“Honestly, I think people are afraid of me,” Sherman says. She pauses to offer a caveat: “I’m not a bully.” But she does inspire fear. “When I see my name in the opening blurb, I get a jolt of anxiety every time,” says one fashion executive who’s a recurring comprimario in Sherman’s emailed opera. Chris Black, the writer and podcaster, compares the power of Line Sheet to “the way that you’d want to see your name in bold in Page Six in the ’90s. For better or worse, if you’re in it, you’re part of the conversation.”
Sherman’s audience is obsessive. One fashion editor recalls receiving “hundreds” of texts when Line Sheet broke the news of her new job. Subjects of her newsletter say she often reports news about their companies before they even know about it. “I don’t know how she knows these things sometimes,” says the executive. “She is the only journalist that I will call to actively do due diligence on a company that we are looking at,” says a venture capitalist who works with fashion businesses. “I trust her nose. I trust her intel.”
“She’s built up Puck to be inevitable in fashion,” says a competing fashion journalist. “You can’t not read it.”
It’s a fine time to cover fashion, if not to work in it, which has been central to Line Sheet’s success. In the last few years, the $2.5 trillion industry has been in a state of near-constant turnover. Chanel, Gucci, Valentino, Loewe, Celine, Tom Ford, Dries Van Noten, and Maison Margiela have cycled through creative-leadership changes. These luxury houses increasingly resemble sports franchises, with star designers traded, poached, and recruited across warring corporate empires. Sherman has whipped the turmoil into an arresting drama. Last year, amid a blizzard of hirings and sackings at the upper level of the major houses, a group of top designers maintained a WhatsApp group chat dedicated to complaining about Sherman’s coverage of their fates.
“I don’t really care about clothes,” says Black. “I don’t care about fucking construction. These personalities and why they do what they do and how much they’re getting paid and where they’re going and why and who’s getting replaced—Lauren has made that a full reality show.”
Working outside the glossy magazines allows for certain liberties. There has long been a tacit complicity between the houses and the magazines that cover them, which means that most fashion reporters respect embargoes—the agreements between a company and an outlet stating a piece of news can’t be published until it is officially announced. Sherman, liberated by her own ambition but also her platform at Puck, which is seen as less beholden to luxury advertisers, pays no mind to such agreements. “I think that anyone who sends a thing that says ‘embargoed’ is stupid,” she says. “There’s no way I would ever honor that. It’s insane. Why do people do that?” (A source at Puck says the outlet “regularly agrees to and adheres to news embargoes.”)
