The Monday Morning Edit: What You Missed in Fashion This Weekend

Fashion's boys club strikes again, rental finally gets its vindication moment, and Depop is going IRL

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Hi! It’s me! The girl who last Monday said she was really sorry for not posting an actual Thursday newsletter in weeks and that she swore she had one coming and if she didn’t post it that you could bully her!

Well, feel free!

I’m literally begging, like truly someone be mean to me so I’ll get out a fully baked Thursday newsletter.

And do you also know who said they had a bunch of fun stuff planned while they were in Miami and that they were going to film it for TikTok and then lied and didn’t do that either?

In my defense it rained for like 4 days straight, all of my plans got cancelled and I sat in my hotel room eating room service. I’m not complaining!

I’m doing my best, I swear. I’ve yet to miss a Monday?

So let’s just get right into it - everything you missed this weekend in 5 minutes or less!

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• Fashion's game of musical chairs officially ended with Jonathan Anderson's full house takeover at Dior, and the final scorecard is… depressingly predictable: men now occupy nearly every major creative director role despite women making up 85% of fashion graduates. The talent pipeline excuse feels weak when you consider that most number-two designers are also men (appointed by said CD) -it’s almost like we've built a system designed to keep replicating itself (shocking, I know). How do you have an industry where an overwhelming majority of the talent coming out of schools is female, yet when the biggest jobs open up, somehow men keep getting picked? The math literally doesn't add up unless there's something systematically broken about how this industry identifies and promotes talent (👀). Whether these new appointments are good designers isn't the point (they are, they’re tried and true designers) - the point is that we've created a system where the vast majority of trained professionals never make it far enough up the ladder to even get considered for these top roles. Maybe next time!
  
  List of current female CDs (not at eponymous brands):
  1. Nadège Vanhee-Cybulski at Hermès

  2. Sarah Burton at Givenchy

  3. Veronica Leoni at Calvin Klein
  4. Chemena Kamali at Chloe
  5. Sandra Choi at Jimmy Choo
  

• Rent the Runway just forecasted double-digit subscriber growth after finally addressing their biggest customer complaint: everything good is always out of stock (revolutionary insight, truly). They're ramping inventory by 134% this year, which feels like a "why didn't we think of this sooner" moment, especially since Urban Outfitters' Nuuly actually overtook them as the largest rental platform recently. The fact that URBN is using their own brands for Nuuly rentals? Chef's kiss - vertical integration at its finest. Meanwhile, newer players like By Rotation and Pickle (fresh off a $12M Series A) have been eating RTR's lunch by actually solving for customer experience. Speaking of rental wins, Vivrelle just closed a $62M Series C (!!!), proving that when you solve for real pain points (no return dates, try-before-you-buy, exclusive member pricing), people will pay a premium for access over ownership. The rental vindication era is here, and it's about time.

• Depop is taking over NYC for all of June with activations that solve the real problem plaguing all peer-to-peer platforms: getting buyers to care about the platform itself, not just hunt for individual deals. The challenge isn't getting sellers (sellers will always go where they can get the most money for their items) - it's creating buyer loyalty when people can find similar stuff across a dozen other platforms. With Vinted becoming France's largest retailer (!!!) and competition heating up everywhere, platforms desperately need to solve for buyer loyalty. Depop's strategy - from Brooklyn Museum partnerships to block parties to Cosmopolitan collaborations - is smart brand building in a space where most platforms feel completely interchangeable. When your business model depends on community, actually building community in real life isn't just marketing; it's survival strategy. The peer-to-peer space is getting crowded, but whoever figures out how to make buyers actually care about the platform (not just the products) will win. I personally will not be buying $200 “vintage Charlotte Russe” skirts on Depop but to each their own! And this is just me complaining at this point but can these platforms create a universal cart please? TYSM.

• Farfetch is integrating into R.Lux, Coupang's luxury app that already has millions of South Korean users, which is honestly brilliant when most luxury brands are being overly cautious about Asian expansion right now (see: not expanding at all). Coupang (who rescued Farfetch from administration for $500 million) basically owns South Korean e-commerce infrastructure, so instead of Farfetch burning cash trying to convince this demo to download yet another shopping app, they're plugging into one people already trust and use. The strategy is smart as hell - R.Lux gets a massive inventory boost from Farfetch's 1,400 brands and boutiques, while Farfetch gets instant distribution in one of the few luxury markets in Asia not completely imploding. This is exactly the kind of move that works when everyone else is being overly cautious - sometimes the best time to expand is when your competitors are sitting paralyzed on the sidelines.

• H&M's founding family has been quietly buying back shares for years (spending $6.6 billion since 2016) and now controls 85% of voting rights, fueling speculation they're planning to take the fast-fashion giant private despite official denials. The Perssons have ramped up purchases while H&M stock has fallen 60% over the past decade - which is either the worst market timing ever or brilliant opportunism to buy control on the cheap. Stefan Persson built H&M into a global powerhouse and clearly isn't ready to watch it get eaten alive by Zara on one end and Shein on the other. The family has openly complained about short-term investor focus, and when you're trying to reinvent fast fashion (??) while quarterly earnings calls dissect every miss, going private starts looking pretty appealing (I’m a big DND girl maself!). What's particularly interesting is the timing - H&M just posted disappointing Q1 results and their increased marketing spend isn't translating to customer growth (maybe because their editorial is so good and then the product never exists in store or online? Where are the phantom goods?), so this feels less like family sentiment and more like strategic necessity. Sometimes the best way to fix a struggling business is to remove the audience.

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Here’s the part where I give you my normal spiel: it’s 3:10 AM, I have a pilates class at 8 and I need to go to bed desperately. Pls roast me in the comments so I get back on schedule, thaaaanks!

LYLAS <3

Carly