Loose Threads
Oof, can anyone save Gucci? Parent company Kering announced first quarter results: revenue decreased 14 percent, while Gucci sales dropped 25 percent. (Kering sister brand Bottega Veneta, meanwhile, must be a bit smug: its sales were up 4 percent.) New Gucci Creative Director Demna’s designs will premiere in September. I’ll likely do something more in depth on The Gucci Problem this week or next but with consumer confidence being what it is these days, it’s hard to imagine any creative director being able to alter trajectory any time soon. In fact, I’d predict that even downturn-defiant Hermès is going to start to flail.
The New York Times has labeled beige “the color of money.” Hm. After that Blue Origin billionaire joyride architected by none other than Jeff Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez, one might say it’s blue.
Speaking of loud luxury: is it coming for cosmetics? Bond No. 9 is offering $400 refillable Swarovski encrusted lipsticks (and at least one colorway is sold out!). The brand is hosting a Mother’s Day sale (with code MOM15) beginning today.
Do you want to see 71 photos of Michael Dell’s daughter Alexa Dell’s Hawaii wedding in Vogue, featuring a custom Schiaparelli wedding dress? I couldn’t help myself and neither can you.
Demi Moore has been named People’s most beautiful. “I did torture myself,” she said of her old diet and exercise routine. “Biking from Malibu and going all the way to Paramount… it’s about 26 miles on a bike, starting in the dark, to work a full day while I had a new baby that I was still feeding through the night.” She added that her focus these days is on “quality of life.”
GUYS. My beloved sweatpants jeans are now available for children.
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni Want to Save You Money
There was a period in the 2010s when fashion and beauty startups were as hot as a wide-leg jean in 2025. You might remember it as the Box Era — everyone wanted to send you a box filled with crap! Beauty crap (Birch Box) or fashion crap (Stitch Fix) or a random assortment of crap that might include a tie-dyed towel and a face oil (FabFitFun). There were other startup ideas at this time, for cheap jewelry (Bauble Bar), online sample sales (Gilt Groupe), and rented clothing (Rent the Runway). But how much did any of these ideas really disrupt the industry? And what could be possible now with AI?
Maybe what people want is not more stuff, but help figuring out what is worth buying and where to buy it from. Investors probably aren’t thinking much about how to solve these problems, which could be typical venture capital sexism. But there are problems to solve, here: online shopping is, frankly, a nightmare. There’s too much stuff available, it’s hard to know if you’re getting the best price, and a lot of people simply have no time to troll re-sale sites for things they really want even though they’d probably be happy to buy secondhand. Phoebe Gates (one of Bill and Melinda’s daughters) and her roommate from Stanford Sophia Kianni (classes of 2024 and 2025 respectively) hope to help with this with their new app, Phia. Phia (a combination of their names) works as a browser extension that lets you know if you’re getting the best price on an item of apparel, where you can find it cheaper, and where to buy it on re-sale sites like Depop and the Real Real. It also tells you how much value a new item will retain in the event that you re-sell it.
Phia aspires to ultimately do something I thought we would have seen in spades by now, in this great dawn of AI, which is integrate a personal styling tool. “If you think about the question, ‘Should I buy this?’ In an ideal world, an AI assistant should say, ‘No, you should not buy it,’” said Kianni. “What people care the most about is getting the best price for an item. But a good shopping assistant would be able to understand your preferences, your tastes over time, so that when you ask that question, ‘Should I buy this?’ It's, ‘No, you shouldn't buy this because X, Y, and Z are already in your closet.’”
Ahead, I talked to Gates and Kianni about Phia, sustainability, and the potential future of online shopping.
Talk about how you came to this idea and to each other.
Gates: I always wanted to shop secondhand, but I found it pretty challenging because I didn't have time when was in between classes [at Stanford]. I used to shop at Zara in high school. Then, as both of our work in sustainability — and my work specifically in reproductive rights — continued, I was like, Wait a minute, this just doesn't align with what I believe. I don't want to be shopping fast fashion.
I spent every summer of high school going to Rwanda and working in reproductive rights there, which I really, really enjoyed. And I thought I was going to go into gynecology for my med degree. Now I get the honor of building with my best friend every single day and created something to hopefully revolutionize the fashion industry.
Kianni: My background is in climate activism. In high school, I started the climate change nonprofit Climate Cardinals. I grew it through Stanford to become the largest youth-led climate nonprofit. A huge focus of my advocacy was fast fashion. I did a campaign with Vogue Arabia about how there's enough clothes in existence right now to dress the next six generations of humans. I never really understood why anyone would buy anything new, because from a very early age, I realized I could go on Depop and Mercari and find the things that were trendy and cool for 75 percent off.
Phoebe and I both had backgrounds in activism, but we also were thinking from the mindset of a consumer — the reason fast fashion is so prolific among our generation is people don't have a lot of money to spend.
I remember in our Stanford class we asked people, how many of you guys shop secondhand? And I want to say one other person in the room raised their hand. And when we asked people why, a lot of them were like, It's just so overwhelming. I don't know how to find what I'm looking for.
What else were you buying around this time? Were you ever looking for, like, a re-sold Birkin bag where you might troll a bunch of different sites to see what the options were.
Gates: Not a Birkin yet, but some day. But definitely Khaite Jeans [which can cost upwards of $500], trying to find those cheaper on the resale market. A Prada sweater is around $2,000, trying to find that for $200 on the RealReal.
If the item is fast fashion, we're like, Hey, this item is going to depreciate really fast, so you might want to consider investing in a high[er]-end item that is going to last.
Are you big re-sellers?
Kianni: My sister is a power reseller on Depop. I don't personally resell a lot because I feel like I don't buy a lot of clothes, and when I do have clothes that I no longer wear, my sister resells all of them.
Gates: Yeah, mostly to the RealReal. I do some on Vestiaire as well. I actually resell, randomly, a lot of furniture and stuff on eBay. I’m a big puzzler, so I like to get a puzzle from eBay and then resell it.
It's actually kind of niche to be a reseller, but it is not niche to want to know if an item is worth buying or not.
What you’re talking about — a virtual shopping assistant, taking the pain out of the way most people shop — seems obviously useful to a huge number of people. I’m almost wondering why we’re not seeing a lot more iterations of this. Do you have thoughts on that? What are you seeing in the fashion tech landscape more generally?
Kianni: We're building a mobile Safari extension, which, I'm not going to lie, maybe 99.9 percent of people have no idea what it is and have never downloaded one. It's a pretty recent development by Apple to even support a mobile Safari extension.
We actually took a lot of inspiration from the flight and hotel industries. So with Google flights, you can see all the different airlines selling this particular flight, all the different prices, in this really easy-to-understand format.
When Phoebe and I were at Stanford, we were like, This is so crazy. Fashion has not changed in the last few decades. There is such a potential for disruption in this space with AI, with secondhand, and we would definitely be super-excited to work on this obsessively for the next five to 10 years.
How are you monetizing this?
Gates: We're on an affiliate basis, so if we find you a great deal in the RealReal, we take a commission there. We have about 150 secondhand partners.
What about traditional retail?
Kianni: I love a good Sézane sweater. Sézane is still really expensive, unfortunately, on the secondhand market. So for retailers like that, there's also an opportunity for us to partner because in a lot of cases we actually end up driving conversion on their websites.
Do you have investors?
Gates: It was really important for us to raise from a blue chip investor, to not raise from family. We have two great angel investors, Kris Jenner and [Spanx founder] Sara Blakely, but we're going to be hopefully announcing our large blue chip investor in the coming months.
What have you learned from them?
Kianni: Sara Blakely we had on our podcast [The Burnouts]. The biggest thing that she talked to us about was, when she was first doing Spanx, she would go to department stores and sell it herself, and then she would go watch women try it on. They'd be like, I like how it fits here, but it's kind of tight here. It hurts. And then she'd be like, I'm writing this down and I'm going to go to a factory and I'm going to tell them what to change.
Now every two weeks, we meet with 40 girls, we give them pizza at night, and then we ask them, “Try the product. What do you hate? What's confusing?” And then we continue to iterate so that it's like we're building a product that’s solving a pain point.
Phoebe, you talked on Burnouts about being a “nepo baby” and your anxieties around that, which got a lot of coverage in the news. Why did you feel like you had to address that so directly?
Gates: I think it's really important to address that head-on. I think it'd be foolish for me to be like, I don't have privilege. I was able to go to Stanford. I got an incredible education. I went to private school as a child. I think acknowledging those things is super-important.
I thought it was funny that they said I was really nervous about it. I don't think I was ever nervous about it. I think it was more [that] we need to frontload with, Hey, we have access to these people — we have an incredible support system. Otherwise it just wouldn't feel super-real.
So when you download the Phia browser extension, you get a message from Safari about privacy and data. Can you guys talk about that? I know people are going to get that and be nervous to proceed. What are you doing to protect user privacy and data?
Kianni: If you're on Gmail, Phia is not showing up — we only show up on shopping websites. We don't use or do anything with your data. You giving us permission allows us to show up on shopping websites.
What was the last thing each of you bought?
Kianni: Frame jeans. I went to the store and tried on, and then I got them second hand off of, I want to say, Poshmark.
Gates: An Aureum belt off Poshmark.
Phoebe, you interned at British Vogue. What was that like?
Gates: I was going into my sophomore year. I'd never seen the inner workings of fashion specifically — how you run an advertising budget, how brands advertise, then they get credits to be featured in the editorial section. But it was mostly being on set — packing up items, steaming items, repackaging them, shipping them for all the different shoots. They would also let me do some backend research for different articles on things like #MeToo.
I was just shocked at how much waste there was. Frankly, in the fashion industry at large, particularly for these shoots, you're using probably five plastic bags a garment, and you have hundreds of garments. So that was a little crazy to me. But I also realized while I was there, just how hard people in fashion work. I was so inspired by Edward Enninful.
Edward would always be the last person to leave the office, and he knew every single person’s name. He was very direct about his feedback, but he would always [tell people] something that they had done well. He would never put someone down.
He knew my name. He's like, “Hey, we work really hard here. You're going to be ready to work really hard?” And ever since he said that, I’ve not stopped working.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
