Loose Threads
Is the Cannes red carpet having an identity crisis? The festival banned naked dresses and excessive trains and Bella Hadid, one of the naked dress’s most famous adopters, showed up in a simple black gown looking like she was on her way to a D.C. fundraiser. The puffy straight hair and makeup were Melania-esque. Halle Berry had to change her dress at the last minute due to the dress code.
Speaking of identity crises: Burberry will lay off 1,700 people, or around 18 percent of its global work force. (I would love to do a “Retail Confessions” on Burberry so if you have worked there or know someone who has, email me at amyodellbooks (at) gmail (dot) com.) Burberry may have moved too far from its plaid and trench coat roots — which is what I see on the sales floors of its stores — in its shows and branding. Like, if you wanted a trench coat, would you be able to justify a Burberry version over, say, one that’s much less expensive and looks great from Banana Republic?
Kim Kardashian arrived to court in Paris to testify about her 2016 robbery, wearing, Page Six reported, a vintage John Galliano blazer dress with a long slit up the side, Alaïa sunglasses, and six-inch Saint Laurent slingback heels. She’s taking down those who allegedly robbed her and, perhaps, stealth wealth along with it. A guard reportedly groused, “Is this a courthouse or the Cannes Film Festival?”
Kering chief François-Henri Pinault on the decline in demand for luxury goods in the U.S.: “The drop in consumption, which has been going on for several weeks now, is quite strong.”
Finally, news you can use: Olivia Rodrigo keeps cheese in her purse.
Retail Confessions: Agent Provocateur
“You’re familiar with doms, right?” a former retail employee of Agent Provocateur said on our call this week.
The question goes to show the brand’s secret sauce was never basic underwear. Founded by Vivienne Westwood’s son Joseph Corré and his then-wife Serena Rees in 1994 in the U.K., Agent Provocateur sold in 2007 to investment firm 3i, which expanded the brand globally. It started struggling in the mid-2010s and entered administration in 2017 before finding a new owner. According to Vogue Business, the brand is experiencing something of a renaissance. Creative director Sarah Shotton, who started her career on the sales floor and worked her way up and witnessed the brand’s highs and lows, said, “Buyers would buy deeply into something [basic] and I would think, ‘You’re not going to sell that.’”
In today’s “Retail Confessions,” Back Row’s series where luxury retail workers talk about what selling the world’s most rarified fashion to the world’s wealthiest people is really like, someone who worked at Agent Provocateur stores in Boston and Los Angeles remembers the brand’s heyday in the early 2010s. While many clients would just go in for underwear, the stores also offered accessories like handcuffs, whips, and collars.
“The thing that I learned when working at AP was that, really and truly, you should never judge a book by its cover, because the people in Boston were these buttoned-up professors, and they were buying the kinkiest shit with their doms. And then the women in L.A. would come in wearing crazy L.A. outfits, and they would buy a really romantic set,” she said. Like other luxury retail stores, her work involved clientele-ing — building up a base of regular shoppers and going back to them again and again when new items came in.
Ahead, she talks in detail about the particular skill of selling intimates, dealing with demanding clients, keeping the fitting rooms PG, and more.
Who would shop at Agent Provocateur?
In Boston, some of the clientele would be Harvard and MIT professors. This never happened at the L.A. store, but at the Boston store, I did have one or two professors come in with a dom. We knew the dom because she would bring her clients to the store and they would pay for her. She was like a professional dom where she had a dungeon and everything. I think that was part of the experience is she would bring them in, and then they would go presumably back to her dungeon.
What would they buy?
What was popular generally?
It depends on if you are talking about men or women.
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