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Jonathan Anderson Is Leaving Loewe After Rampant Rumors

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Jonathan Anderson Is Leaving Loewe After Rampant Rumors

Finally, after months of rumors, it’s official: On Monday, LVMH announced that Jonathan Anderson, the designer who transformed Loewe from a minor Spanish leathergoods house into a cultural lodestar and is one of the buzziest names in the LVMH stable, a favorite of Daniel Craig, Greta Lee and Josh O’Connor, was leaving the brand.

“What he has contributed to Loewe goes beyond creativity,” Sidney Toledano, the chief executive of the LVMH Fashion group, said of Mr. Anderson in the news release. “He has built a rich and eclectic world with strong foundations in craft which will enable the House to thrive long after his departure.”

Where Mr. Anderson goes next, and who takes his place, was not revealed. Cliffhanger!

Not really.

Planned designer moves have been leaking like a sieve since last fall. Things could always change, but it is widely accepted that Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the American founders of Proenza Schouler who stepped down from their label in January, will be taking Mr. Anderson’s place at Loewe. Mr. Anderson is expected to move to Dior, where he will most likely take the reins of both women’s and men’s wear, the first designer to unite the two halves of the house in decades.

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The mystery is not so much what happens next. The mystery is why it is taking so long, and unfurling so publicly. Even in a DOGE world where firings seem like everyday news, even in a world where designer change has begun to seem like the norm, this has been a painfully drawn-out procedure.

It’s easy to forget, in the fun of playing the fashion equivalent of fantasy football, that the designers involved are human beings rather than chess pieces, with teams of more human beings for whom they are responsible. As a result, Dior has a women’s wear designer, Maria Grazia Chiuri, who has been walking around for months with what seems to be a phantom guillotine hanging over her head.

Ms. Chiuri, 61, was the first woman to lead Dior in its approximately 80 years — and one of the few women at the head of a mega-luxury brand. In her nine years as artistic director of women’s wear, she helped take the brand from an estimated 2 billion euros in revenue to about 9 billion euros. She was also responsible for injecting a feminist note into its narrative and supporting female-led collectives and artists around the world, especially in India. Whatever anyone thinks of Ms. Chiuri’s work — and it could verge on the banal — or her politics (ditto), there’s no doubting her contribution to the business, her work ethic or her place in Dior’s history.

Yet according to the word on the street, Mr. Anderson, 40, has not only been finishing up his Loewe term but has also been working on a shadow Dior collection, even as Ms. Chiuri continues to work on her own. When Mikey Madison wore a remake of a 1956 Dior gown to the Oscars rather than a look from the current collection, it seemed like a portent. The rumors became so rampant that they helped prompt Kim Jones, the Dior men’s designer since 2018, to resign after his last show rather than exist in a state of further insecurity. (His position has not been filled, giving credence to the idea Mr. Anderson will take over both sides of the business.)

And the rumors cast a pall over not only Ms. Chiuri’s couture in January and her ready-to-wear show last month, but also Mr. Anderson’s Loewe presentation. “Was it the last or wasn’t it?” was as much a part of the reactions to the show as the designs themselves. It’s hard to commit to a designer’s vision — to buy into it — when it’s unclear if there’s a commitment to, or from, the designer himself.

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It is possible, of course, that the extended ambiguity is partly Ms. Chiuri’s doing. It’s possible that she is in the middle of a protracted contract negotiation about exactly what shape her departure will take and that no one involved is legally free to address the situation. It is generally believed that her cruise show in May, which will be held in Rome, her hometown, will be her farewell. LVMH declined to comment on why the transition was taking so long or why the news was being released in piecemeal fashion. Sometimes, refusing to address rumors is the best way to make them go away.

Not this time, however. This time, the rumors simply became the accepted state of affairs. Which makes it hard not to wonder why everyone involved did not simply acknowledge the truth, even if it emerged at an inconvenient time, the better to move forward. That would have cast Ms. Chiuri’s final Dior collections and Mr. Anderson’s last at Loewe as collectibles rather than question marks. It would have made the changes exciting rather than anti-climactic.

After all, if fashion reveals anything, it is that closure, as well as transparency, has its own kind of chic.

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DDG Reacts to Halle Bailey TRO … As Soulja Boy Threatens to Beat Him Down

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DDG Reacts to Halle Bailey TRO … As Soulja Boy Threatens to Beat Him Down

DDG
Not Stressing About Halle Bailey Restraining Order
… But Soulja Boy Wants His Head!!!

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How Pandora Is Surviving Trump’s Trade War

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How Pandora Is Surviving Trump’s Trade War

Pandora, the world’s largest jewelry company, is based in Denmark and has nearly 500 stores in the United States, more than in any of its other key markets. But in some ways, its real home is Thailand, where the company has been making its products for nearly four decades.

Like many global corporations, Pandora has used a continent-crossing supply chain to sell its goods worldwide at a low cost. But last month, that supply chain became a grave weakness when President Trump said he would impose 36 percent tariffs on goods entering the United States from Thailand, alongside steep tariffs on dozens of other countries.

After Mr. Trump unveiled his “reciprocal” tariffs, Pandora’s shares were among the worst performing in Europe. A week later, Mr. Trump postponed those tariffs until early July, offering a reprieve.

But the threat looms, and Alexander Lacik, the chief executive of Pandora, is not expecting the uncertainty that is paralyzing businesses to end. Unless tariffs return to previous levels, the next year will be turbulent, he said in an interview. For now, he added, there is little to do but wait to see how investors, customers and competitors react.

“With the information at hand today, I would be crazy to make big strategic decisions,” Mr. Lacik said.

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Alongside business leaders all over the world, Mr. Lacik is grappling with how to respond to Mr. Trump’s unpredictable policies, which have generated almost maddening uncertainty. The Trump administration has started to show a willingness to lower tariffs, but his first agreements, with Britain and China, have posed more questions than answers, and tariffs are still higher than they were a couple of months ago.

Although some aspects of the trade war have been suspended, Pandora and other multinationals are in limbo, waiting for more agreements to be completed.

Pandora, best known for its silver charm bracelets, has been making jewelry in Thailand since 1989. Across three factories, thousands of people handcraft the products. The company is building a fourth plant in Vietnam, but Mr. Trump has threatened tariffs of 46 percent on Vietnamese goods.

Last year, the company sold 113 million pieces of jewelry, about three items every second, making it the largest jewelry brand by volume, with stores in more than 100 countries. A third of its sales, 9.7 billion Danish kroner, or $1.4 billion, were generated in the United States, and Mr. Lacik said he had no intention of moving away from the company’s most profitable market.

But prices will rise, he said, and who will bear the brunt of that is unclear.

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“The big question is, am I going to pass on everything to the U.S. consumer, or am I going to peanut butter it out and raise the whole Pandora pricing globally?” Mr. Lacik said.

But Pandora keeps several months’ worth of stock, giving him time to see how other jewelers change their pricing and then decide.

A few things can be done immediately, such as streamlining parts of the supply chain. The day after the reciprocal tariffs were announced, Pandora said it would change its distribution so that products sold in Canada and Latin America would no longer move through the company’s distribution hub in Baltimore, a process that would take six to nine months to complete.

Moving production into the United States is not being considered, in part because of higher labor costs. Pandora employs nearly 15,000 craftspeople in Thailand and expects to hire 7,000 more in Vietnam.

In an earnings report last week, the company estimated the cost of the trade war. If higher tariffs on Thai imports, 36 percent, and Chinese imports, 145 percent, go back into effect, they will cost Pandora 500 million Danish kroner, or $74 million, this year, and then 900 million Danish kroner, $135 million, annually after that.

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But the jeweler is not panicking. In fact, the economic curveballs are starting to feel normal, Mr. Lacik said. “We are battle ready,” he added.

When he joined the company as the chief executive in 2019, Pandora was struggling. Its share price had dropped more than 70 percent from its peak three years earlier. Mr. Lacik instituted a “complete overhaul,” he said, with new branding and store designs, an emphasis on its “affordable luxury” label, and a showcase of its complete jewelry line, not just charms.

That prepared the company for the trials that hit the global economy next. First, the Covid-19 pandemic, when 15,000 store employees were sent home and some factory workers slept on cots to keep production going. Then a surge in inflation risked customers pulling back.

Mr. Lacik’s strategy appeared to be working. In January, Pandora’s share price reached a record high. Since then, however, it has dropped more than 20 percent.

The company has managed to shield itself from some of the trade turmoil. After Mr. Trump raised tariffs on China during his first term, Pandora stopped sourcing all of its showroom furniture and display materials for its 3,000 stores from China.

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“We had some readiness,” Mr. Lacik said, so they were not “caught completely with our pants down.”

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Dance with a K-pop star? Wrestle a luchador? Airbnb to offer 22,000 experiences

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Dance with a K-pop star? Wrestle a luchador? Airbnb to offer 22,000 experiences

Airbnb wants to do your hair, cook your dinner, massage your back and possibly photograph your honeymoon. All these services, and several more, are part of a new bid by the company to further expand beyond its roots as a lodging broker.

The company unveiled Airbnb Services — which includes 10 initial categories — while relaunching its experiences program and introducing a new app design at a media event in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Rather than heavily emphasizing lodging, the redesigned app more strongly integrates all of its offerings and encourages more interaction among guests and hosts.

This new approach opens new possibilities for the company and its customers, who could order services and experiences from home or on the road. But this step depends on a lot of behind-the-scenes work. The new services menu — which went live Tuesday with 10,500 offerings — will be offered in 260 cities, and Airbnb vows to protect consumers by carefully vetting those legions of service providers.

Airbnb, born in 2007, grew to challenge the hotel industry and became a giant in the world of hospitality. It first launched its Airbnb Experiences program in 2016, serving as a matchmaker between travelers and people offering their services as specialized tour guides and teachers. But that effort sputtered.

By 2022, many critics on Reddit and elsewhere were complaining that Airbnb experiences were unreliable, and industry website Skift reported that Airbnb had stopped adding new experiences and reduced emphasis on them on its homepage. With this relaunch, company representatives said, Airbnb is aiming to focus more narrowly on distinctive experiences that have been more closely vetted. The company also said it would include more experiences focused on meeting or spending time with celebrities.

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To start, Airbnb would offer about 22,000 experiences in 650 cities in 19 categories. To announce the new moves, Airbnb co-founder and Chief Executive Brian Chesky convened hundreds of influencers, podcasters and media in a special-event space in Boyle Heights.

“What if you could Airbnb more than a place to stay?” Chesky asked the audience. “Today we are changing travel again.”

For instance, Chesky said, “Now you can book a professional chef to come right to your home.” The same goes for photographers, personal trainers, massage and spa treatments, hair-styling, makeup and nails. Moreover, “you don’t need to stay at an Airbnb to book these services. You can book them in your own city.”

Chesky said he expects to add thousands of more services over the course of 2025.

In the case of Airbnb Experiences, “we’ve learned a lot about how to make them better,” said Chesky, tacitly acknowledging the feature’s uneven history. As before, the goal is to give travelers an experience that reaches beyond the usual photo-op spots and bus-tour stops.

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Stressing small groups, specific themes, Chesky said the new experiences will fall into five categories: history and culture; food and drink; nature and outdoors; art and design; and fitness and wellness. He encouraged anyone who is an expert in their city and has something to share to apply to be a host. Airbnb representatives said the vetting process, which can take up to two weeks, includes online scrutiny of a host’s work history, licensing, education and any awards — along with ongoing attention to guest reviews.

The renewed program also includes about 1,000 Airbnb Originals — adventures in the company of “the world’s most interesting people.” As examples, Chesky cited a mezcal-tasting session in Mexico City with an expert, a class with a ramen master in Tokyo, a dance with a K-pop performer in Seoul and a visit to Notre Dame with an architect who worked on the cathedral’s restoration.

Those offerings feature at least a few celebrity options, which include spending a Sunday with Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, “learning to throw the perfect spiral” or an anime-intensive encounter called “Become an Otaku Hottie with Megan Thee Stallion.” Airbnb said those initial celebrity experiences are free, offered as a promotion, with guests chosen from applicants.

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