Travis Kelce Fashion, Gap Revival Questions & Outdoor Voices’ New Daddies

Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. I had a nice weekend, spent mostly at kids’ birthday parties and eating various types of French fries. I also got a spray tan.

But you’ll probably be more interested in the pregame. On Friday night, I went for drinks (that turned into dinner) at San Vicente Bungalows. It was busy: a very Sand Hill Rosewood energy. I didn’t know people went out in Los Angeles on weekends!

Thursday was the night to be in town, though. Blasblog hosted a garden party at the Beverly Hills Hotel with Dior, and there were Toteme cocktails celebrating the new store on Melrose. I spent the evening watching Japanese women’s wrestling with Katie Grand, the Le-Tan sisters, Greta Lee, the David Choe who spells his name with an e, and a bunch of L.A. fashion people. (I saw Carol and Humberto; apparently Scott Sternberg was there, too.) A bit more on that below, plus a major update on our favorite emo activewear label, Outdoor Voices, an analysis of the Gap Inc. glow-up, and a riff on the freaky Travis Kelce jeans.

⏰ Requisite programming note: The Journal’s Jacob Gallagher is back with me on Fashion People tomorrow. We ponder the proper short length for summer 2024, Supreme M&A speculation, Roland-Garros’s best (and worst) dressed, and more. It’s a real boy episode. Subscribe here not to miss it. Also, I’m glad you all are enjoying the pod. I don’t want to say the response has been overwhelming because honestly, it would take a lot to overwhelm me. However, it has been really lovely. If you are listening faithfully and can afford a subscription to Puck (obviously you can), just know you will never be a fully realized human in my mind until you join us.

Finally, if you happen to be free this evening at 7 p.m., I’ll be chatting with the costume designers from the HBO and Max Originals series Hacks, The Gilded Age, The Righteous Gemstones, The Sympathizer, and True Detective: Night Country. There are a few seats remaining for the conversation and cocktail hour. It’s at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard—RSVP here.

Okay, let’s get started…

Mentioned in this issue: Outdoor Voices, Ashley Merrill, Tyler Haney, Gap Inc., Richard Dickson, Zac Posen, Sukeban, Kunichi Nomura, Travis Kelce’s “piranha jeans,” Tinos, Olympia Le-Tan, Kali Kennedy, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Marc Jacobs, Candace Bushnell, Reese Witherspoon, Anne Hathaway, and many more…

• The latest in press trips: Cruise season shows still hit. This summer, however, editors are looking for coveted invitations to fashion and hard-luxury brands’ high-jewelry showcases. Dior took editors to Florence, Cartier to Vienna, Hermès to Tinos (for watches, but still). Tiffany kicked the season off with the Los Angeles reveal of their latest collection. These trips, which have proliferated post-Covid, are now considered even more special than the cruises because fewer editors are invited—which allows brands even more time to curry favor via fabulous hotels, unlimited room service, plus lots of debatably pretty gifts.

  Why such a focus on hard luxury? As we all know, the people with the most money are the ones spending these days, and high jewelry lines for Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, and the other mass-luxury brands have performed exceptionally well over the past few years. Did you go to one of these to-dos? Tell me funny stories!

• Back on the Travis beat: I read The Skimm for the first time in at least 10 years this weekend (it happened to pop up in my inbox while I was procrastinating) and they were going on about the “great denim revival,” with nods to a recent Washington Post trend piece and mentions of Travis Kelce’s “piranha jeans,” which aren’t exactly ripped but instead perforated with short, diagonal slashes. (Jacob Gallagher found them for me on Farfetch: They are Heron Preston, and potentially women’s or unisex.)

  Calling any of this a revival is hyperbole: Denim is a perennially big business (upwards of $70 billion globally in 2024, according to some questionable but directionally accurate data). And if the parents at my preschooler’s art exhibition in Northeast Los Angeles last week are any indication, denim is how people dress up these days when they feel like they shouldn’t wear leggings or sweatpants. (Let’s just say I overdid it in all-black and 30mm heels.)

  What’s really happening: The in-poor-taste-denim that was so popular in the early and mid-aughts—too low of a rise, too dirty of a wash, too matchy-matchy—is gaining traction, which makes perfect sense since fashion is cyclical. Less-offensive Y2K wares have been “back” for years. But here’s a bit of fashion advice: You absolutely do not have to participate in this trend. You’re safe with a mid-rise, straight-leg or even slightly tapered jean. This goes for men and women.

  As for what it means for fashion, I happen to love it when people with instinctively bad taste let it fly. One of the most disappointing things about living in these times is that people have so much access to information about clothing that they don’t develop their own sense of style—instead, they just copy what they see. Are these jeans disgusting? Definitely. Do I bristle at the denim corsets and green acid washes flooding e-commerce? For sure. But Kelce loves fashion, and his clothes (generally) fit him. What more could we ask for? This garish era, too, shall pass. Long live bad taste, which is better than no taste.

• The future of fashion entertainment?: You don’t have to be a fan of the deceased Netflix show GLOW, which was about female wrestlers in the 1980s, to appreciate Sukeban, a women’s Japanese wrestling league brought to the U.S. last year by hipster-glasses comms guy Alex Detrick, late of Vice and currently of Supreme. First stop on the tour was New York in September, then Miami in December during Art Basel, and last week, a theater in downtown Los Angeles (currently cosplaying as New York in the late 1970s). I have never watched a WWE match (sorry, Tina), but I assume Sukeban wrestling is not very different, with wacky characters and fake fights that occasionally look real (and very painful).

  Sukeban is unique for a number of reasons beyond the pure wrestling of it all. There are the costumes (designed and styled by co-founder and creative director Olympia Le-Tan, Detrick’s sister-in-law), the faces (conceived by makeup artist Kali Kennedy), and the crowd, which comprised extremely young people in short skirts who definitely have never uttered the phrase “Suck It” (and have certainly never made the hand gesture). Japanese cool-guy Kunichi Nomura (you might know him from Lost in Translation or Instagram) emceed. Stephen Jones did the hats. Marc Newson designed the championship belt. Incredible stuff. No wonder WWE president Nick Khan popped by with his kid.

  When you think about where the culture is moving—an agglomeration of niches—Sukeban feels uniquely relevant. It’s not for everyone, and that’s the point. After the show, I walked out alongside a couple. The woman was wearing a heavy green cardigan embroidered with the phrase “I hate everybody” across the shoulders. “Are you invested?” the guy asked her. Yes, she replied, “I’m going to learn all the characters’ names now.”

• Is Richard Dickson going to pull it off?: On Gap Inc.’s earnings call last week, no less than five different analysts wished the group’s C.E.O. luck, and four congratulated him and his team. That’s because things are looking up: Dickson fired the Banana Republic president, lowered inventory levels (down 15 percent year over year), and made news with Gap’s Met Gala gown, the Dôen collaboration, and the Anne Hathaway white shirt dress—two out of three executed by his chief creative guy, Zac Posen. Most importantly, sales at stores open for at least one year were up across all four brands. (There was bottom-line growth, too.) It shows a lot of discipline, so no wonder analysts were eager to wish Dickson well. The stock popped 20 percent after the announcement.

  Big picture, this progress shows that Dickson is taking a measured, holistic approach to transforming the culture at Gap Inc. All of these brands are going to benefit, for a while at least, from shoppers trading down. (We’re not in a recession, but a lot of consumers don’t realize that.) Dickson’s strategy is going to work in the short term, perhaps over the next year, and that’s what’s important to the market.

  Will it work in the long term? The answer might be yes if he can fundamentally change how the group operates. I’m bullish on Athleta. When you think about portfolio balance, there’s a way to expand Athleta’s footprint while artfully minimizing Gap and Banana Republic. Really, he should just sell Banana Republic once and for all. It means nothing, and it’s a pain to manage.

  Dickson also needs to figure out why Old Navy exists in an era when Amazon and Shein occupy the same price point or lower. Cutting costs, getting inventory in check—these fundamental fixes cannot make up for sweeping changes in how people shop. I suspect he knows that Old Navy needs to be rethought, but this problem won’t be solved overnight.

  The Gap, of course, remains the most important brand in the portfolio, if not the largest. They’ve earned some marketing wins: The Dôen collab led to meaningful sales, and the white shirt dress had significant reach on social media. Then there’s the “Linen Moves” campaign, which Dickson said is successful. But what he’s greenlit so far feels like icing without the cake. I truly believe that there is a fundamental need in the market for a brand that does premium basics, at scale, with an opinion. It should be about the clothes, not Anne Hathaway’s beauty or a jazzy Tyla commercial. Those Everybody in Cords, Everybody in Vests, and Khakis Swing commercials worked so well in the 1990s because the clothes looked good, felt good, and were good. Yes, we live in a different time, but those old ads still circulate on TikTok.

  Dickson is clearly not taking the fast-fashion, no-marketing marketing route adopted by Abercrombie. So he’ll need to figure out how to connect the dots between the marketing and the product in a convincing way. If he pulls off that feat, he has a chance to make everyone happy.

Consortium, founded in 2022 by Cory Baker, Michael DeVirgilio, and Jonathan Greller, is a licensing firm, but the Outdoor Voices deal isn’t a typical licensing play. Ordinarily, “brand management companies” like Authentic Brands Group or Marquee—where Baker, DeVirgilio, and Greller met—extract value from post-prime businesses, either by licensing their trademark to firms making inferior products, or worse, just selling the name for random, unrelated projects. (Authentic Brands infamously mashed together two of its properties, Forever21 and Barneys New York, in an ill-conceived collab, and licensed out Sports Illustrated to a bunch of jokers.) If you talk to anyone at any of these groups, they’ll argue that they are in the business of brand management—or, better, value preservation—but they’re really just squeezing these labels for all their remaining worth, unconcerned with what remains once they’ve had their way with them.

The Consortium Boys, however, have ambitions to run more of a private equity distressed-asset strategy—they actually want to create value for Outdoor Voices in order to either make it very profitable or potentially resell the business down the line. The trio cut their teeth at Marquee managing brands including Bruno Magli (maker of O.J.’s shoes), Destination Maternity, and BCBG Max Azria. A few years back, Marquee also bought the Los Angeles-based merch business Anti Social Social Club, an unusual choice for one of these outfits. Baker, DeVirgilio, and Greller are evolving the approach further with Consortium, an open fund where half the investors are traditional L.P.s (institutional, etcetera) while the other half are strategic—i.e., service providers in manufacturing and the like. The group has raised nine figures, I’m told.

There are reasons for some optimism with the O.V. deal. Consortium’s first purchase was a 70 percent stake in Reese Witherspoon’s lifestyle line, Draper James, in September 2023. In that case, the executive team stayed in place and Witherspoon kept a significant economic interest in the business. (Kirsten Green’s Forerunner Ventures was an early investor in both Draper James and Outdoor Voices, but I’m told this is entirely a coincidence.) With Outdoor Voices, I suspect, the Consortium Boys are also hoping to achieve something similarly dignified while also, you know, doing their thing. WWD reported that there are plans to expand the business into categories like sleepwear and bedding, which actually does reek of the typical licensing playbook.

I was told by a potential buyer that Merrill, along with her husband, Riot Games co-founder Marc Merrill, sunk at least $26 million into the Outdoor Voices business, maybe more, in the hopes of resuscitating the brand. (Merrill denies this—she said that number is “nowhere near” what she put in.) Alas, she couldn’t make the finances work. At Lunya, the sleepwear company she founded in 2012, Merrill successfully leveraged a Chapter 11 bankruptcy to reorganize but keep control. At Outdoor Voices, however, that playbook didn’t pan out. In March, the majority of the brand’s corporate staff were fired and managers at its 16 stores were told to close up shop, permanently.

As the turnaround sputtered, pressure to offload the company continued to mount. I get asked all the time by designers and C.E.O.s for introductions to investors, but it’s rare (if not totally uncommon) that I am asked by an investor for an introduction to a brand. In the case of Outdoor Voices, several people were interested in getting in touch with Merrill, before and after she started prepping the business for a potential bankruptcy in order to clear the debt and sell it off. In the end, she didn’t have to go that far. But she wasn’t able to hold on to the company, either.

As for the Consortium Boys, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get back in touch with Haney, the brand’s erstwhile architect, who occasionally makes us think she might want back in via vague tweets and Instagram posts. But I’m not sure Outdoor Voices is worth saving now, or if Consortium has the ability to save it, or if bringing Haney back into the fold would be smart. It would certainly be fun for me, but it would likely be a horror show for the founder to watch her former baby be licensed off to oblivion. However, I remain steadfast in the idea that there is plenty of room for more activewear brands, given that the category is dominated by just a few names.

The art and design collection of Tamotsu Yagi, the art director who worked on Esprit and also with Steve Jobs, is being sold at Sotheby’s this week. I’ll take the Charlotte Perriand bookcase from Maison du Mexique, thank you! [Puck]

Ten years of normcore, by Delia Cai. (Thanks for quoting me.) [Ssense]

I definitely judge people who wear Golden Goose sneakers. I’m sorry, I still love you. [Reuters]

Carolina Herrera designer Wes Gordon’s next off-piste show will take place in Mexico City in November. Should we make a weekend of it? [WWD]

Japanese video arcades are… taking over dead malls? [Bloomberg]

Love to see Brock gossiping with Candace Bushnell. [New York mag]

An explanation of why people care about Katie Holmes’s style. This is also a moment to note that A.P.C.’s collaboration series is very thoughtful and results in a lot of great clothes. [The Washington Post]

Donatella Versace was honored by the Italian government for her contributions to the arts and culture. [Vogue]

When you’re rich, you can wear whatever you want! [People]

I forgot to mention the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalists last week. Personal faves Connor McKnight, Presley Oldham (Todd Oldham’s nephew!), and Spencer Phipps all made the cut. This is the 20th year of the Fund. Time to reflect. [Vogue Runway]

Until Wednesday,
Lauren