LOOSE THREADS
Lauren Sánchez went on the Today show to promote her new children’s book and told anchor Craig Melvin how she got involved in this year’s Met Gala: “When Anna called me and said, ‘Do you want to co-chair and also be the sponsors of the Met?,’ I was so honored.” Being honored to be asked for money for the Met Gala seems like exactly the sort of old-school attitude the event has long demanded.
CNN’s Rachel Tashjian (a great Back Row podcast guest!) went to The Row’s show in Paris where the clothes were not allowed to be filmed per usual but captured important footage of the boxes of six individually wrapped blackberries passed out on silver trays after the show. (She was one of the few critics to really critique the viral Gucci show, calling it “humorless” and “surprisingly vacant: rail thin women and muscly men in skintight, under-designed clothes.“)
The huge crowds attending Elias Medini (@ly.as)’s fashion week watch parties are impressive. No, he didn’t invent the idea of getting together to watch something, but the popularity of his events surely say something about fashion’s new vs. old Establishment, entertainment in 2026, the desire for doing things together versus sitting at home and staring at crappy videos on a phone, and the collective enthusiasm for luxury marketing.
Opulence is all over the runways now, and beauty brands are picking up on it, too. ScarJo’s The Outset’s new lipglosses are sparkle-inflected and very bold, like a Miami DJ brunch.
Another rich tech dude at fashion week: Bryan Johnson, who’s spending millions of dollars in effort to beat death and seems to be known as “the longevity guy,” walked in the Matières Fécales show, meant to be a comment on the 1 percent.
In addition to today’s “Retail Confessions” story, Premium subscribers get an extended “Loose Threads” with a big Paris Fashion Week runway recap (the hits AND the misses). Upgrade so you don’t miss it.
Retail Confessions: Hermès Beverly Hills
In Beverly Hills, at least according to reality shows like The Real Housewives, Birkins are as much a part of the landscape as palm trees and filler.
Why are the bags so prolific there, aside from the local consensus on taste? According to a former employee of the Beverly Hills Hermès boutique who started working there prior to the pandemic, the brand preferred to offer quota bags (Birkins and Kellys, sales of which are limited to two per customer per year) to locals. “If you lived in Utah, they were less likely to sell you a bag, because there's no presence there,” this person recalled.
Hermès Beverly Hills. (Photo: Jason Kempin/Getty Images)
This week, I had a fascinating conversation with Glitz correspondent Noëmie Leclercq for the Back Row podcast about the Hermès game — the catchall for the specific moves quota bag buyers have to make in order for the brand to deign to sell them the bags. Leclercq’s reporting focuses on the market in Paris. So for this month’s “Retail Confessions,” in which luxury salespeople talk about what it’s really like selling the world’s most expensive fashion to the world’s wealthiest shoppers, we’re going inside Hermès in a very different market: Beverly Hills. Here, associates prized the clients who shopped for their whole families, only certain celebrities got special treatment, and customers didn’t have to rush to catch their flights because — duh! — the planes wait for them.
Do shoppers know they were playing the “Hermès game”? What was the game at that time?
Everyone knows the Birkin game. You just have to be a friend of the company, and the criteria for that could involve status, spend — a lot of things.
Most of that clientele has a personal sales associate at every store who ships their purchases to them. So they don't shop in person. But at Hermès, some of these women actually get dressed to go get their Birkin, because it was never shipped — you had to pick it up. The only person I saw who they did send one out to was J. Lo.
But not every celebrity got what they wanted.
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