saturday was the only day it was available to you, and Bloomingdale’s leaned into that scarcity rather than fighting it. They built an entire department around the phenomenon and called it Saturday’s Generation.

Regulars called the store Bloomie’s. Shoppers called it, according to CBS’s own framing decades later, their “private adult Disneyland.” Sabol walked Safer through the parts of the store where people went, she said, if they were “into cruising.” Three spots got named specifically: men’s, for reasons nobody had to explain, the active sports floor, where the free ski trips did the talking, and the cheese counter, where a customer walking out with twelve pounds of specialty cheeses was hosting something, and the whole point was being invited. One shopper, on camera, ranked Bloomingdale’s, on a Saturday, above every singles bar she’d ever tried on the Upper East Side. Sabol described the typical couple this way: “chrome-and-glass furniture, brie in the fridge, a Famous Amos t-shirt, and the right patch jeans.”

S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y. The Bay City Rollers spelled it out on Wonderama, between snake cans and a Twinkie giveaway, and the song hit number one. Saturday Night Live launched that same year. Saturday Night Fever came two years later. Bloomingdale’s had Saturday’s Generation running the whole time. One night, one day, three different cultural products built entirely around it.

Saturday was the only day off the clock to shop, except Thursday night, usually until eight. Sunday wasn’t an option at all. People planned around it, because there was nothing else to plan around.

Today nobody’s schedule matches anybody else’s. No single day carries that weight anymore. Saturday isn’t special. Neither is anything else.

By the time CBS aired the segment, Bloomingdale’s had already spent years training New York to treat a single day as an event worth dressing for. A year later, Studio 54 would open a few blocks away and prove the city wanted to take that instinct even further, this time after dark, behind a velvet rope. Bloomingdale’s got there first, in daylight, with no door policy at all. Anyone could walk in. The trick wasn’t exclusivity. It was making sixty thousand people feel like they’d been let in on something anyway.

Andy Warhol kept a diary, and entries from that same year have him getting up early specifically to get to Bloomingdale’s. Saturday or not, he belonged to exactly the world the segment was describing, the same year the cameras showed up, the same crowd’s most famous figure was already a regular. A year later, Studio 54 opened, and Warhol became its most photographed fixture. Bloomingdale’s got him during the day. The clubs got him at night.

Selling Certainty

Marvin Traub’s first appearance in the segment isn’t in an office. It’s inside that same A Chorus Line pop-up. Traub talks numbers like a man who loves them.

A walkway between two escalators. Customer traffic, nothing more, most days.

Traub turned it into an experience. First during the holidays, by setting up a cosmetics outpost right there in the flow of foot traffic.

Four weeks. $50,000 to $60,000. From a walkway.

The industry later gave it a name. A swing space. Floor that wasn’t built to sell, turned into an experience that showed the customer what they couldn’t live without.

Traub put the whole store’s performance in real numbers. “Many stores around the country do about $90 to $125 a foot,” he tells Safer. “We do somewhere in excess of $350 a foot in this downtown, which we are quite sure is the highest productivity of any store in the country.”

Put that next to today. The national retail average is around $325 a foot. A strong department store does $200 to $300. Nordstrom, one of the best performers in the country, does $439. Macy’s does $210. Traub’s flagship hit $350 a foot, in 1976 dollars, across the entire store. Adjust for inflation and there isn’t a department store in America today coming close.

Theater and point of view did that. Not convenience. Not being open every hour of every day. A store that knew exactly what it was selling and made you feel lucky to be standing in the right spot at the right time.

A bed shaped like a sneaker. $450. Blair Sabol said it best: something about Bloomingdale’s makes you believe you should be sleeping in that sneaker.

Safer’s own words explain the philosophy better than I can. “You won’t find a refrigerator or a freezer here,” he says, “but these New Guinea ceremonial masks and shields have always been good sellers. Or a Porsche racing jacket that may never see the inside of a Porsche, but it’s great for hailing taxis, and it’s only $65.”

That’s the whole store in one sentence. Nobody needed a ceremonial mask. Nobody needed a racing jacket for hailing cabs. They needed to feel like they were standing somewhere that knew something they didn’t.

The gourmet department got the same treatment. 146 varieties of bread. 300 varieties of cheese and pâté. Nobody needed that many options. The point wasn’t choice. The point was making an ordinary loaf of bread feel like a decision worth caring about.

When Wally Amos brought Famous Amos cookies to the store, Bloomingdale’s held a press conference. A single cookie got the royal-jewel treatment, displayed on a satin pillow. They didn’t sell a cookie. They sold FOMO, decades before anyone had a word for it.

The store decides what’s special and stages it accordingly. That’s the actual product. Not the sneaker bed, not the cookie. Certainty.

The Talent

Barbara D’Arcy joined Bloomingdale’s in 1952, fresh out of college, as a junior decorator in the fabrics department. Traub later described her taste as “not school-taught, but city-bred.” By 1958, she was running the model rooms, and over the next fifteen years, she redefined what a department store floor was even for.

She didn’t display furniture. She built rooms. A sofa, an ottoman, a rug, lighting, staged together as if someone actually lived there. The New York Times noticed right away. In its first review of her model rooms, the paper wrote: "It is impossible to miss the major point of the rooms. Modern furniture can be luxurious, elegant and romantic. It all depends on the decorator." Her most famous, the 1972 Cave Room, turned an entire living-dining-sleeping space into a single sculpted cavity, no flat walls anywhere, built up from chicken wire and foam until it looked carved rather than constructed. A sunken pit held the seating, piled with cushions in her favorite purple. She credited the whole idea to a building she’d once seen by the French architect Jacques Couëlle.

Another was inspired by a Japanese farmhouse she'd once visited. The walls weren't smooth, she'd mixed straw directly into the plaster, and the effect, in her own words, came out looking "hairy." Whole tree trunks ran across the ceiling as the main beams, with thinner saplings filling in around them.

Another room turned every surface into a screen. Images projected onto the ceiling, down the walls, and across the floor, while people sat on furniture made entirely of inflated plastic.

Another was built entirely out of cardboard, designed by a young, then-unknown architect named Frank Gehry. Gehry's experiment started with leftover cardboard lying around outside his office. He began fooling around with it almost absentmindedly, shaping pieces by hand, until he realized that layering it in alternating directions made it sturdy enough to hold real weight, a car's worth, by some accounts. He called the line Easy Edges. A chair retailed for $37. Today, Vitra’s official reissue of that same chair sells for $1,740. Within months of its debut, Gehry was, to his own discomfort, a famous furniture designer almost overnight, decades before anyone had heard of the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, or the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. D’Arcy put his work in front of Bloomingdale’s customers before the rest of the design world had any idea who he was. Mitchell Gold, who started at Bloomingdale’s in 1974 selling pillows before cofounding the furniture company Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams, said it himself: “Knowing her and watching her work made me reach for the stars.”

Traub knew exactly what she was worth to him. In his own 1993 memoir, he wrote, “If Barbara D’Arcy isn’t a household name, she certainly should be.” Her influence worked the way the best taste-making always does, everywhere at once and credited to no one, shaping what an entire country thought it liked without anyone ever learning her name.

Bloomingdale’s would close the store the night before new rooms debuted and fill it instead with the press, the designers, the entire New York scene Traub spent his evenings cultivating, all of it choreographed so that by the time the public walked in the next morning, word had already spread that something worth seeing was inside. That’s not exclusivity for its own sake. That’s manufacturing discovery, the sense that everyone who mattered already knew, and you were behind if you hadn’t seen it yet.

I know her work firsthand, in a much smaller way. My parents were out to dinner with D’Arcy and her husband. My mother had been hunting for a dining table for months and couldn’t find anything right, she was specific, oval, not round, with two leaves so the table could become three different sizes depending on the night. D’Arcy sent her a photograph not long after, a beautiful Italian table she knew my mother would love. On her next trip to Italy, she had one of her manufacturers build my mother’s version from scratch, for a fraction of what the original would have cost. That table is still in the family today.

Katherine Murphy Grout (known professionally as Katie Murphy) ran the fashion side with the same instinct. She started as a trainee at Macy’s, then worked her way through Lord & Taylor, Bergdorf Goodman, and Bonwit Teller before running her own firm, Sportswear Couture, with a partner named Ellen Brooke. She joined Bloomingdale’s in 1967 as an executive assistant. Five years later, by 1972, she’d made fashion director a vice-president-level position, the first time the industry had treated the role with that kind of weight. Executive assistant to vice president in five years, at a time when almost no woman moved through a major retailer’s ranks that fast. People who worked for her describe her as tall, stately, and impossible to ignore. When she spoke, you listened.

Much of what I know about her comes from my friend Sherri Donghia, who worked in her office and went on to her own serious career in design, fashion director of Gimbels in her twenties, two decades at Donghia Furniture and Textiles. She’s the reason any of this is still findable at all.

Before Murphy, “fashion director” mostly meant windows and ad direction. She made it indispensable, speaking directly to buying decisions and color palettes, the kind of authority that shaped what actually got manufactured, not just how it got displayed. The effect was felt well beyond Bloomingdale’s: once her office carried that much weight, Saks gave its own fashion director real power too and copied the model outright.

Mickey Drexler started his career at Bloomingdale’s under Murphy. When he needed swimwear and sweaters made right, she took him to a manufacturer in the south of France herself, a relationship built through her own network, the kind of connection nobody could just look up. She’d developed the silhouettes and color palettes herself first. Drexler never went to Europe without her. “She adopted me,” he said decades later, still describing it as the lucky break of his life.

She’d come up with the themes, the ideas, the trends, and when nothing in the market matched what she’d envisioned, she sent her team to Seventh Avenue to get it made exactly right. She also guided Ralph Lauren through the hardest transition of his early career, from a menswear label he’d already built into something real, into women’s wear, a category he’d never touched. “It was like having a coach who watches over you when you are a kid,” Lauren said. “She always made me feel special.” She contributed to the success of Sonia Rykiel, Calvin Klein, and Missoni in the American market too, and under her direction, Bloomingdale’s gave Issey Miyake an entire dedicated section devoted to his early “East meets West” pieces, years before most of America had any idea who he was.

She was constantly traveling, constantly teaching her own buyers how to develop product the way she did, and by every account, ignoring her own doctors the entire time. She died on March 14, 1975, of a heart attack, collapsing at the employee entrance on 60th Street while waiting for a car home. She was 58, married to a well-known interior designer, with one son, living in Bronxville. That November, twelve hundred people from the fashion world filled the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria for a memorial in her honor. Issey Miyake flew in from Tokyo. Rosita and Ottavio Missoni came with two of their children. Vidal Escojido, who made T-shirts in Nîmes and had developed the fabric sourcing Murphy relied on for years, made his first trip to New York in his life to be there, improvising his way around an Air France strike to do it. Missoni made a notebook printed with their signature pattern for everyone who attended, in her honor. There’s a building named for her at FIT today, the Katie Murphy Amphitheater.

So many women who shaped fashion from the inside get overlooked entirely, their names attached to nothing, their influence absorbed into men’s careers without a second thought. Murphy is proof of what that erasure costs. A woman significant enough that twelve hundred people filled a ballroom in her honor, designers and manufacturers flying across an ocean to be there, significant enough to have a building named for her decades later, and still, when I went looking for who she actually was, there was almost nothing to find until Sherri told me herself.

In the years right after Murphy’s death, Bloomingdale’s brought in Carrie Donovan, a celebrated fashion journalist who’d worked at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, hoping she could fill the role. She lasted barely a year before going back to journalism, rejoining The New York Times in 1977. By every account, she simply wasn’t Murphy.

It was Murphy who first introduced Sherri to a woman named Marianne Rachline in Paris. Decades later, Sherri introduced me to Marianne too. I stayed in Marianne’s apartment on Rue de Paradis one summer. I had no idea, until I started reporting this piece, that the connection ran that far back, three women, one introduction at a time, starting with a fashion director I never had the chance to know.

Kal Ruttenstein had an English degree from Princeton and an MBA from Columbia, not exactly a typical fashion résumé. By 1972, he was a VP at Saks Fifth Avenue, and his reputation as someone who could actually predict what people wanted was made on vacation: he placed one impulsive order from St.-Tropez, an entire tie-dye wardrobe, head to toe, and Saks couldn’t keep it on the shelves. He went on to become president of Bonwit Teller before Traub hired him in 1977 to fill the office Murphy left behind. Over the next twenty-eight years, he became, by The New York Times’ own description, the most visible face the store had, mentoring Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Isaac Mizrahi, Zac Posen, and Marc Jacobs through the early years of their careers. He had no qualms walking up to a stranger on the street to tell her he loved her outfit, then building an entire merchandising idea around what he’d just seen. He saw the musical Rent thirty-three times and built entire shops around it. “He was really the one man who was the voice of the designer,” Donna Karan told The New York Times.

Years later, when I was national sales director at DKNY, I was responsible for the seating chart at our fashion shows, every name placed exactly where it needed to be. Kal sat at the top of that list every single time. And every single time, before he placed my face, I’d watch him brace for a stranger about to introduce herself. Then I’d say my name, and his face would light up. “How is your mother. I love your mother,” he would shout. He’d known my parents for years, long before I was the one standing in front of him.

Bonnie Mackay started in sales at Lord & Taylor, then moved to Bonwit Teller as an assistant buyer and, eventually, a buyer. At Pratt, a teacher had once told her no one ever actually becomes a fashion coordinator. She decided that was exactly what she’d become. While still at Bonwit’s, she took a part-time job in Bloomingdale’s trim-a-tree department, just to earn extra money for her wedding. She performed so well, they asked her to stay on as a salesperson for Sonia Rykiel, and not long after, a job opened as assistant fashion coordinator in the Home Fashion office. She interviewed, got it, and over the next eighteen years rose to OVP fashion director for the entire home division, building Bloomingdale’s holiday ornament department by tracking down individual artisans and developing pieces with them directly, exactly the goal her Pratt teacher had told her was basically impossible. She carried that same instinct to the Museum of Modern Art, where she became Creative Director and Director of Merchandising for the museum’s retail division, overseeing design and presentation across MoMA’s stores in New York and Tokyo.

Decades later, her own personal Christmas tree, the product of a lifetime collecting nearly three thousand ornaments, was profiled by The New York Times in 2012, and she turned that collection into a book, Tree of Treasures, in 2016. Bonnie is one of my dearest friends today, and my true museum muse. We see most exhibitions in New York together.

What Happens Next

This is Saturday’s Generation. The set is built, the cast is in place, the curtain’s about to go up on the part that actually matters now. Next week, the story leaves 1976 and comes home to right now: what Bloomingdale’s proves about risk, about theater, about why retail lost its nerve, and what it would take to get it back. For now, some thank yous are owed, because none of this reporting happened alone.

How Lucky Am I

I call my dad every day, but this week it became five or six times a day. Every single time he picked up ready to go back fifty years like it was last Tuesday. This piece doesn’t exist without him.

I’ve known Sherri since I was two years old. I worshipped her then. I still worship her now. She worked for Murphy directly. Murphy left almost no public record behind, and Sherri cared enough to make sure I got her right, not just the facts, but who she actually was.

Marianne Rachline gave me her apartment in Paris one summer and made me a Parisian. I knew Sherri was the reason I met her. I did not know, until this week, that Murphy was the reason Sherri met her first.

And Bonnie, my museum muse, who texted me back the real story within the hour every single time I asked this week, the same way she always shows up and supports me.

And family to the rescue this morning: my brother and my stepmother, both up before 8am, racing to find a photo I needed. My brother found it. Thanks, Dude.

That’s not luck. That’s a world I was born into. My father handed me the first version of it when I was nine years old, and he is still handing it to me. So are Sherri and Bonnie. My love for this industry came to me as a gift, and I have an obligation to pass it on.

I didn’t choose this industry so much as I was chosen by the people already living inside it. My whole career has been an attempt to deserve that. Writing this piece, I finally understood why I’ve never wanted to leave the room. The room was never really about clothes or department stores or quarterly numbers. It was about people who loved something enough to make a nine-year-old feel like royalty and have dreams of one day being a fashion executive herself.

I am the lucky end of a very long chain, and I intend to keep it going. If you’re reading this and you love something the way these people loved theirs, don’t wait for permission. Go be loud about it. Go hand it to somebody.

Thank you, Dad. Thank you, Sherri. Thank you, Bonnie. I am so, so blessed.

Enjoy,

Michelle.

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The Discovery

Some gifts arrive without wrapping.

It was 1987. My cousin Beth was getting married in Los Angeles. She was five years older than me and had always been the cool one, the one I copied. When I was in fourth grade she showed up from LA in a Jag jumper dress and cowboy boots and I never recovered. She was tan where I was fair, effortless where I was trying. I spent years feeling one step behind her. Eventually she handed that jumper dress down to me. I wore it like a trophy.

And here I was at nineteen, in college, thinking I was finally holding my own in the style department, until I walked into her wedding.

Then the bridesmaids walked in. Four women. Four different silk dresses. And then there was Laura. She told me later how she had dressed that morning, first an underpiece, then an enormous length of crinkled pink silk that she literally had to wind around her body to wear. The result floated from the shoulder, then gathered and bound around her lower body in horizontal layers, tightening as it went, until she could barely walk. She moved in tiny, deliberate steps. Like a geisha. Satin ballet slippers on her feet, an enormous bouquet of pink lilies in her arms, completely unbothered.

That dress was Comme des Garçons. I did not know the name then. But even at nineteen I was already the kind of person who needed to. Great clothing does that to me. It gets under my skin and stays there until I have hunted down every detail, who made it, how, and why. I have never been able to walk away from a piece that moved me without knowing its whole story.

The designer was Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, and the woman who had spent years convincing the fashion world that clothes did not owe anyone an explanation.

The Woman Who Made the Rules Optional

Kawakubo was not trained as a designer. She studied fine arts and literature at Keio University in Tokyo, graduating in 1964, and took a job in the advertising department of Asahi Kasei, a textile manufacturer. There she was given creative freedom and became involved in sourcing props and costumes for photo shoots. It was in that role that she ran into the problem that changed everything. She could not find clothes that matched the vision she had in her head for the shoots. So, she made them herself. By 1967 she had gone freelance as a stylist. By 1969 she was selling her own designs under the Comme des Garçons label.

What came next was not accidental at all. The clothes she made were philosophical, idea-driven, completely uninterested in trend. From the very beginning, Kawakubo was not asking what people wanted to wear. She was asking what clothing could mean.

She founded Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1969. The name is French for “like boys,” inspired by a line from Françoise Hardy’s 1962 song “Tous les garçons et les filles”: “comme les garçons et les filles de mon âge,” meaning like the boys and girls my age. A Japanese woman. A French song. A brand that had no interest in dressing women the way women had always been dressed.

By 1973 she had her first store. By the end of the decade, she had 150 of them across Japan, and a devoted following the Japanese press called “the crows” for the all-black ensembles they favored. The Japanese fashion world understood what she was doing. The rest of the world had not yet been informed.

That changed in 1981.

When Kawakubo showed her first Paris collection, the fashion press did not know what to make of it. The clothes were dark, deliberately unfinished, asymmetrical, deconstructed. At that moment in Paris, French couturiers ruled the roost. Black was not worn during the day. Clothes existed to ornament and to celebrate the body. The idea that a garment might express something other than femininity and sexuality was, to the establishment, simply unthinkable. The press called it “Hiroshima chic.” They meant it as a dismissal. Kawakubo kept going. What they read as darkness, she understood as freedom. What they called unfinished, she called honest.

Her runway shows became events in their own right, conceptual, theatrical, impossible to ignore, harder still to explain. She was not presenting clothes. She was making arguments. Fashion had never seen anyone use a runway quite like that. In 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art made it official. Kawakubo became only the second living designer in history to be honored with a solo retrospective at the Met Costume Institute. The first was Yves Saint Laurent. The exhibition, “Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between,” drew over 650,000 visitors. The fashion world had spent decades catching up to what she already knew.

I went with Luis and Vanina, my dear friends visiting from Paris, and we spent the better part of an afternoon circling the same dresses from opposite sides of the room, each finding something the others had missed.

By 1987, when Laura wound herself into that crinkled pink silk at a Los Angeles wedding, Kawakubo had already been reshaping what fashion was allowed to be for eighteen years.

Her theory was simple and unforgiving. Clothing could carry meaning, not just utility, but that meaning had to be earned, not handed over. She built a label on refusal. The destroyed look. The asymmetry. “Hiroshima chic,” thrown at her as an insult, worn like proof of concept. She never believed clothes owed anyone an explanation.

Building Beautiful Chaos

Dover Street Market would be the same theory, built in three dimensions. Refusing comfort. Refusing permanence. Refusing to explain itself to you.

In 2004, Kawakubo and her husband Adrian Joffe opened Dover Street Market in London. Joffe is not a footnote in this story. South African born and a Zen Buddhist, Joffe had studied Japanese and Tibetan languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He first met Kawakubo in Paris in 1987 when a mutual friend asked him to come translate for her. She was looking for a new commercial director. She offered him the job. He took it and eventually married her.

The original inspiration was Kensington Market, a three-story bazaar in London that had been the beating heart of British subculture fashion for over forty years before closing in 2000. Kawakubo and Joffe wanted that energy. The sense that anything might be on the next floor. They opened Dover Street Market at 17 Dover Street in Mayfair and invited a curated selection of designers, established and unknown, to display and sell their collections in whatever manner they chose. The result, in Kawakubo’s own words, was “beautiful chaos.”

It was not a store. It was not a gallery. It was not a concept boutique. It was all of those things and none of them. Installations changed. Floors were reimagined. The space closed twice a year for complete reinstallation and reopened transformed. The staff rebuilt alongside it, which is why the people who work the floors of Dover Street Market are unlike any retail staff you have encountered anywhere else. They do not hover. They do not push. They know everything about what surrounds them because they have watched it arrive, watched it change, and watched it leave. Walking into DSM and striking up a conversation with the right person on the floor is like getting a private tutorial in what is happening in fashion right now. That is not an accident. That is the culture Kawakubo and Joffe built.

And then there is what sits at the very top of it all. Rose Bakery. Rose Carrarini is South African born, London raised and happens to be Rei Kawakubo’s sister-in-law. Before Kawakubo invited her in, Rose and her husband Jean-Charles had already spent years feeding the fashion world from their original location on the rue des Martyrs in Paris’s 9th arrondissement, which they opened in 2002. The concept was simple and quietly radical: English baking, organic ingredients, vegetable forward, completely unpretentious. In a city that took its food as seriously as its fashion, Rose Bakery became the place. Fashion editors and designers filled the tables. The carrot cake alone earned a reputation. When Kawakubo asked Rose to take the top floor of the original London DSM in 2005, Jean-Charles put it simply: “If Rei Kawakubo wants, then you say I’m going to do it.” They did it.

Literal family. Feeding the people who just survived the beautiful chaos below, one assiette de légumes and one perfect scone at a time.

The Expansion

Dover Street Market was never meant to exist in only one city.

In 2012, Kawakubo and Joffe opened the Ginza location in Tokyo, the country where CDG had built its empire, where Kawakubo’s devotees had been wearing all black since the 1970s. It felt less like an expansion and more like a homecoming.

New York followed in 2013. Six floors on Lexington Avenue. Rose Bakery on the ground floor, to the right when you walk in.

Singapore arrived in 2017, then Los Angeles and Beijing in 2018. Each location interpreted the beautiful chaos through its own architectural lens, each one reinstalled twice a year, each one unmistakably Dover Street Market and entirely unlike the others.

In 2016, something changed in London. The rent on Dover Street had risen sharply and the space had become too small for what Dover Street Market had grown into. Kawakubo and Joffe moved to 18-22 Haymarket, into a building that Burberry had occupied for over a hundred years. Three times the size of the original. The same beautiful chaos.

And then Paris. In May 2024, twenty years after London, Dover Street Market opened its eighth location in the Hôtel de Coulanges in the Marais, a building dating back to 1627. The newest Dover Street Market in the oldest walls. Paris had been waiting for this moment longer than most people knew. Kawakubo had initially considered Paris too bourgeois for Dover Street Market. The city had to prove itself, first earning a Dover Street Parfums Market in 2019, then a Dover Street Little Market in 2021, before finally getting the real thing in 2024.

I was thrilled. The Hôtel de Coulanges is around the corner from one of my dearest friend’s apartments, my home when in Paris, and right near where the Marais Rose Bakery on rue Debelleyme used to be before it closed, a place I had loved and mourned. Delphine, my dear Parisian friend, had been my companion at the Rose Bakery in New York. Now she was back in Paris full time, and the plan wrote itself. We would discover the new DSM together and lunch at Rose Bakery. My assiette de légumes. My scone. Paris. Delphine. The poetry of it was almost too good.

The kitchen had other ideas.

What was there was a café corner with a limited menu. No assiette de légumes. No scone. A small salad and a pizzette, served at a few small tables tucked into the corner of all that beautiful chaos. Which makes a certain kind of sense when you think about it. Paris is where Rose Bakery is from. The original on rue des Martyrs is still there. There is one at Le Bon Marché. The city did not need Dover Street Market to bring it Rose Bakery. Rose Bakery already belonged to Paris, and perhaps knew better than to try to compete with itself. Delphine and I ate our pizzettes. C’est la vie.

The School With No Diploma

What Kawakubo built was never just one thing. Over the decades, Comme des Garçons expanded into an entire ecosystem of sub-labels, each with its own distinct identity but all unmistakably part of the same universe. Comme des Garçons Homme, launched in 1978, brought the CDG sensibility to menswear. Homme Plus followed in 1984, more experimental, more theatrical. Comme des Garçons Shirt arrived in 1988, offering a more wearable interpretation of the CDG aesthetic. And then in 2002, CDG Play, conceived by Adrian Joffe and featuring the iconic heart logo with cartoon eyes designed by artist Filip Pagowski. Play became the entry point. The gateway. The thing that made CDG simultaneously the most avant-garde label in fashion and one of the most recognizable logos in streetwear. By 2024, the Financial Times reported CDG and its affiliates generating approximately $450 million in annual revenue. Not bad for a woman who started out making costumes for photo shoots because she could not find what she needed.

And alongside all of it, Kawakubo was doing something the broader fashion industry had largely abandoned. She was building designers. The great couture houses had once done this. But the corporate era of fashion had largely moved away from that kind of patient, deliberate cultivation of talent. Kawakubo never stopped. And she went further than most. She did not just train designers to carry on her vision. She gave them their own names, their own creative freedom, their own identities, and kept them inside her ecosystem. They were not successors. They were not imitators. They were something rarer. Themselves.

No formal curriculum. No graduation ceremony. No tuition. She simply watched people work, and when she saw something, she acted on it.

Junya Watanabe arrived at Comme des Garçons in 1984 as an apprentice pattern-maker. Kawakubo watched him work. By 1987 she had appointed him chief designer of the CDG Tricot knitwear line. In 1992 she did something she had never done for anyone. She gave him his own label under the CDG umbrella. Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons was born. He is still there today, still designing, still very much his own voice inside the house that made him possible.

Kei Ninomiya came to CDG during a university summer break, applying for a job as a patternmaker. He liked it so much he dropped out of school entirely to stay. Four years later, Kawakubo looked at what he was quietly creating on the side and told him it should have its own name. Noir Kei Ninomiya was born. A designer who might have spent his career as a patternmaker became one of the most quietly revered names in fashion, because Rei Kawakubo was paying attention.

Chitose Abe arrived at CDG as a pattern-cutter for Kawakubo herself, eventually becoming a lead designer for Watanabe’s line. After eight years she left, took time away, and eventually founded Sacai, now one of the most covetable and widely imitated brands in the world, beloved for its signature deconstruction and reconstruction of classic garments. The CDG education is all over it.

And then there is Simon Porte Jacquemus. Not a patternmaker. Not a design assistant. A young man from Provence who showed his collection at a Tokyo showroom in 2012. Kawakubo saw it. She was interested. Adrian Joffe offered him a job at the Comme des Garçons boutique in Paris so he could fund his next collection. He sold clothes on the floor of the CDG Paris boutique by day and designed his own collection by night. CDG picked up his line for Dover Street Market Tokyo. The kid who had been selling clothes to pay for his own became one of the most celebrated designers of his generation.

Four designers. Four completely different stories. One woman with the vision to see what others could not yet see, and the power to do something about it.

Two Purists

Dover Street Market did not just bridge the world of luxury and streetwear. It became the place where that bridge was built, tested, and permanently established. And no relationship tells that story better than the one between Dover Street Market and Supreme.

Supreme was founded in New York in 1994 by James Jebbia, originally as a skate shop on Lafayette Street in SoHo. It was not fashion. It was not luxury. It was something else entirely, a brand built on scarcity, community, and an uncompromising point of view. Which made its relationship with Dover Street Market not unlikely at all. It made it inevitable. Two purists, each operating by their own rules, recognizing something deeply familiar in each other.

Comme des Garçons Shirt and Supreme began collaborating in 2012, with drops released almost annually through 2018, each one selling out within minutes. In 2021 the relationship extended further when Supreme collaborated with Junya Watanabe Comme des Garçons, another branch of the CDG family tree, deepening a partnership that has become one of the most celebrated in fashion history. DSM has a Supreme outpost across all its global locations and is the only retailer in the world outside of Supreme’s own stores and website where Supreme is officially sold.

But the truth is, Dover Street Market was already bridging luxury and streetwear from within its own ecosystem long before Supreme arrived. CDG Play, with its iconic heart logo, had already become a streetwear staple worn by skaters and hypebeasts and fashion editors alike. The mainline remained resolutely avant-garde. Both lived comfortably inside the same house. Dover Street Market simply made that conversation visible on a global scale.

What made it work was that neither side blinked. Supreme did not soften itself for CDG. CDG did not explain itself to Supreme. They met in the place where both already lived, the conviction that what you make should mean something, that scarcity is a philosophy not a supply chain problem, and that the people who get it will find you. You do not need to go looking for them.

That is Dover Street Market in a sentence. You either understand what you are standing in, or you do not. No amount of money changes which one you are.

The Gift, Unwrapped

June 1st. The first day of our internship program. Erick and I walked three interns into Dover Street Market on Lexington Avenue. One from NYU. One from Parsons. One from Morehouse, a lifelong New Yorker. None of them had ever been there.

I did not tell them what to expect. That was the point. You cannot explain Dover Street Market. You have to walk someone in and watch what happens. Watch their eyes adjust. Watch them slow down. Watch the moment they stop looking for the logic and start feeling the current instead.

I wanted to give them what nobody handed me at nineteen. I had to stumble into mine, in a hotel ballroom, watching a bridesmaid wind herself into pink silk without anyone telling me what I was looking at. This time, I got to be the one doing the unwrapping.

I have spent my career in fashion. I know what a store is supposed to do. Move product. Manage traffic. Convert browsers into buyers. Dover Street Market does all of those things. It just refuses to do only those things. Every floor is an argument. Every installation is a provocation. Every season it closes, strips itself down to the walls, and rebuilds from scratch. It does not ask what sold well last time. It asks what needs to be said now.

This is what I have come to call Inclusive Exclusivity. The currency is not money. It is knowledge. It is the willingness to stand in front of something you do not immediately understand and stay there until you do. Anyone can walk into Dover Street Market. Not everyone knows what they are walking into.

Rei Kawakubo has been saying this since 1969. She said it with clothes that wound themselves around bodies like pink silk at a Los Angeles wedding. She said it with a store built on beautiful chaos in a Mayfair townhouse. She said it with a South African Zen Buddhist she married and built an empire with. She said it with the designers she watched from across a workroom and decided to believe in.

She is still saying it.

Dover Street Market is not a store. It is a standard. A reminder that retail at its best does not just take your money, it takes you somewhere. You enter as a shopper. You leave as something more. Inspired. Engaged. Marked by the experience in a way you cannot quite explain but will not forget.

That is what retail was always supposed to do. Most of it stopped. A few never did.

This is the first installment of Shopping as a Pilgrimage: Retail Concepts That Inspire, Engage, and Leave Their Mark. A new series about the places that got it right, held the standard, and kept going. The ones worth crossing the room for. Worth crossing an ocean for. The ones that send you home different than you arrived.

Dover Street Market is where we start. There are others. We are going to find them.

Enjoy,

Michelle

Exciting. Terrifying. Is this really my life?

That is what responsibility feels like the morning after clarity.

Now what?

This is the part nobody covers in the founder playbook. Not because it is a secret. Because it is uncomfortable. Building a brand is an exercise in vision. Building a product is a reckoning with reality. The two are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where most ideas go to die quietly.

I should tell you something before we go further. When Erick and I decided to build a tennis brand, I did not play tennis. I had spent the last thirteen years of my corporate career becoming an expert in men’s underwear, VP at Ralph Lauren and SVP at Calvin Klein. I knew those businesses down to the fiber content and the fit model. That fit model, by the way, is still one of my closest friends. He is about to have his first child, for whom I will proudly be an auntie. But I digress.

What I knew was that I had learned an entirely foreign world from scratch before. A founder has to immerse herself in everything about the business, every detail, every decision, every discipline, until she has built the team that can carry it. At the start, there is no team. There is only you, the problem, and the willingness to become fluent in whatever it takes.

If I could become the person in the room who knew more about men’s underwear than anyone wanted to know, I could do it again.

Today I know more about racket construction, string tension, frame geometry, and manufacturing supply chains than most people who have played tennis their entire lives.

That education started the hard way. It always does.

Pick up any tennis racket. Hold it. Feel the weight, the balance, the way the frame tapers from the handle into the throat into the hoop. It looks simple. It is not.

Every racket you have ever held was almost certainly made by hand. Not assembled by robots. Not stamped out on a conveyor belt. Carbon fiber sheets cut and placed precisely in a steel mold, layer by layer, then pressurized, cured under heat, drilled, painted, decaled, and inspected by a human being who has done this thousands of times. If the orientation of a single layer is wrong, the playing characteristics of the finished frame change. A fraction of a degree. A different racket.

This is artisanal manufacturing at industrial scale. And it happens almost entirely in one country.

China.

Wilson, born in Chicago in 1913 and Roger Federer’s racket for two decades, is now owned by Anta Sports, a Chinese conglomerate that also owns Arc’teryx, Salomon, and Atomic. Made in China. Head, invented by an American engineer, now Austrian. China. Prince, born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1970, went bankrupt in 2012. China. Today the name lives on, owned by Authentic Brands Group, the intellectual property company that also owns the estates of Marilyn Monroe and Bob Marley. ABG licenses the Prince name to operating partners who make the products. The brand exists. The company does not. Babolat, founded in France in 1875 as a string manufacturer, did not introduce a racket until 1994. China. The one meaningful exception is Yonex, which manufactures its top-end frames in Nagaoka, Japan. A distinction they wear as a badge of honor and price accordingly.

Before those brands became what they are today, there was ProKennex. Founded in 1978 in Taichung, Taiwan, by Lo Kunnan, the son of a plastic toy gun manufacturer who started building wooden badminton rackets in his father's backyard. By 1983, the company was producing over 10,500 rackets a day, combining its own branded line with OEM contracts for Western brands. At their peak, they were among the most prolific racket manufacturers on earth, and Taiwan had become the center of the global supply chain. An entire industry had been built in one place, by hand, at scale.

That infrastructure, the factory relationships, the proprietary steel molds, the decades of accumulated technical knowledge, is what a new brand has to navigate to make a racket. There is no catalog to order from. There is no open-door policy for newcomers with a good story. You earn your way in through credibility, relationships, and a product idea compelling enough to be taken seriously by people who have seen everything.

No American brand had done it in a generation.

We had no idea what we were walking into. Which, in retrospect, was a gift.

The first person we approached for advice was a friend Erick had grown up with at Prospect Park Tennis. Same neighborhood. He had gone deep into the sport from a different angle, becoming a certified master racket technician and eventually owning two pro shops. We call him G.

G connected us to a sales rep he trusted. We placed a small first order: strings and grips. Nothing dramatic. A test. We put them on Instagram and gave them away for free, asking for one thing in return: honest feedback.

The strings. Lukewarm.

The grips. They loved them.

So we built our first accessory assortment around the grips and went back to the drawing board on strings. The small thing earns the right to ask people to believe in the big one.

The company we were buying from also made rackets. They offered to produce one for us under our name, their frame, their mold, their manufacturing relationship, our label.

The answer was no. I had not walked away from a thirty-year career to put our name on someone else’s frame. That was not the point. That was never the point.

They paused. Then: “I know a guy.”

The guy was Y-san.

Thirty years working for Wilson and Head in Japan. He knew every factory worth knowing, every material supplier, every engineer with real expertise across the most concentrated racket manufacturing ecosystem on earth. He was the kind of person who exists at the center of an industry and is completely invisible to everyone outside it. And when the introduction was made, Y-san was skeptical.

He had seen founders before. He knew the difference between people who wanted to launch a brand and people willing to do what that actually required. They are not the same people. Not even close.

We flew him to New York in 2016 in a last effort to convince him we were the real thing, that this was not a hobby or a vanity project or an idea dressed up as a business.

He came. The conversation that followed brought him on board. And with that, everything changed.

But before Y-san, before Taiwan, before any of what comes next, G handed us the filter we would run every single decision through. Not just then. We still use it today. For every product we make.

Making a racket, he said, was insane. Unless it had something Ooh-Aah about it.

Not good. Not competitive. Not well-priced at retail. Ooh-Aah. The thing that makes a player pick it up in the first thirty seconds and understand, without being told, that something here is different. A reason for being. Not a nice-to-have. A non-negotiable.

Y-san had a connection from the ProKennex world: an engineer who had been involved in designing what became the first Babolat racket frame. Here is sixty seconds of tennis equipment history that changes everything.

For the better part of five decades, elite rackets were built around what the industry calls a flat beam frame. Narrow through the cross-section of the hoop. Precise. Built for control. The Wilson Pro Staff that Pete Sampras carried to 14 Grand Slam titles, and Roger Federer carried to 20 more. The same frame that Stefan Edberg and Jim Courier built their games around. Flat beam. All of them.

Power was something the player manufactured. Technique. Swing weight. Lead tape added to the frame. The racket was an instrument of precision. What you did with it was up to you.

Then came Babolat.

After 119 years of making only strings, the French family brand decided in 1994 to build a racket. What they designed was a departure from everything on the market: a larger head with an elliptical cross-section frame, rounder through the hoop than anything before it, that generated natural power without demanding that the player produce it all themselves. Carlos Moya won the French Open with it in 1998 and became world number one the following year. Rafael Nadal, who would go on to win 14 French Open titles and become the most dominant clay court player in the history of the sport, began his professional career on a Pure Drive before Babolat developed the Pure Aero specifically around his game. The association of Nadal with Babolat changed the brand’s global position almost overnight. The Pure Drive became the best-selling tennis racket in history.

The engineer Y-san connected us with had since developed a grommetless racket technology. One more definition, because this one matters: conventional racket frames have holes drilled through them for stringing, and small plastic inserts called grommets are fitted into those holes to protect the strings from the sharp carbon fiber edge. A grommetless design eliminates that plastic buffer entirely. Different feel, different acoustics at contact, a genuinely different engineering proposition. Babolat, the story went, had been offered it and passed.

In 2017, we flew to Taiwan.

The first stop was Hong Kong, then a connection to Taipei. Taiwan is where the racket industry was actually built, the factories, the tooling knowledge, the carbon fiber expertise that made Western brands possible. We were being brought into a world most people in tennis have never seen and most people outside tennis do not know exists.

We took a train to Taichung, and Y-san’s contact and his partner drove us out of the city and into the mountains.

The meeting happened on a wooden deck open to the forest. Racket frames and technical drawings spread across the table. No slide deck. No PowerPoint. We spent a weekend going through the engineering, asking questions, holding prototypes. The air was different up there. So was the conversation.

It felt, genuinely, like the beginning of something.

Two weeks later, the proposal arrived.

One million dollars. For a licensing arrangement. Not IP we would own. Technology we would rent, indefinitely, building our brand on a foundation that would always belong to someone else.

Y-san was back in Japan when the number came in. We called him. His reaction was the same as ours: not a serious offer. Not at that price, not on those terms. Not ever.

We walked away.

One year. Back to zero.

Here is where most founder stories cut to the breakthrough. The dramatic pivot. The eureka moment packaged neatly for a podcast. That is not what happened.

What happened was: we kept going.

Y-san did not disappear. Together, we made a decision: we would design our own racket. No licensing. No renting someone else’s technology. We would build it from the ground up.

Here is the physics problem we were solving. Erick had grown up playing with Prince rackets, flat beam, player’s frame. His instinct was that the category was about to curve back. Flat beam was coming back. He could feel it before the data showed it.

Y-san agreed.

The problem: flat beam frames give you control. They do not give you the same natural power as an elliptical cross-section frame. That gap is real. A player can compensate, but compensation is not a technology. After significant research, Y-san proposed a proprietary material that could be integrated into the carbon fiber layup of a flat beam frame, without changing the geometry, without adding weight, without touching the control profile that made the frame worth building. At the moment of impact, the frame returns energy into the shot rather than absorbing it.

We call it our energy return technology. It existed nowhere else in the market.

The question was whether it would work on a court.

We returned to Taiwan with Y-san to meet our new factory and source strings. Prototypes started coming in. We tested each wave as it arrived, coaches on courts in the US, Y-san running his own tests in Japan. Each wave closer. Each session ending with the same question: Ooh-Aah?

Not yet.

Then one session, the answer came back from the court. Erick started pointing his finger. “We got it. We got it.” Over and over, emphatic, certain. No debate. No qualifications. Just the unambiguous, collective recognition from everyone who had been in this process: we had found it.

Ooh-Aah.

With the right prototype confirmed, Erick and Y-san flew to China to finalize production at the factory. They approved the top of production.

In 2019, we manufactured 100 of each.

The ARMA PRO LIMITED EDITION and the ARMA LITE LIMITED EDITION. ARMA is the Spanish word for weapon. Each frame hand-numbered, one through one hundred. A deliberate act of scarcity, the same logic that makes a Supreme drop mean something, that made the first Stüssý pieces collectible before anyone called them that. We believed these rackets would matter. We numbered them the way artists number prints. Someday, we told each other, someone is going to want to know they have one of the first one hundred ever made.

Made by the same hands, in the same facilities, using the same manufacturing process as the brands that have owned this category for decades. With something none of them had.

Three years. Two continents. One walk away from a million-dollar licensing deal that would have handed someone else a permanent seat at our table. One proprietary material that did not exist in any other frame on the market. Two hundred rackets that proved it was possible.

We did not build the ARMA for the country club. We built it for the kid who found tennis through the yellow pages and walked 25 minutes to Prospect Park with his grandmother because they did not have a car. We built it for every player who ever picked up a racket and felt, without being told, that the sport was not built with them in mind. The ARMA was proof that it could be. That a brand built from the outside of this industry, by people who had no business being in it, could make something that belonged on the same court as the brands that had owned the category for decades.

In 2022, The Tennis Nerd gave FURI an Honorable Mention for Best New Racket of the Year, alongside Yonex. An honor earned by a brand that did not exist five years earlier, in a category that had not welcomed a serious American entrant in a generation. An honor that belongs to every person who believed in this before it was easy to believe in.

But in 2019, holding frame number one of one hundred, none of that had happened yet.

What I knew, standing there, was simpler.

The Ooh-Aah was real.

And that was everything.

Enjoy, Michelle

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“You are never too old to reinvent yourself.” — Steve Harvey

Three years in Paris. A consulting practice I built with a former colleague and a client list we earned. At some point the decision made itself: come home and build something of my own.

Paris gave me back something I had not realized I had lost. After thirty years inside one industry, one hierarchy, one way of seeing, the professional blinders had become invisible to me. I could not see them until I was somewhere they simply fell away. And when they did, I began to see the industry I had given my career to from the outside, for the first time.

And what I saw changed everything.

While luxury fashion was doing what I wrote about in When Luxury Forgot What It Was, decades of heritage being dismantled, creative directors cycling in and out so fast the houses forgot their own point of view, something else was happening entirely.

Streetwear was quietly living its best life in luxury’s shadow.

Not fighting for recognition. Not asking for a seat at any table. Just building, deeply and deliberately, the kind of authenticity that luxury had taken generations to earn and only a decade to lose. By the time the luxury industry noticed, streetwear had not merely disrupted the category. It had rewritten the rules of the entire game.

The rewrite was not about price point or product category. It was about currency.

For a century, fashion’s primary language was money. The logo communicated what someone had spent. The flagship store announced who had access. The department store made clear exactly where you belonged. Status moved in one direction, from the top down, and everyone below understood their place in the architecture.

Streetwear dismantled that architecture completely.

The new currency was not how much money you had. It was whether you were in the know. Being in the know is more valuable than money. You cannot buy this type of knowledge or belonging. Money could acquire the piece. It could not acquire what the piece meant.

I call this Inclusive Exclusivity. The invitation required fluency, not funds.

The brands that built this model share one quality that cannot be manufactured or retrofitted: they were born from the communities they represented. Not inspired by them. Not targeted to them. Born from them.

Shawn Stussy shaped surfboards in Laguna Beach in the early 1980s and signed each one with the handwritten script that would become the most recognized mark in streetwear history. He did not court surf culture. He was surf culture. The apparel followed because the community recognized his signature as their own. His global reach was built not through advertising but through DJs, artists, skaters, and musicians across cities who carried the brand because they genuinely were the brand. That network became the International Stussy Tribe, with chapters in New York, Tokyo, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles.

James Jebbia had carried Stussy at his Union NYC store starting in 1989, watched it sell out instantly, and eventually partnered with Shawn Stussy himself to open a Stussy store on Prince Street in 1991. When Stussy stepped back from his own brand three years later, Jebbia found a vacant storefront with cheap rent on Lafayette Street and opened a skate shop. He called it Supreme. That is not a coincidence. That is one founder learning from another, then going further. Supreme opened in April 1994, built for and by skateboarders. Its Thursday drop schedule, every week, 11am sharp, limited quantities, was not a marketing invention. It came from the community itself: Thursday was the day skaters received their allowance and immediately spent it on gear. Supreme honored the rhythm that already existed. Today, items sell out in under a minute. Website traffic spikes as much as 16,800% on drop days. The brand has sold branded crowbars, bricks, and toothpaste. A Supreme brick resells for over $300. The object is almost beside the point. What matters is what owning it says about you.

Vans. Palace. Carhartt. Timberland. The North Face. Each was born from a distinct community, skateboarders, construction workers, extreme outdoor athletes, and each became aspirational to the rest of the world for exactly that reason. The authenticity was the prerequisite, not the afterthought. The community had to be real before the aspiration could travel.

Apparel became the invitation to the party. You did not have to skate to wear Supreme. You did not have to work a construction site to wear Carhartt. But you had to recognize what the brand stood for, and that recognition was the entire point.

I want to tell you about my coveted Supreme x Comme des Garcons hoodie.

The collaboration between Supreme and Rei Kawakubo began in 2012 and has been a near-annual partnership since, two of the most culturally fluent houses in the world, releasing together. Every drop has sold out instantly. I did not get mine on the secondary market. I got it on drop day. (The secret of how will remain mine forever).

When I wear that hoodie, I get head nods from 18-year-olds who have no particular reason to acknowledge me. I am a middle-aged white woman. We share no obvious demographic. And yet the nods come, every time, because we share something more important: we both know.

That is Inclusive Exclusivity in practice. A single piece of apparel that crosses every demographic line and builds a moment of recognition between two people who would otherwise have nothing in common. That is not marketing. That is culture. And culture is the only thing a brand cannot buy.

During New York Home Week in August of 2014, I attended a showroom networking event at 230 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

I was there with my business partner, building our client roster. Erick Mathelier was there with his business partner; they were running a media company at the time. I believe we started talking because we were the four youngest people in the room.

We went to lunch the following week. The conversation kept going, so many people came up, so many connections we could make, so many ways we could help each other, that by the time we were done the four of us had decided to host a networking event and bring everyone together. We got the Gansevoort Park Avenue hotel to give us the rooftop bar at no cost. Cash bar. October 14, 2014.

The rain that night was torrential. I was convinced no one would come.

One hundred and fifty people showed up.

The energy was immediate and unmistakable. Before the evening was over, people were asking when the next event would be. Erick and I were assigned to find the next venue, which meant carving out time for something that would turn out to be one of the most consequential walks of my life.

While we were walking, Erick told me his story.

He grew up in Brooklyn. His first love was baseball. He was one of two Black children on the team, which played in a predominantly white section of the borough. In August 1989, a 16-year-old named Yusuf Hawkins traveled to the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn to look at a used car. He walked into a mob of white youths who mistook him for a Black man rumored to be dating a neighborhood girl. Hawkins had no connection to her. He was shot twice in the chest and killed. Erick was nine years old. He did not yet see color in the way the world around him did. His mother and grandmother did, and they told him baseball was over. It was too dangerous.

He needed something to replace it.

Tennis looked boring on television. He still does not know why he wanted to try it. He asked his mother, and she told him to look in the yellow pages and find somewhere to play. He found Prospect Park Tennis.

His mother is worth pausing on. She had the opportunity to join a program at AT&T in the early 1970s, where she learned English as a switchboard operator and worked her way up to middle management. She commuted from Queens to Morristown, New Jersey every day. Erick grew up in the care of his grandmother and his aunts. His grandmother worked too. He saw his mother every couple of weeks. She was building something, and she expected no less from him.

Once a week, his mother or his grandmother walked him to Prospect Park Tennis and back. Twenty-five minutes each way. Sometimes they stopped at McDonald’s on the way home. He started playing at ten. By thirteen he had fallen in love with the sport. His words.

He and his mother sat down with his tennis coach and asked what it would take to get better. The answer was simple: play more. His mother made it happen, summer camp, additional court time, a growing commitment to the game. By fourteen he had earned Most Improved Player and boarded his first plane to a tournament in Bermuda.

He went on to play junior tennis, compete for his high school, and ultimately earn a Division I scholarship to college. A kid from Brooklyn who found the sport in the yellow pages.

I knew, at a cellular level, what it means when a community claims a product as its own, and what it means when a brand tries to claim a community it was never part of. I had built a career inside one version of that equation. Standing on that sidewalk with Erick, I was hearing the other.

What he had just described was the founding story of every brand I had spent the previous year studying in a completely different context.

The walk to the park. A stop at McDonald’s on the way home. A mother commuting across state lines every day so her son could reach a sport that had no interest in reaching back. A community with a deep, authentic relationship to a sport, a set of unmet needs, and not one brand that saw them.

It was Shawn Stussy on a surfboard. It was James Jebbia opening a door on Lafayette Street. It was the very structure of Inclusive Exclusivity: a culture that existed long before anyone thought to build a brand around it. And I was standing next to the person whose life was the proof.

What I understood in that moment had nothing to do with trend forecasting or market research. It was simpler and more certain than either of those things. I had given my career to an industry that spoke one language and ignored everyone who did not already speak it. I had watched that industry hollow itself from the inside as a result. And I was looking at a sport with more fashion DNA than any other in history. The tennis shoe. The tennis skirt. The tennis sweater. The tennis bracelet. A sport that had made the identical mistake.

Tennis had kept its back turned.

According to the USTA, tennis participation in the United States has grown 54% since 2019, adding nearly 10 million players across six consecutive years of growth and reaching 27.3 million in 2025. More than 70% of those new players come from minority communities. Black and African American participation has grown at nearly four times the rate of white participation over that period. Latino and Hispanic participation has grown at more than six times that rate. Asian and Pacific Islander participation at nearly three times. The future of this sport is being shaped by communities that no brand in the category was building for.

We founded FURI to be that brand.

Steve Harvey opened this episode telling us we are never too old to reinvent ourselves. But standing on that sidewalk with Erick, reinvention was not the word in my head. The word was responsibility. When you can see it all clearly: the community, the white space, the authentic story, the right partner, all in the same conversation. You do not get to unsee it. You are accountable for it.

Enjoy, Michelle

— Steve Harvey

In Episode 2, I landed in Paris with five suitcases and no plan. The free fall had begun. What I did not tell you was what free fall looks like from the inside.

There was a pigeon outside my window when I arrived.

She was there every morning and every night. I said good morning. I said good night. When you are in free fall, you take companionship wherever it arrives.

Before I left New York for Paris, a dear friend sat down with me.

His name was Jonathan. One of the closest people in my life. My advisor in all things. For years, he had managed my financial affairs and had this gift for taking the fear out of things. Not by solving them. By giving them a shape. Once you can see the whole of something, fear runs out of places to hide.

He drew an ellipse.

On the left: May 15, 2013. The day I would arrive. The ellipse opened wide. From May 15 to July 15, the net was cast as wide as I wanted it. European path: work in Paris, build a life there. U.S. path: return as an employee, build something at home, or some combination. The drawing was direct about one boundary. Paris did not equal starting a business. One new thing at a time.

July 15 was where the ellipse began to narrow. September 15 was where it closed. That was when I would pick a road.

He gave my chaos a shape and my indecision a deadline. I share this ellipse with people going through transitions to this day. It is not about having the answers. It is about making the infinite feel finite. That is what Jonathan did for me, over and over, for years.

I have had to learn to take the fear out of things for myself now.

I had done everything I could to build the network I would need before I left New York. One of the most important connections came in an elevator.

Stanley Silverstein was Head of International at Warnaco. His office was on the black carpet. That was what we called the area where the C-suite sat. He heard I was moving to Paris. He had a name for me.

Karine Ohana. Ohana & Co.

Karine was co-managing partner at Ohana & Co., a Paris-based boutique M&A firm that had advised some of the most consequential deals in fashion. Eres to Chanel. Nina Ricci to Puig. Emanuel Ungaro to Ferragamo. She had also handled the sale of Lejaby when Warnaco divested it. That is why Stanley had her name. TIME named her one of the most powerful women in fashion. She knew everyone in Paris who mattered. She introduced me to many of them.

The first month moved fast. Lunch with Miles Socha from WWD and the opening of the Moynat store on Rue Saint-Honoré. A trip to London to meet with Li & Fung Europe and Burberry, which led to a connection with Li & Fung Paris.

Back to Paris to sit with Michael Borian, one of the city’s most respected chasseurs de têtes. Henri Sebauon at Carven. Lyne Dokes-Naggar, Head of Executive Recruitment at LVMH. Meetings on weekends. Nothing felt impossible. I was casting the net exactly as wide as Jonathan’s ellipse said to. I also took nine hours of French class a week at Alliance Française. I was not in Paris to visit. I was there to belong.

Every meeting led to the next. Every name opened a door. I was learning something thirty years of corporate life had never taught me: how to build from nothing, one introduction at a time.

But not every connection was scheduled.

The Saturday before my LVMH interview, I walked as many brand stores as I could to prepare. I stopped in at Dior on Avenue Montaigne to see the scarves. I had had coffee with the designer, Alexandra, the day before. A young woman named Cissy, from Shanghai and doing sales that day as part of her Dior analyst rotation, introduced herself and started speaking to me in English. I asked her please to speak to me in French. I had an interview that Monday and needed every bit of practice I could get. She gave me her card. We ended up at the Plaza Athénée for coffee the next week. She is my little sister to this day.

You never know where the connections that change your life will come from. A man you pass in an elevator on your way out the door. A young woman in a Dior store who wants to practice French. Do not count anyone out.

I met Floriane de Saint Pierre on May 31st.

She is the woman who placed Christopher Bailey at Burberry, Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, Christophe Lemaire at Lacoste and later at Hermès. She had strategized the creative directions at Gucci and Saint Laurent, including Alessandro Michele’s nomination. She built EYES on TALENTS, the first digital platform connecting fashion brands with creative talent across design, photography, and architecture. She was a partner of the CFDA. She was also one of the women doing the real work of making France’s Copé-Zimmermann Law, which required that 40 percent of corporate board seats go to women, actually mean something. The CHRO at Warnaco had connected us.

To sit across from her and receive her honest assessment was a privilege I did not fully understand until later.

What she told me, I did not want to hear.

A full-time employment position in France was essentially not available to me. I was not an American expat being recruited from the U.S. I was someone trying to become a true French resident. The door was not open that way. I would be doing contract work. Consulting. Project by project.

What I wanted was permanency. That is the real word. Permanency. A full-time job. Benefits. A lease on a life in the city I loved.

I did not accept her guidance right away. I kept circling the possibility that she was wrong. She was not wrong. The moment I accepted that she was right, the real Paris chapter began.

In my last week of my first month, a neighbor named Gregory came by. I wanted to show him the pigeon because I was leaving for New York and I was worried about her. The French are not known for their love of pigeons. I had not loved them before this either. But this one was mine and I wanted someone to keep an eye on her.

Gregory looked at the pigeon and then at me, the way you look at someone who has missed something obvious.

Do you really not know what she is doing?

She was sitting on eggs.

I had been looking at her every single day and had not seen it. New life, being tended in the dark, in a window box, just as I was, on a street I was still learning to call mine.

I know how this sounds. She was real. Gregory remembers her too.

A month after arriving, I went back to New York.

I had immersed myself so completely in becoming Parisian that I had forgotten how fast New York moves. I sat down to dinner with friends and ninety minutes later everyone had to go. In Paris, dinners run into the early hours of the morning. In Paris, an espresso and a tartine from the boulangerie on Rue d’Hauteville was not breakfast. It was ceremony.

In New York, I crashed.

Paralyzed. Out of place. Hard to breathe. It was like putting on a coat that no longer fit and realizing you are not the same size you used to be. The life I had lived there was over. I could feel it in my body. I was basically an infant in my life in France. I needed more time in the nest.

After three weeks, I knew. The loudest yes I had ever felt was pointing back to Paris.

And then a dear family friend, who lived on Rue de Paradis, around the corner from my apartment on Rue d’Hauteville, offered me her apartment for the summer while she was in Bretagne.

Rue de Paradis. My metro station was still Bonne Nouvelle. Good News.

The universe is not subtle.

I could go home.

Here is what I know now that I did not know then.

Free fall does not end because you land. It ends because you learn what you need to navigate it.

Three things.

The first is structure. Not a plan. A framework. Something that shows you the shape of the decision so the infinite options stop feeling infinite. Jonathan gave me that. Without it, the freedom of an open ellipse can be paralyzing.

The second is honesty. Someone who will tell you the truth you do not want to hear. Floriane told me the permanency I was reaching for did not exist the way I had imagined it. I resisted it. Then I accepted it. That acceptance was the turning point.

The third is patience. Enough patience to let the right answer get loud enough to hear. New York told me clearly it was not the answer. Not yet. Paris was. Rue de Paradis was. Patience was.

Every morning I wake up and choose faith over fear. I started in that apartment in the 10th Arrondissement, in the first month of a free fall I did not yet know how to name. I still do it. I share it with anyone standing in their own uncertainty. It has steadied others the way it steadied me. That is one of the most unexpected gifts of this journey.

The eggs hatched the day before I left for New York.

She had been sitting on something she could not yet show me, tending to new life in the dark, patient every morning and every night.

She was not waiting. She was becoming. The same as me.

New life for her chicks. New life for their mother.

New life for me.

Episode 4. Drops next Wednesday.

Enjoy,

Michelle

“God doesn’t make any mistakes. You are exactly where you are supposed to be right now.”

— Steve Harvey

I want to tell you about a man named Ghouti.

In November 2012, a few weeks after Sandy and a few weeks before my last day at Calvin Klein was decided, I took my annual birthday trip to Paris, a trip I had planned long before either of those things happened. I go every year. And I am always heartbroken when I leave.

It was raining the day I was headed to the airport to return to NYC. Ghouti was the driver the Warnaco Paris affiliate car service sent to take me there. What I did not know yet was that he owned the car service. He spoke perfect English and could see immediately that I was not okay. I was leaving a place that felt more like home than home, heading back to a life that had just begun to crack open in ways I didn’t yet fully understand.

He asked me who my favorite singer was.

James Taylor.

Without another word, without music, without anything but the rain on the windows, Ghouti began to sing. I joined him. Two strangers in a car, singing James Taylor a cappella all the way to the terminal. By the time we arrived, something had shifted. I didn’t know what. I just knew I felt less alone than I had an hour before.

I had no idea I would be back in Paris in less than six months. Indefinitely.

Here is something I have learned about free fall: the discomfort is not a warning. It is confirmation. If you are not uncomfortable, you have not actually jumped. You have only changed rooms.

The terror I felt in those months between Sandy and Paris was real. I did not know what I was building or who I was becoming. I only knew I could not stay where I was. That feeling, the one that sits in your stomach, is not anxiety. It is information. It means you are exactly where growth requires you to be.

The job is not to make the discomfort go away. The job is to get comfortable inside it.

Six months later.

May 15, 2013. Charles de Gaulle Airport. I walked out into the arrivals hall with five suitcases, a severance package, no plan, and a level of terror I am not sure I have ever admitted to anyone.

I grabbed a cart. Free, as every international airport I have ever been to has the good sense to offer. America is the only country that looks at an exhausted traveler with five suitcases and sees a revenue opportunity. But I digress.

I had not requested a specific driver.

There was a man holding a sign with my name on it.

We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything for a moment. And then, at exactly the same time, we both said it.

James Taylor.

It was Ghouti.

And for those of you who know me, you won’t be surprised that, of course, I got to know Ghouti’s whole family. We are still in touch to this day, thirteen years later.

I truly believe that was the universe telling me it was going to be okay. But here is the part worth paying attention to: I would have missed it entirely if I had been too afraid to get on the plane. The signs are always there. You have to show up to see them.

The apartment at 21 Rue D’Hauteville was on the second floor, the third floor by American standards since Europeans count the ground floor separately, with an elevator the size of a very optimistic phone booth. One bag at a time. Ghouti and Luigi, the friend of the owner who had come to hand over the keys, worked that elevator like a relay team until all five suitcases were inside.

Luigi did not leave after dropping off the keys.

He gave me a tour of the 10th Arrondissement. Took me to the cutest Vietnamese sandwich shop on his street. Helped me get a French SIM card. Introduced me to the one organic market in the neighborhood at that time and gave me his discount code.

My metro station was Bonne Nouvelle, which means good news. I took that as a sign too.

That was thirteen years ago. Luigi is still one of my closest friends.

In one afternoon, I had found two of them.

This is the part people underestimate when they think about free fall. They focus on the plan, the funding, the strategy, the risk. All of that matters. But what actually gets you through the hard parts is people. Connection is not a luxury when you are in free fall. It is infrastructure. You cannot build anything alone. Not a company, not a new life, not a version of yourself you have never been before. The people who show up in the first hours are rarely accidental. Pay attention to who they are.

That first night I picked up a baguette, some cheese, and smoked salmon. I collapsed into bed.

I had no corporate infrastructure waiting on the other side. No team. No title. No certainty about what any of it was supposed to become. And I had stopped needing it.

That is the other thing nobody tells you about free fall: you do not need the whole plan. You need enough for tonight. A discount code for the organic market. A SIM card. A sandwich shop two blocks away. One small thing that makes the new place feel possible.

What I had that night was more than enough.

I was in my heartspace. I always say that my heart lives in Paris, and when I am there I am whole. Even surrounded by five open suitcases in a second-floor apartment in the 10th Arrondissement, even with all the uncertainty still ahead, I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Steve Harvey had promised it. The universe sent Ghouti and Luigi to prove it. The free fall had begun.

Episode 3: The Ellipse. Drops next Wednesday.

Enjoy,

Michelle

If you have been reading since April, you know this is not my first series. What comes next is different. For the past several years I have been building FURI Sport from the ground up while fundraising, consulting, writing, and figuring out what it actually means to leave a 23 year corporate career and start something entirely your own. I am sharing this journey not because my story is exceptional, but because I suspect parts of it are yours too. If something I have learned saves you time, spares you a mistake, or simply makes you feel less alone in whatever you are building or becoming — that is the point. I am not writing this from the other side. I am writing it from the middle.

The Jump

“If you want to be successful, you have to jump, there’s no way around it. When you jump, I can assure you that your parachute will not open right away. But if you do not jump, your parachute will never open. If you’re safe, you’ll never soar.”

— Steve Harvey

October 31, 2012. I had been on the roof since the day before, it was the only way to see what was happening below. The water was still there. The National Guard had arrived and was working to extract elderly neighbors and families with young children who couldn’t get out on their own.

Then my phone buzzed.

PVH had just announced it was acquiring Warnaco for $2.9 billion.

I ran Calvin Klein Men’s Underwear for Warnaco. In one morning, both the water and my professional future had arrived at the same address. Neither of them had knocked.

Let me back up.

By October 2012, I had spent 23 years building fashion businesses from the inside. Macy’s. DKNY, where I grew up professionally. Polo Ralph Lauren. And then Calvin Klein, where I spent seven years running a business responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars. I had the team, the title, the expense account, the quarterly reviews. I had built exactly the kind of career that looks, from the outside, like something you would never walk away from.

I had never planned to walk away.

But standing on that roof, something landed. I had always regretted not going abroad in college. The National Guard was rescuing people on my street, my company had just been sold, and I had one thought: Mother Nature was telling me it was time to be extraordinary. Why not now?

It took three days for the water to recede. Eight days for the electricity to come back. A full week before I could get back to the office, which sat above 14th Street in Manhattan — a completely different world. Up there, the lights were on and life had continued without interruption. For those hit by the storm, everything had changed.

When I got back to the office, I went straight to Jay, a close friend and head counsel at Warnaco. I asked him one question: if I asked my boss for a package instead of staying through the acquisition, would I be okay? He looked at me and said yes. That was enough.

I went to my boss and laid it out plainly. I wanted one of two things: a transfer to PVH’s Amsterdam office, or a package. I wasn’t asking for his blessing. I was stating my terms.

February 2013. The acquisition closed. My boss came back to me with a PVH position. I knew before he finished the sentence that I would hate every minute of it. I took the package.

April 12, 2013, was my last day.

Was I scared? Absolutely. I had spent over 20 years inside systems designed to support the work: teams, resources, budgets, process. I was stepping out of all of it.

But I also knew something simpler and more honest than any plan: the life I was living had stopped being extraordinary. I could feel the distance between where I was and what I was actually capable of. I did not know yet what came next. I just knew I had to go find it.

Steve Harvey says your gift is your parachute. He says it will open. He also says it will not open right away. You will hit the rocks on the way down.

He is right on all three counts.

On May 15, 2013, thirty-three days after my last day at Calvin Klein, I arrived at an apartment on Rue D’Hauteville in the 10th Arrondissement of Paris. Five suitcases. Scared to death. No plan.

I had jumped.

The parachute had not yet opened.

I hadn’t asked for a specific driver at Charles de Gaulle. The universe had other ideas.

That story is Episode 2.

Enjoy,

Michelle

WHEN LUXURY FORGOT WHAT IT WAS | PART 4

Over the course of this series, we have watched luxury lose the plot. The rules that made it luxury, abandoned. The aspiration that made it covetable, inflated into inaccessibility. The customer who made it a cultural force, priced out and forgotten. We have watched the resale market step in to fill one part of that vacuum. But there is another part of the story. A white space that has been quietly reclaimed, by founders who never asked for a buying office’s approval. It is the return of Bridge. The reasons it is back are not the same reasons it was born. But the white space is identical.

Let me be precise about what Bridge actually was, because the word has been misused, misunderstood, and eventually abandoned by the industry that created it. Bridge was not contemporary. It lived between better women’s ready-to-wear and luxury, closer in spirit and construction to the designer side, honest in price to the woman who was not there yet. Not basics. Not separates-only. Sophisticated. That word is the entire definition. Bridge made a woman feel like she had already arrived, even when she was still very much on her way. Contemporary gave you a pant. Bridge gave you a feeling.

The Cultural Shift That Made It Possible: 1984 to 1989

1984. Who’s the Boss arrives on ABC. Tony Danza as the male housekeeper. Judith Light as the female advertising executive. It ran for eight seasons because America could not stop watching.

September 1988. Murphy Brown premieres on CBS. Candice Bergen as a hard-driving television journalist who answered to no one and apologized to fewer.

December 1988. Working Girl opens in theaters. Melanie Griffith on the Staten Island Ferry, big hair, bigger ambitions, heading to Wall Street to be taken seriously.

Three cultural moments. Same era. Same message. Women are arriving.

The numbers confirmed what the culture was already saying. By 1990, women’s labor force participation had climbed to 57.5 percent, a surge that would not peak until 1999, when it reached 60 percent. That same year, Carly Fiorina became the first woman to lead a Fortune Top-20 company when she was named CEO of Hewlett-Packard. It was 1999, and it was still news.

Their earnings were rising alongside their titles. For the first time in real numbers, women had discretionary income and a growing sense of their own worth. But the brands she had always worn were not keeping up. What we wear is a declaration of who we are, and the brands she had always worn were still speaking for the woman she used to be. She was stepping into new rooms, new roles, new authority. She needed clothes built for who she was becoming, not who she had been.

Bridge landed exactly at the intersection of rising income, rising ambition, and rising possibility. Sophisticated enough to match the woman she was in the process of becoming.

Born Here. Built Here.

The story of Bridge starts with one house, one vision, and one woman who did not live to see it realized. Anne Klein founded her company in 1968. That same year, a young Donna Karan walked in as a summer intern. In 1973, Anne Klein asked Tomio Taki to become her business partner, giving him a stake in everything she had built. One year later, she was gone. Before her death in 1974, Anne Klein and Tomio Taki had already planted the seeds of what would become Bridge. She imagined a woman the world had not yet made room for. By 1983, that woman had arrived. It was Tomio Taki who formalized the initiative, and Donna Karan and Louis Dell’Olio, Anne Klein’s proteges, who brought it to life. Anne Klein II debuted that year as the first bridge line in American fashion.

Donna had been at the house since 1968. Louis joined in 1973, the same year Anne Klein stood alongside American fashion’s finest at the Battle of Versailles. When she died the following year, the two friends stepped up together, inheriting the design direction of the house she had built. For the next decade they shaped it, won multiple Coty Awards, and were inducted into the Coty Hall of Fame.

Sixteen years at Anne Klein gave Donna the certainty of her own eye. In 1984, she was ready to share it. She had spent a decade learning the craft inside another house. Now she was ready to design on her own terms. With her husband Stephan Weiss and backing from Takihyo, she founded Donna Karan New York that year and presented her first collection in 1985 to a standing ovation. It was her luxury line, parallel to the Anne Klein Collection she had spent years shaping. Louis continued as sole designer of both the Anne Klein Collection and Anne Klein II until 1993. And in 1989, four years after her luxury debut, Donna launched DKNY. Her version of Bridge. The same architecture she had learned at Anne Klein, rebuilt entirely under her own name.

She continued the cycle. When Donna returned to Parsons as a faculty adviser, she found Jane Chung. As Donna told it: “Her name is Jane Chung. I taught her at Parsons School of Design, and she said to me, ‘I wanna give DKNY a shot.’ And she has been there from the very, very beginning. She truly is the launch of DKNY.” Anne Klein had pulled Donna out of a classroom. Donna pulled Jane out of one too. The same instinct, one generation later.

DKNY started as the casual expression of the Donna Karan Collection woman, the same woman, just living a different part of her life, before expanding to serve every part of it. In DKNY’s first year alone, the Donna Karan company reached $115 million in total sales. One of the most successful launches in fashion history.

No conversation about Bridge is complete without Ellen Tracy. Ellen Tracy was an ideal, not an actual person. The company was founded in 1949 by Herbert Gallen, who invented the name. In 1962 he hired a recent college graduate named Linda Allard, who spent the next forty years guiding the brand through every evolution of the American working woman’s wardrobe, from junior sportswear in 1964 to better ready-to-wear, arriving finally at Bridge in 1984 when her name was added to the label.

Dana Buchman was the last of the original Bridge brands, and her origin story says everything about how seriously the category had been taken. By the mid-1980s, Liz Claiborne Inc. was the largest women’s apparel manufacturer in the world, built on better sportswear. But Bridge was growing and they had no presence in it. In 1982 they recruited Dana Buchman directly from Ellen Tracy, where she had been developing her eye, bringing her in as a knitwear designer. Her work proved so strong that Liz Claiborne charged her with building a Bridge label that would bear her own name. Dana Buchman launched in 1989. The pipeline was direct and deliberate. One generation trained the next, carrying the standard forward.

The talent that built Bridge ran through two companies, each with its own distinct voice, both answering the same woman. And unlike luxury, which was born in Europe, Bridge was entirely, unapologetically American.

The talent structure behind Bridge mirrored the way luxury had always built itself. Chanel trained designers who built the next generation. Dior, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, all talent pipelines, craft moving through houses, standards carried forward by the people who had absorbed them firsthand. Bridge had its own version of that system. Anne Klein did not just invent the category. She trained the people who built it.

That is what Bridge was built to do. Create an emotional relationship between a woman and what she wore. Make her feel like she had already arrived, even before she fully had.

I know this world from the inside. I worked in the better women’s department at Filene’s all four years at Wellesley, the real Filene’s, not the basement. The Bridge section sat by the windows, separated from the rest of women’s ready-to-wear by its own aisle. I saved up and bought my first Ellen Tracy suit. Eggplant. Big shoulder pads. A short trench jacket with a tie. I loved it more than anything I owned. Then in 1990, as a department manager at Macy’s, I spent my entire weekly paycheck of $330 on a hunter green silk and linen Anne Klein II suit. I thought I was the most sophisticated woman alive.

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The Peak, and Then the Floor Moved

I started at DKNY while finishing my master’s at Columbia, brought in to help create and execute DKNY Jeans because I had been the buyer for junior denim at Macy’s. I went on to become the analyst for DKNY clothing and accessories, then corporate analyst, and eventually National Sales Manager for DKNY women’s in the late 1990s, right at the brand’s peak. In 1996 and 1997, the DKNY floor at Bloomingdale’s on 59th Street did over eight million dollars annually. Floor-to-ceiling shop installations. Not rented space, not a shared rack. A destination. That is what Bridge looked like when it was working.

Then Theory launched in 1997. Andrew Rosen and Elie Tahari built it on a single proposition: technically sophisticated stretch fabrics, unfussy silhouettes, no designer name required. The contemporary category that followed was functional rather than fashion-forward. It served a real need. But it was not Bridge. And it kept taking up more floor space, season by season.

I felt the floor move even if the broader industry was slower to name it. And then came the moment that said everything: Saks moved DKNY from the contemporary floor to the missy floor. That was a dark day. Not just for the brand. For the whole category. Bridge had been reclassified as something it was never meant to be, by the very stores that had built their identity around it.

Bridge was not killed by a single blow. It was an onslaught, methodical and relentless. In 1992 Levi’s sent a guide to casual business wear to 25,000 American companies. By 1994 nearly half of the thousand most important companies in America observed Casual Friday. By the late 1990s a third of US companies had gone casual five days a week. The Bridge customer did not reach for khakis and a polo shirt. She was never going to do that. But she did reach for a $200 pair of Seven For All Mankind jeans with a beautiful blazer and a great top. Premium denim gave her a new language for sophistication. Theory gave her a new language for workwear. James Perse in 1994. Vince in 2002. Rag and Bone in 2002. Citizens of Humanity in 2003. J Brand in 2004. Each one a new destination for the dollars that used to flow to Bridge. And then January 1, 2005, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing expired and fast fashion flooded in. Bridge never had a chance. Born from one cultural moment, undone by another.

Same White Space. Different Reasons.

It is 2026. According to HSBC, luxury prices have risen over 50 percent since 2019, more than double the rate of inflation. The contemporary floor has quietly delivered less for a decade. And the woman who once built her career in Bridge-quality clothes is back, older, more certain of what she wants, and far less willing to settle.

Here is what I want you to understand about this moment. The conditions that created Bridge the first time have reassembled themselves, but the causes are completely different, and the result is something more durable than what came before.

Then, the white space opened because women were ascending for the first time and the market had not caught up. Luxury was out of reach simply because it always had been. Bridge filled a gap that had never been filled before.

Now, the white space opened because the market failed the customer from both directions simultaneously. Luxury broke itself, as this series has argued, abandoning the craft, the restraint, and the customer who made it aspirational. And the contemporary labels that were supposed to fill the middle quietly stopped investing in the woman they were built for. Thinner fabrics. Simpler construction. The same or higher prices. The category that was supposed to serve her delivered less of everything except the invoice.

The customer who wanted quality without luxury’s price tag, sophistication without the pretension, got squeezed from above and below at the same time. The middle was empty again. Different reasons. Same white space.

That moment is now. The office has re-formalized post-pandemic. Women hold more leadership positions than at any point in history. Discretionary spending is being scrutinized like never before. She is not going to overpay for luxury that has lost its point of view. She is not going to accept less from contemporary.

Bridge 2.0

I went for a walk on Bleecker Street. What I found confirmed everything I had been thinking. But the story is bigger than one block. South of 14th Street, in the West Village, SoHo and Tribeca, these brands have quietly claimed the best addresses in the city. No department store floor needed. Just the right street and a customer who already knows where to find them.

My first stop was Sarah Pacini. I recognized it immediately because there is one on Rue de Turenne in Paris, the street where one of my closest friends’ lives. I must have passed it a thousand times. Designed in Belgium, made in Italy. The knits are remarkable, the fabrics serious, the price points exactly where Bridge belongs. This is not a brand trying to be luxury. It is a brand that understands quality at the level luxury used to, and has priced it for the woman who deserves it.

Leset was also there, an LA-based brand priced just below traditional Bridge but delivering genuinely better fabrication and silhouettes than its contemporary counterparts. It has been compared directly to The Row in aesthetic sensibility. That comparison says everything about the tier it is reaching for. And Anine Bing was there too, with career and sophisticated casual pieces that touch Bridge pricing in her suiting. She belongs to a tier worth acknowledging, brands like Sezane, The Frankie Shop and Soeur alongside her, which carry Bridge’s aesthetic point of view and an emerging commitment to fabrication at contemporary price points. They understand the woman. They are the on-ramp.

Trish Wescoat Pound rose to President and Creative Director at Theory. Built Haute Hippie to $40 million. Lost everything. Wasn’t afraid to start over. TWP is what she built next. Her New York label describes it simply: “well-made clothes for women who don’t want to pay luxury prices.” That is the Bridge definition in her own words. The man who gave her her first job at Theory thirty years earlier, Andrew Rosen, is now her business partner at TWP. Andrew Rosen co-founded Theory, the category that helped displace Bridge 1.0. In 2021 he backed TWP. When someone who helped reshape the market once bets on it shifting again, pay attention.

Nili Lotan spent years leading design at Liz Claiborne, Ralph Lauren and Nautica before David Chu, the founder of Nautica, suggested she launch her own line and offered to back her. In 2003 she did. They did not continue together, but that push was all she needed. She opened her studio and store on Duane Street in Tribeca in 2006 and built entirely on her own terms. As she puts it: “I really do design for myself. I’m a real woman: I have kids, I have a husband, I travel, I work, I entertain. My clothes are the answer to my life, and I think that’s why so many women see them as the answer, too.” When a former Barneys CEO was asked what filled the void left by the brands that faded, the answer was Nili Lotan. Price point, quality, and fit. She had been building quietly in Tribeca since 2003, and nobody handed her a thing.

Bridge 1.0 was entirely American. Bridge 2.0 belongs to no single country.

The cohort is wide and growing on both sides of the Atlantic. Toteme from Stockholm, whose scarf coat needs no introduction, posts double-digit growth every year post-pandemic and now has two New York stores.

Studio Nicholson, founded in London in 2010 by Nick Wakeman, has built a devoted following on both sides of the Atlantic with the same fabric-first, no-fuss philosophy that defines the whole category.

And Chava Studio, founded in Mexico City, builds made-to-order shirts and suiting from Savile Row fabrics with the construction precision women’s brands have historically skipped.

In accessories, Polene from Paris has become the proof point the whole argument needed. The leather is made in the same Ubrique ateliers as Loewe. The price is a fraction. The woman carrying it knows exactly what she bought and why.

Bridge has always been built this way. Herbert Gallen saw Linda Allard. Anne Klein saw Donna Karan. Donna Karan saw Jane Chung. Linda Allard saw Dana Buchman. Liz Claiborne saw her too. David Chu saw Nili Lotan. Andrew Rosen saw Trish Wescoat Pound twice. One generation recognizing the next. The knowledge moving forward. The category rebuilding itself.

Bridge 1.0 vs. Bridge 2.0

Here is what separates this Bridge moment from the original one. Anne Klein II, Ellen Tracy, DKNY and Dana Buchman needed the department store. When those floors shifted, the brands went with them or disappeared. The new Bridge is not built that way.

These brands are DTC-first or own-store-first. They do not chase a department store floor plan that cannot decide where they belong. They own their customer directly. Through their own doors. Through word of mouth. Through communities no buying office controls. Trish Wescoat Pound started TWP with trunk shows. Nili Lotan built a hundred-million-dollar brand without a single outside investor. Toteme grew from $40 million to over $100 million in just a few years without a single fashion week show.

The original Bridge category needed permission from retail infrastructure. This one does not. And that changes everything about its durability.

I spent years inside one of the brands that defined the original Bridge era. I watched it get built, watched it peak, and watched the floor shift under it. What I see now, on this side of the Atlantic and the other, looks different in structure but feels identical in spirit. A woman who refuses to compromise on quality, refuses to pay luxury prices, and is finally being answered. The category the industry abandoned did not go away. It just waited for founders who understood it well enough to build it without a department store floor to stand on.

Bridge is back. This time on its own terms.

Enjoy,

Michelle

Parts 1 and 2 explored what luxury was and how it broke itself. Part 3 is about who broke it.

I have been frustrated for years watching the same names rotate through the same chairs. Another announcement. Another departure. Another appointment. The names change but the pool does not. It was not until I saw it mapped out that the full picture hit me. This is not a trend. This is an epidemic. And the numbers are now proving what the eye already suspected.

Look at it. Really look at it. The same designers moving between the same houses. The same training grounds. The same resumes. The same rotating door. And there at the bottom, three names currently without a chair. Kim Jones, who held Dior Men and Fendi womenswear simultaneously, two of the most powerful chairs in fashion at the same time. Hedi Slimane, who nearly tripled Saint Laurent and more than doubled Celine. Riccardo Tisci, who ran Givenchy for twelve years and Burberry after that. When the music stopped, there was no chair for any of them.

This did not happen by accident. It happened because the industry stopped believing in something it once understood instinctively. That the most valuable thing a creative director brings to a house is not their name. It is their time.

Then and now

Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel for 36 years. Simultaneously at Fendi for 54. Hubert de Givenchy at his own house for 43 years. Valentino Garavani for 47. Yves Saint Laurent for 41. Giorgio Armani, who founded his house in 1975 and worked until his death in September 2025, 50 years, never relinquishing creative control, working until his final days. Ralph Lauren, who founded his company in 1967 and remains its Executive Chairman and Chief Creative Officer today, approaching 60 years of unbroken creative vision. Calvin Klein founded his company in 1968 and held creative control for thirty-five years before selling to PVH in 2003. Donna Karan held the creative reins of her mainline from 1985 to 2015, thirty years. Jane Chung designed DKNY from its launch in 1989 until 2015, twenty-six years, the quiet architect of one of the most beloved American brands of its era. Christopher Bailey at Burberry for 17 years. Veronique Nichanian at Hermes menswear for 37. Phoebe Philo at Celine for 10 years, and in that decade she trained an entire generation of creative directors who now run some of the biggest houses in the world. Miuccia Prada took over her family’s leather goods business in 1978, launched her first ready-to-wear collection in 1988, and has never left the creative chair, over 40 years of singular vision, and Miu Miu, her secondary line, just recorded a 41% increase in retail sales for 2025. Even she, after four decades, chose to share the chair with Raf Simons rather than hand it to a stranger. That is a statement about what creative direction is supposed to mean.

And then there is this. Christian Dior himself ran his namesake house for only ten years, from the New Look in 1947 until his sudden death in 1957. In a single decade, with complete creative control and an uncompromising point of view, he changed the course of fashion and gave a demoralized post-war world a reason to believe in beauty again. Since his death, the house that bears his name has cycled through creative directors. Jonathan Anderson is the latest, and his appointment was the most anticipated in decades. Dior proved that tenure is not measured in years alone. It is measured in the depth of what you leave behind.

Now look at today. Givenchy has had three creative directors in eight years since Riccardo Tisci left in 2017. Gucci dismissed Alessandro Michele when growth slowed, not stopped, slowed, and has since cycled through two more. And then there is Hedi Slimane. He moved from Dior Homme to Saint Laurent, where he controversially stripped the Yves from the name and imposed his rock and grunge aesthetic entirely over the house’s existing legacy, to Celine, where he did the same to Phoebe Philo’s quiet minimalist world. The numbers at both houses were extraordinary. He nearly tripled Saint Laurent’s revenue from 353 million euros to nearly a billion, and more than doubled Celine’s to nearly 2.5 billion euros. Nobody questions his talent. What I question is something else entirely. If your vision is so strong that it can generate those results entirely on your own terms, then have your own brand. The houses existed before you arrived and their heritage is worth protecting. Slimane left Celine in October 2024 when contract negotiations failed and is now without a position. Riccardo Tisci, who ran Givenchy for twelve years then moved to Burberry, has held no major house role since 2022. The average tenure at a major house today is under three years. You cannot build a point of view in three years. You can barely learn the archives.

But not every house forgot. Fendi under the founding family was not just a fashion house. It was a training ground for the entire industry. Maria Grazia Chiuri started there in 1989 as head of accessories, working alongside Silvia Venturini Fendi during the creation of the Baguette bag, and recruited Pierpaolo Piccioli to join her. Alessandro Michele worked there in his early career. Frida Giannini did too. Chiuri moved to Valentino in 1999 and brought Piccioli with her, where they spent 17 years and grew the brand to a billion euros in revenue. Then Chiuri went to Dior as its first ever female creative director, where over nine years revenue quadrupled. She is now back at Fendi as Chief Creative Officer, returning to the house where she began over 35 years ago. That is not musical chairs. That is a full circle earned through decades of sustained, serious work. The Fendi founding family understood something that most of today’s ownership structures have forgotten: if you build a culture of craft and mentorship, the talent you develop will carry the industry for generations. They sold to LVMH in 1999. The designers they trained are still running the industry twenty-five years later. When the last family member stepped down in 2025, Fendi did not go looking for the next big name. They called Maria Grazia Chiuri, who had been trained by the family, who left when they sold, and who spent the next twenty-five years proving exactly what Fendi had built in her. That is not a hire. That is a homecoming.

What a creative director actually is

I spent my career inside some of the greatest creative visions American fashion has ever produced. I know what it feels like when a house has one, and I know what it looks like when it is gone.

At Donna Karan, the electricity was real. So was the chaos. Donna was always the front person, the presenter, the force of nature in yoga attire who could walk into a room full of struggling salespeople and walk out having left them mesmerized. I saw it happen. We were heading into Spring of 1999 market and the collection was a departure, floor-length fantasy skirts and netted sculptural tops. The buyers had not yet seen it. Inside the building, we were all trying to figure out how to tell the story, how to sell what felt like a significant shift from what we had done before. Our president had Donna come speak to us. In fifteen minutes she transformed the room. That was the thing about Donna. She could make you believe in anything she believed in. Her 1992 “In Women We Trust” campaign, which cast a model as the first woman president of the United States, was pure Donna. Political, powerful, ahead of everything. But here is what people often misunderstand about her. That campaign was not just for the Donna Karan collection. It was for both. Because in Donna’s mind, it was always the same woman. The woman in the Donna Karan collection was the same woman in DKNY. She was just living different parts of her life.

Jane Chung understood that better than anyone. Donna had taught Jane at Parsons, and when it came time to launch DKNY, Donna called her. Jane was there from day one, the perfect complement to Donna’s vision. Where Donna was expansive and declarative, Jane was precise and architectural. “She was my balance,” Donna later said. “She wouldn’t only go along with me. She was very defined on who she was and what she wanted to do.” I remember my first real fashion show, DKNY Fall 1996, which I attended as a standing room guest through my friend Jen, who was assistant to the president at the time. The invite alone told the whole story, a swatch of chartreuse suede printed with the show details. Jane’s work. Before you even walked through the door, the world had already begun. Everything you touched, bought, and loved about DKNY in its golden years came from that collaboration. Donna’s singular point of view. Jane’s ability to translate it into a product that felt timeless. It sat perfectly in the space between luxury and missy, which was the industry’s shorthand for the rest of women’s ready-to-wear. It was the definition of bridge, and it helped launch an entire level of fashion alongside Anne Klein II, where Donna came from, Ellen Tracy, and Dana Buchman.

What watching both of them taught me, I have never forgotten. A great creative director does not just deliver a collection. They deliver a world. The product, the campaign, the show, the invite, all of it telling the same story at the same time, with the same hand behind it. That coherence is not an accident. It is the result of a singular point of view, sustained over time, by someone who has earned the right to hold it.

What happens when the vision leaves

I watched it disappear at DKNY in real time. What made DKNY extraordinary has been gone for years. After LVMH took over, the quality eroded slowly. The fabrics lost their integrity. The craftsmanship lost its soul. The risk-taking on declarative style was muzzled. I have always said, and the people who know me will attest to this, when a brand loses its way, go back to the archives and rediscover the brilliance of its birth. DKNY’s archives are extraordinary. Nobody is looking at them.

Today G-III owns and operates DKNY as a licensed brand, primarily for Macy’s. They have also relaunched the Donna Karan label as a more premium line carried by Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue. As someone who was at DKNY in its golden years, my heart is broken. The spirit of the Donna Karan Collection line lives on through Urban Zen, Donna’s own label, which she founded in 2007, a lifestyle and wellness brand rooted in artisanal craftsmanship and her most authentic values. It is Donna on her own terms, free from institutional ownership. But the full fabulousness of what she and Jane built together is not coming back from a licensing deal.

Calvin Klein is another version of the same story, and I watched part of it from the inside. I ran the men’s underwear division, which Warnaco owned outright. It was the most profitable and culturally powerful business in the building. The campaigns alone were worth a graduate course in brand building. Calvin had already sold the company to PVH. He was not in the room. But his point of view still was. That is how strong it had been. And then PVH discontinued the Collection line in 2019. When you pull the north star down, the rest of the brand must navigate without it. The product gets cheaper. The campaigns get louder to compensate. The stores start to feel like they are selling a memory. In February 2025, Calvin Klein Collection returned to the runway for the first time in six years, with a new designer and a new point of view. Calvin himself was there, eighty-two years old, in the front row. But I know what a brand looks like when it is chasing its own ghost.

Built from within — the model that works

The two most compelling creative director stories of the past decade have something in common. Neither arrived from outside. Both were built from within.

Alessandro Michele joined Gucci in 2002 as an accessories designer under Tom Ford. He stayed. He worked under Frida Giannini for years as associate creative director, learning the house, absorbing the DNA. When Giannini left abruptly in January 2015, Michele was given five days to redesign the menswear show. He did it. Two days later Kering appointed him creative director. Thirteen years inside one house, rising from accessories to the top chair. He took Gucci from under four billion euros in revenue to nearly ten billion. Then Kering dismissed him when growth slowed. Not stopped. Slowed. The math on that decision has since spoken for itself.

James Jeter started at Ralph Lauren at sixteen years old as a part-time salesperson. He stayed. He became an intern, then a design associate, then lead designer of the landmark Morehouse and Spelman Colleges Collection in 2022. I wanted that M sweater so badly. So did everyone else. It sold out that fast. That is not a marketing win. That is what happens when a designer brings genuine cultural truth to a brand, the kind of resonance that no campaign budget can manufacture, and no rotating creative director can fake. In September 2024, Jeter was named Creative Director for Men’s Polo, the first Black creative director in the brand’s 57-year history.

Two different houses. Two different decades. The same story. Built from within. Steeped in the heritage. Recognized for original thinking that expanded the brand’s story rather than replacing it. That is what the rotating door system cannot produce. You cannot manufacture that in three years.

The counterpoint worth naming

Jonathan Anderson is the one name in the current rotation who represents a different model. He built JW Anderson into a credible brand, then took on Loewe and stayed for eleven years. He did not just redecorate the house. He rediscovered its Spanish craft heritage and built it into one of the most critically respected brands in fashion. His appointment to Dior was the most anticipated in years, and his debut delivered on everything the industry hoped for. He arrived with his own handwriting already fully formed. And the house met him.

Where new talent comes from

I think the system is broken. Not temporarily lost. Broken. Too many creative directors have become influencers rather than designers or visionaries. They may start with the best intentions, like a politician who enters with genuine ideals and gets slowly absorbed by the system around them.

The great design schools are still producing extraordinary talent. Those students have worked themselves raw to earn a place in it. They deserve a system that actually sees them. Apprenticeship is the other answer, the way the most prestigious houses were built in the first place. Not rotating names. Sustained mentorship. A founder or a long-tenured creative director who stays long enough to actually develop the next generation from within. Ralph Lauren did it. Hermes does it. Fendi under the founding family did it for decades and the industry is still living off that investment. Miuccia Prada has held her creative chair for over 40 years, and when the time came to think about succession, she chose to share the chair rather than vacate it. Phoebe Philo spent ten years building talent at Celine. The industry inherited that talent and immediately put it on the carousel.

And Phoebe herself? She never took another house chair. After leaving Celine in 2017 she chose independence entirely. She launched her own label in October 2023, retains majority ownership, and brought LVMH in as a minority backer. Her 2025 full year revenues surpassed $41 million, nearly tripling from the year before, per a filing with UK Companies House. Her first flagship boutique opens in 2026 on Carlos Place in London’s Mayfair, directly across the street from The Row. Two founder-owned brands, majority controlled by the women who built them, with no corporate overlord telling them what to do. Facing each other on the same block. That is not a coincidence. That is a statement.

The Cost of the Carousel

The musical chairs are not just aesthetically exhausting. They are financially catastrophic. The numbers are in. The chairs keep moving. And the music that made these houses worth listening to in the first place is getting harder and harder to hear.

Something is moving into the space that luxury is leaving behind. Something that understands premium without the hype. Elegant without the streetwear costume. Something that as the workplace returns and people start dressing again, as they want to invest in things worth keeping, is perfectly positioned for what comes next.

That is where we are going in Part 4.

Next: Part 4 — Bridge is Back. And It Was Inevitable.

Enjoy, Michelle

Every system that stops protecting what made it great eventually breaks under the weight of its own compromises. Luxury was no exception.

The unraveling did not happen overnight. It started with a crisis, accelerated through a decade of bad decisions, and arrived somewhere nobody in the industry wanted to admit they were heading. The numbers confirmed it in results reported last week. LVMH, the largest luxury group in the world, just reported its worst quarterly stock performance in recorded history. A 28% decline in Q1 2026, worse than the 2008 financial crisis, worse than the pandemic, worse than the dot-com collapse. Fashion and Leather Goods, the core of the empire - Dior, Louis Vuitton, Celine, Fendi, Givenchy - down 2% organically. Then came Kering’s results, also reported last week. Gucci, the brand that was supposed to be in the middle of a creative renaissance under its new artistic director, down 14.3% in the first quarter. Kering shares fell 9.3% in a single day. Bernstein, the luxury analyst firm whose calls the industry watches closely, summed up the LVMH results in one line: ‘Party postponed.’

This did not happen to luxury. Luxury did it to itself.

And then there is Allbirds. Once valued at $4 billion, the brand sold its entire footwear business this month for $39 million, roughly 1% of its peak valuation, and announced it was pivoting to become an AI company. It is now called NewBird AI. I am going to let that sit for a moment. A shoe company that forgot what it was selling, sold everything, and bought a buzzword. The stock jumped 600% on the news. I am shaking my head. But Allbirds is not a luxury story. It is a cautionary tale about what happens at the far end of losing your point of view entirely. When you no longer know what you stand for, you will stand for anything.

Luxury is not there yet. But it is closer than it should be.

The moment the calendar broke

The first crack appeared in 2008. When the financial crisis hit, the industry panicked. Brands that had spent decades protecting their pricing discipline suddenly found themselves sitting on mountains of unsold inventory and no customers willing to pay full price for any of it. The sales started early. The discounts were extraordinary. I know because I was there, shopping them, not knowing whether I would have a job the following Monday. And even in that uncertainty I recognized something important: this was a once-in-a-lifetime correction. Companies had over-produced freely. Retailers had over-bought recklessly. The inventory that flooded the market in the holiday season of 2008 and spring of 2009 was the consequence of years of discipline breaking down quietly before the crisis made it visible.

I bought as much as I could. Because I understood that what I was seeing would never happen again. That going forward, inventories would be controlled, budgets would be strict, production would be managed. I was right about that part. What I did not anticipate was that the brands would never fully restore the calendar. Having broken the rules once in a crisis, they found reasons to keep bending them. The twice-yearly sale season gave way to rolling promotions, earlier markdowns, and an industry increasingly indistinguishable from the mass market it had always looked down on. When you abandon your own calendar, you abandon the signal that told your customer you were worth waiting for.

The creative director carousel

If the broken calendar was the first symptom, the creative director musical chairs are the most visible one. In roughly eighteen months, nearly every major house changed creative leadership simultaneously. Chanel. Dior, both men’s and women’s. Gucci, twice. Bottega Veneta. Fendi. Valentino. Balenciaga. Loewe. Versace. Balmain. The same names rotated through the same chairs. And Kim Jones, who held Dior Men and Fendi womenswear at the same time, is now without a position. When the music stopped, there was no chair. More on all of this in Part 3, because the creative director story deserves its own conversation.

But let me say this here. The Gucci numbers reported last week are the perfect illustration of the problem. Alessandro Michele took Gucci from under four billion euros in revenue in 2015 to nearly ten billion in 2021. Then growth slowed. Not stopped. Slowed. Kering dismissed him anyway. “Pretty Woman” moment: “Big mistake. Big. Huge.” What they failed to understand is that double digit growth on a four-billion-euro base is a very different mathematical challenge than double digit growth on a ten-billion-euro base. The denominator gets bigger as the business gets bigger. Michele built something extraordinary. And they let him go for not delivering the same miracle twice on a number twice the size. Gucci has since churned through another creative director and is now down 14.3%. The math on that decision is not complicated.

I do not have one appointment that bothers me more than another. What bothers me is the pattern. These are not fresh voices discovering what a house can be. They are familiar names in rotation, and the houses are paying the price in consumer confusion and eroded brand equity. The question nobody is asking loudly enough is: where is the new talent? Where are the designers who spent years developing their own point of view, earning their way to a major house by building something original first? That is the conversation for Part 3.

The squeeze from below

While luxury was making these decisions at the top, something genuinely brilliant was happening below. Streetwear, in its original form, did something luxury had never thought to do. It changed the currency of access. You did not need money to belong. You needed knowledge. Being in the know was the price of entry. The Supreme Thursday drop. The limited release that only certain people even knew was happening. I call this inclusive exclusivity, and it was revolutionary. For the first time, a kid without significant means could own something genuinely rare and genuinely coveted, not because of their bank account but because of their cultural intelligence. That changed everything about how a generation understood aspiration.

Luxury watched streetwear win and made a catastrophic misread. They thought they could layer that cultural credibility on top of money as a barrier to entry. But inclusive exclusivity does not stack. It replaces. The magic of the model is precisely that knowledge substitutes for wealth. When luxury tried to import the aesthetic without understanding the philosophy, they lost their existing customer without ever truly capturing the new one.

Then influencer brands arrived and commodified access entirely. Suddenly exclusive meant a 48-hour window on a merch drop. The currency luxury had spent a century building was devalued by a thousand different hands, and the industry opened that door themselves by chasing relevance they did not earn.

Where the Barneys customer went

The customer did not disappear. She migrated. And I know because I am one of her.

I have been spending time in the secondary market in ways I would not have imagined a decade ago. Last month I was thrifting in Williamsburg with my sixteen-year-old friend (I have what I am told is “cool aunt” status with many of my friends’ children) and she bought more at Crossroads Trading Company than anywhere else we went that day. The treasure hunt energy of those places, when you are doing it for someone else, is genuinely joyful. For my own shopping, I recently discovered Offspring New York, a resale and new designer showroom in Brooklyn with the kind of curatorial intelligence Barneys used to deliver. Herman Solomon, the founder, is a genuine talent finder. I found it by accident and nearly missed the fashion show I was supposed to be attending on the same floor. Full disclosure: our FURI streetwear line is now in the showroom. But I am telling you about it because if you love designer fashion and discovering new voices, you need to find your way there. offspring-ny.com.

That former Barneys customer understands the value of what she is buying. She is not fooled by inflated resale prices, and some of the more prominent platforms have gotten greedy. I once saw a Giambattista Valli dress, I bought at Barneys on sale, five years later at a resale platform for more than I originally paid. The Barneys customer knows. She is buying and selling now, turning over pieces she has loved, finding new ones, upcycling heirlooms. She is participating in fashion entirely on her own terms. And luxury brands are not seeing a cent of those transactions.

The secondary market for luxury goods is now forecast to grow two to three times faster than the primary market through 2027. That is not a trend. That is a verdict.

The one who never forgot

Hermes never played any of these games. Thirty-seven years of creative consistency in menswear under Veronique Nichanian. No chasing streetwear. No promotional calendar capitulation. No revolving door of creative directors. Revenue of 16 billion euros in 2025, up 9%, while every competitor around them struggled. And while the rest of the industry scrambles to find its next creative director, Hermes has been quietly building schools. The Ecole Hermes des savoir-faire, opened in 2021, now runs 12 training centers across France, accredited by the French Ministry of Education, open to people from any professional background, training the next generation of craftspeople from the ground up. They are not just protecting what they built. They are investing in who will build what comes next. That is what it looks like when a house actually believes in its own future.

The lesson was always there. The industry chose not to learn it.

And yet markets correct. Consumers do not disappear forever. They recalibrate. And when they do, the question that matters is not which brand has the newest name on the door. It is which brand actually remembers what it is. That question leads us directly to Part 3.

Next: Part 3 — The Creative Director and the Question Nobody Is Asking

Enjoy, Michelle

First Thursday in June and December. I would take a half day, sometimes a full one, and I would go. Not browse. Not wander. Go. With intention. With a list in my head, I had been building for months. I had a route. It never changed. First stop: Prada on 70th and Madison. Then work my way south. Miu Miu. Missoni. Then Barneys, always Barneys, where I would spend the better part of a day going floor by floor and then return many more times over the following weeks as they kept putting out new things. Then Prada on 57th, Prada on Fifth, down to the Soho store on Broadway and Prince. Jeffrey’s. Catherine Malandrino. A pilgrimage, in every sense of the word.

I was hunting. And finding something you had wanted, waited on, taken a gamble might not be there, was a victory like no other. I know how that sounds. But this was not vapid consumption. It was passion. It was knowing the story behind every collection, imagining every possible experience you would have in that piece, understanding that what you were holding was not a purchase. It was an investment. A Narciso Rodriguez dress. A Dries van Noten Jacket. A Giambattista Valli garden party frock marked down from $3,200 to $750 that I may never have worn but will never give away. A burgundy suede satchel from Prada that I still have. A black bag covered in red velvet roses, a leftover from the summer sale, that a salesperson I knew at the Soho Prada brought out for me. It was during Fashion Night Out in 2009, the event the CFDA created after the financial crash to get people excited about fashion again. I bought it on the spot. I still have it, of course.

These were pieces of art you could wear for the rest of your life. That was the entire point.

My relationship with luxury did not start with money. It started with education. I grew up hearing about fashion through my father, who spent forty years in the industry. He was a Bloomingdale’s man, but he got his Bar Mitzvah suit at Barneys in 1952. The bones of this world were in my DNA before I knew what to do with them. It was not until I went to work at Donna Karan that my real luxury education began. Before that, I genuinely did not know. I remember the exact moment it crystallized. It was 1997. I was 29. I was dressed down, working to open the DKNY store across from Barneys on 60th and Madison, where I was National Sales Manager at the time. Princess Diana had just been killed. I took a break to walk to the British Embassy to sign the condolence books for William and Henry. On my way back, I stopped at Prada on 70th and made my first luxury purchase, two pairs of shoes. It was enormous. I never forgot it. And I never stopped going back.

What made those years extraordinary was not just what you bought. It was how the whole system worked. Luxury operated on its own calendar, and that distinction mattered. The first Thursday in June marked the start of the summer sale season. The first Thursday in December did the same, for the fall season, well before Christmas and conspicuously separate from the Black Friday frenzy unfolding around it. Two opening guns, twice a year, that had nothing to do with the American promotional machine and everything to do with something more deliberate. Full price the rest of the year, no apology. That was not stubbornness. That was the architecture of desire. Scarcity created longing. The calendar created ritual. And ritual created customers who were not just buying product. They were participating in something.

I remember waiting outside the Manolo Blahnik store on 54th on a cold December day while they restocked the floor. I watched from the lobby of MoMA across the street until they let us back in line. I look back on that now and it seems insane. But it also tells you everything about what that era felt like. We were not passive consumers. We were hunters. And the industry understood that. It honored it. The brands controlled the calendar. The retailers held the standard. And the customer, educated, intentional and loyal, understood that the wait was part of the value.

Barneys was the cathedral of all of it. Gene Pressman captures that world in his 2025 memoir, They All Came to Barneys, a bestseller and being adapted for television, and reading it felt like finding a photo album I did not know I had. Because I was there. I got my hair cut at Barneys downtown in the 90s. I took my team to Barney’s on 60th, every year to celebrate our wins. I loved watching young fashion people experience Fred’s for the first time, the restaurant on the top floor, where after hours of shopping every floor you would collapse into a chair and order champagne and the most famous fries in New York. Every year between Christmas and New Year’s, my close friend Nancy and I had our annual Barneys date. We would go floor by floor together, trying everything on. I can still see her in a burgundy Lanvin dress when Alber Elbaz was still at the helm. We would end at Fred’s every time. It was a ritual. It was a relationship. It was, as Marc Jacobs wrote in his blurb for Pressman’s book, the work of the original influencer. Not because Barneys told you what to think. But because it curated, ruthlessly and brilliantly, with a point of view so clear you trusted it completely. It was the first store in America to carry Giorgio Armani’s full collection. It brought us Alaïa, Dries Van Noten, Comme des Garçons. It did not carry everything. It carried the right things. And that editorial authority was the product, as much as anything on the rack.

That is what luxury was. Not a price point. A promise. A covenant between the brand, the retailer, and the customer that said: we will make things worth having. You will find them worth waiting for.

It held for decades.

Then, quietly at first and then all at once, it broke.

Next: Part 2 — How Luxury Broke Itself

Enjoy, Michelle