Loose Threads
The Business of Fashion and McKinsey released their annual state of fashion report. This year is supposed to be down slightly or flat for the luxury industry, and 2026 isn’t inspiring overwhelming optimism: “[46] percent of executives expect industry conditions to worsen in 2026, an increase of 8 percentage points over 2025,” the report finds.
Well it’s raining men (and a new typeface) over at Vanity Fair, which just dropped its Hollywood issue. Regarding the issue commenting on masculinity more broadly, new head of editorial content Mark Guiducci told the New York Times, “It’s not that serious.”
I know a lot of you are on the hunt for loafers — Ssense has TONS on sale right now, including this pair by Hereu, and this fringed black pair and this suede brown pair by Ayede (both brands a stylist friend recommended for loafers).
Lily Allen — whose brilliant new album I cannot stop listening to — walked in 16Arlington’s fashion show in London.
Hydrow is having a sale on its signature rowing machines, which include a screen that can stream workouts. Get up to $600 off through November 24 and an additional $50 off with the code BACKROW.
Earlier in Back Row:
It’s Lauren Sánchez Bezos’s Met Gala Now
Silly, silly internet.
Lauren Sánchez Bezos didn’t get a Vogue cover over the summer because Anna Wintour was buttering up her and Jeff Bezos to buy Condé Nast. Unionized workers, legacy media’s ongoing death by a thousand cuts, figuring out how to turn magazines into events — why would any owner of a $500 million yacht big enough to have its own support yacht want to acquire such headaches? Just look at how the Washington Post is going.
Anyway, we now know just what they were seemingly being buttered up to buy: the Met Gala!
Despite the overwhelmingly negative online response to this couple, including their regular Vogue appearances (both online and in the magazine) and recent wedding, Anna has pushed forward in her apparent mission to make them fashion industry figures, culminating with getting them to write a check for this year’s gala. She has helped turn Lauren Sánchez Bezos into one of the most important fashion people in the world. Anna has done so much good charitable work in her career for the Met and other causes, but her willingness to align with rich, powerful, widely disliked figures time and again is one of the most frustrating aspects of her legacy.
On Monday, the Costume Institute announced its 2026 exhibition, Costume Art, which — as I previously exclusively reported — concerns the body. Excuse me — the “dressed body.” The show will cover “the centrality of the dressed body in the museum’s vast collection,” said Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton. (People connected to the Costume Institute told me that incorporating the Met’s existing art saves money, because pieces don’t need to be borrowed and insured, and that museum officials wanted the department to showcase its permanent collection more.)
But overshadowing the theme (which sounds fantastic!) are the underwriters. From the release (emphasis mine):
To celebrate the opening of the spring 2026 exhibition, The Costume Institute Benefit (also known as The Met Gala®) will take place on Monday, May 4. The event’s co-chairs and honorary chairs will be announced in the coming months, along with members of the Gala Host Committee. The Met Gala® takes place annually on the first Monday in May. The funds raised provide The Costume Institute with its primary source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and operations, and also support other Museum activities.
The exhibition and Benefit are made possible by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos.
Additional support is provided by Saint Laurent and Condé Nast.
The catalogue is made possible by Saint Laurent.
The video announcement the Met posted to Instagram called out the sponsors prominently, the Bezoses receiving top billing. Instagram users noticed their names, leading to a rash of disgusted comments and many calls for a boycott of the event.
I know we are living in a post-shame culture, and no one is embarrassed by anything because all engagement is “good” engagement, etc. And I know that Condé Nast is always going to be cutting costs and workers, like it just did at Teen Vogue and elsewhere in the company. And this event (which charged $350,000 for tables this year) and its enormous online exposure feels as inevitable as the earth’s rotation around the sun.
Yet it strikes me as significant that, this decade, the Met Gala has, more often than not, been outrunning some sort of ick. And the Bezos association looks to be this year’s big ick factor.
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