1. Balenciaga to Return to Couture in July: Creative director Demna Gvasalia, who is best known for his chunky Triple S sneakers, is to revive the brand’s high fashion activity 52 years after the founder closed his house. – Read More on WWD 

2. Gen Z, women and Louis Vuitton drive StockX to $1 billion in transactions: Music and/or pop culture-related “merch has a bigger social status than just a drop that anyone can buy from their bedroom. It can have more of a role now in showing what tribe you’re a part of than things like the Supreme drops will.” – Read More on Vogue Biz 

3. How American Apparel is trying to make a comeback after two bankruptcies: American Apparel went into bankruptcy court in 2015, and then again in 2016. But the brand’s wares, from knit T-shirts to zip-up hoodies and disco pants, are still available for purchase online. That’s because the brand was purchased by Canadian company Gildan Activewear in 2017. – Read More on CNBC 

4. RETRO READ: American Apparel – The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of an All-American Business. By 2007, American Apparel had become the largest T-shirt manufacturer in America. One of only a few clothing companies exporting “Made in the USA” products, it sold about $125 million worth of domestically manufactured clothing outside of America. All the while, the behind-the-scenes controversy that had been brewing would be making its way into the purview of the public. – Read More on TFL 

5. How Ganni used tech-world tricks to grow from a cult fashion label to a global brand: The little-known Danish label has seen 50% growth in revenue year over year for the past 3 years. The company is estimating more than 30% growth from 2018 to 2019, with projected sales of more than $88 million for 2019. – Read More on Fortune

1. Ultimate Status Symbol: Just as French luxury giant LVMH adds Tiffany & Co. to its stable, it scores more than a marketing coup with a diamond deal that’s out of this world, a 1,758-carat Sewelo diamond, which is roughly the size of a tennis ball. – Read More on Bloomberg

2. For most luxury goods, this is the most expensive city in the world: Hong Kong was found to be the priciest city in the world for luxury products and services, according to a report by private bank Julius Baer. – Read More on CNBC

3. Jennifer Lopez Is Fashion’s Most Coveted Spring ’20 Campaign Star — But Will She Drive Sales? Jennifer Lopez is the face of three major fashion campaigns for spring ’20 (Gucci, Guess, and Coach) — making her the season’s most coveted ad star. While it’s rare for a celebrity to front so many different brands in the same season, Lopez, 50, is “unique and a megastar right now.” – Read More on Yahoo

4. Is This the Birkin Bag of Lipstick? Every six months for the near future, Hermès plans to launch a new cosmetics category. The company won’t yet confirm any delivery dates or future product lines—“at our own pace” is a phrase often used at Hermès so as not to ensnare its creatives in rigid delivery schedules—but foundations and eye and cheek colors are not far behind, to be followed eventually by skin care. – Read More on WSJ

5. Forget heels, white trainers were the shoe of the decade, going from scruffy to stylish: More than 23 billion pairs of trainers are produced annually, of which about 300 million are thrown away each year, and it takes 30 to 40 years for sneakers to decompose in a landfill. – Read More on SCMP

6. RETRO READ: Sneakers Are the Hottest Thing in Fashion and They Aren’t Going Away Anytime Soon: Digital aggregator Farfetch is offering up more than 5,000 sneakers styles, much more than the 3,500 heels/pumps styles is currently has on its site. – Read More on TFL 

1. Inside the millennial church of Glossier—the beauty brand that wants to get your best friend: Glossier has become the ur-brand for a millennial subculture that loves to hate itself even as it loves to support that which it (supposedly) hates … Glossier wants, above all, to be your friend. It’s a kinder, gentler capitalism—but a capitalism all the same. – Read More on Prospect Mag 

2. Gucci’s Alessandro Michele: “I started in this business 25 years ago and I’m lucky because I’m still working by my stomach,’’ Mr. Michele said, meaning he is driven less by marketing than by instinct. “At a certain point in the business, it was ‘Sell the bag, sell the bag, sell the bag’.’’ That, he said, was the point at which he found himself bored and depressed and looking for the exit. Then, as it happened, he sold the bag. – Read More on the New York Times 

3. ‘LVMH of China’ faces disruption to its cotton supplies: Shandong Ruyi is facing serious disruption to its access to cotton supplies after the company was placed on an industry blacklist that will halt much of its trading in the commodity with major global groups. – Read More on the FT 

4. The unique challenges of selling fashion in China: “Telling that story repeatedly and constantly is really, really important for brands. Working mostly also with luxury brands, they kind of have the sense that, ‘Of course everybody knows who I am.’” But often they just know the name, and not necessarily the story behind the brand. – Read More on Quartz 

5. What’s the carbon footprint of your closet? ThredUp will tell you: ThredUp, an enormous online consignment store, has created a tool with Green Story (which calculates the carbon impact of different consumption behaviors) that estimates your own personal impact based on how you shop and take care of clothes. – Read More on Fast Co. 

1. Millennials want clean conscience when buying luxury goods: “If British luxury is to achieve its target of £65 billion in sales over the next five years, sustainability has to be at the heart of every brand’s strategy.” – Read More on the Evening Standard 

2. Just about every store at the mall is struggling. Then there’s Bath & Body Works: “There are so many things going against this company: It’s a mall merchant — that, alone, should have spelled doom. And it’s selling commodities that are broadly available elsewhere, often for cheaper. But somehow Bath & Body Works has figured out how to appeal to the masses.” – Read More on the Washington Post 

3. RETRO READ: Mall Staple Bath & Body Works Should be Dead, So Why is it Exhibiting “Exceptional” Growth? Staple mall brands have been getting killed off with some regularity in recent years, as consumers opt for e-commerce purchases and foot-traffic has plummeted as a result, but Bath & Body Works is far from dead. – Read More on TFL 

4. The origins, and explosive growth of athleisure: As society grew to accept sportswear separates as the norm, a new term was needed to differentiate this new generation of multipurpose fashion from its predecessor. That’s where athleisure comes in. – Read More on Fashionista 

5. Collaborations are providing fashion brands a gateway to the Chinese market: A June report from Gartner L2 showed that the percentage of fashion brands promoting brand collaborations on the Chinese social network Weibo had jumped up from 62% in the first quarter of 2018 to 80% by the midpoint of 2019. – Read More on Glossy

1. Gwyneth Paltrow: Selling Goop products on Amazon wouldn’t “be good for us.” The actress says her wellness company has been “wrestling with the idea of if we should have a wholesale partner or if we should keep it all direct to consumer.” – Read More on CNBC

2. Why Fashion Brands Today Have Such Strange Names: From 99%is to Suicoke, fashion brands choose increasingly bizarre names as companies strive to stand out on social media and in Google search results. – Read More on WSJ

3. RETRO READ: A Slew of New Brand Names Raises the Question … Is Fashion Running Out of Trademarks? The supply of available trademarks is “severely depleted, particularly in certain sectors of the economy,” such as fashion and retail more generally. So, the adoption of unused names – no matter how unconventional –  provides new brands with the chance to secure trademark rights, as well as the valuable social media handles and domain names of their choice, which might otherwise be difficult since so many of those have already claimed been. – Read More on TFL

4. Opening Ceremony Sold to New Guards Group: Farfetch-owned New Guards Group will assume production of Opening Ceremony’s in-house line. According to a more recently-issued statement, New York-headquartered Opening Ceremony revealed that it will close all of all retail stores “sometime in 2020.” – Read More on Vogue

5. LVMH’s “hacks” for luxury innovation: As the consumer landscape continues to shift, the group taps staff for cutting edge ideas, including ways to enhance the travel experience, to achieve zero waste packaging in wines and spirits, and to move into eco-design. – Read More on the FT

1. The rise of heels for men: Sales of high heels for men have been on the upturn since 2017 and searches for “men’s heels” have grown by 30%, according to Lyst.co.uk. – Read More on the Guardian

2. Purging Your Stuff Is the New Conspicuous Consumption: Americans are “moving away from pride of ownership, which has been the bedrock of our capitalist society.” – Read More on Bloomberg 

3. RETRO READ: When Customers Want to See the Human Behind the Product. Companies recognize the value of authenticity — whether it is Harley Davidson trademarking the distinct sound of its V-Twin engine, Krispy Kreme donuts boasting that they have kept their same recipe since 1937, or luxury brands like Rolex simply providing a certificate of authenticity. It turns out that one simple way to create authenticity, however, is to emphasize human involvement in the product. – Read More on HBR 

4. ‘They drove themselves into a brick wall’: While analysts and industry observers say that Forever 21’s e-commerce operations could use a refresh, they maintain that the company’s biggest problems remain the size of its stores, its cluttered layout, and a failure to respond to fashion trends as quickly as competitors. – Read More on Modern Retail 

5. Model juror? Among the 120 or so potential jurors who reported for duty on Monday morning in New York for determination of who will be part of a 12 member jury for Harvey Weinstein’s criminal trial was Gigi Hadid, who told the judge she could be objective — despite having met the defendant and Salma Hayek, one of his alleged victims. – Read More on THR 

6. The Sorry State Of High Street Shopping For Plus-Size Women: Fifty-five percent of plus-size women avoid in-store shopping not due to a lack of interest but because they know their size isn’t available. – Read More on R29

1. Target hatches a billion dollar plan to challenge Nike and Under Armour: Later this month Target will debut a new athleticwear brand dubbed All in Motion. It’s a private label collection that spans T-shirts, tank tops, polo shirts, pants, leggings, sports bras, swimwear, yoga mats and hand weights, and Target believes it could be a billion dollar sales brand in the first year of availability. – Read More on Yahoo 

2. Universal Standard co-founder Alexandra Waldman on making fashion for the 70%: “Let’s face it, this is how we change the perception of beauty: by seeing it over and over. If you’re just seeing one particular model — one face or one archetype — then you’re forced to judge yourself by how far you are from that archetype.” – Read More on Glossy 

3. A New Market for On-Demand Luxury Fashion Delivers: Rent the Runway wasn’t able to provide data on how much of its current business is delivered to hotels or customers on the go, travelers have anecdotally used their service for rentals when traveling either for work, weddings, or vacations. – Read More on Skift 

4. Victoria’s Secret’s Image Is Hurting L Brands: L Brands recognizes the need to reposition Victoria’s Secret, the concern is this: Can a brand with such a strong image truly revamp to please a customer who is looking for just the opposite? Can shoppers imagine a Victoria’s Secret without the vision of models with angel wings strutting down the runway popping into their minds? – Read More on Motley Fool

5. Vogue Italia’s latest issue is greenwashing at its finest: ‘Vogue Italia’ replaced photo spreads with drawings to reveal the environmental cost of making a fashion magazine. The stunt doesn’t offer any real solutions. – Read More on Fast Co.

1. Gen Z is reinventing social media marketing: Young people aged 16 to 24 spent an average of seven hours per day online in 2019, three of which were spent exclusively on social media, and they uses social media primarily for entertainment, so brands targeting this audience need to plug into platforms like TikTok. – Read More on Vogue Business 

2. Facebook’s Deepfakes Policy ‘Inadequate’ to Some Lawmakers: The criticism, in interviews, on Twitter, and in a hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday, followed the unveiling of the social media giant’s policy to remove video forgeries produced with the aid of artificial intelligence that show people doing and saying things they never did. – Read More on Bloomberg 

3. RETRO READ: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Deepfakes?While the challenges this phenomenon poses are “very clear,” the law is, unsurprisingly, not. This imbalance is unsurprising given that technology almost always develops at a rate much faster than the laws needed to regulate it.  – Read More on TFL 

4. Amazon is said to be preparing a luxury fashion platform: Its luxury venture will operate similar to the concession model seen in department stores and specialty retailers, where brands effectively lease space or pay a percentage of sales to run their own mini-shops within the store. – Read More on Yahoo 

5. America’s Affordable Luxury Brands’ Problems Run Deeper Than the Trade War: Michael Kors and Kate Spade continue to attempt to position themselves as lifestyle brands with wider product offerings. So far, there has been little in the way of results so far and this revamp mission is not without constant challenges.– Read More on Jing 

6. ‘Even when we’re fat, we still want to be fashionable’. Berlin-based blogger Caterina Pogorzelski says, “Of course there’s clothing in larger sizes, but not enough.” Most items are either too cheap or too expensive, she says – the mid-range is lacking. – Read More on SCMP

1. The Future of Luxury? A Conversation With CEO of LVMH Fashion Group Sidney Toledano. “Today, the consumer is more than aware about the origin of the products, sustainability is at the forefront. So, while we produce in a larger scale [than in years prior], we have kept the excellence of an expertise of more than sixty years.” – Read More on Forbes

2. Eileen Fisher built a fashion empire. Her employees now own nearly half of it: Fisher personally owns 60% of the company that shares her name, while the remaining 40% is held by her 1,200 full- and part-time employees through an employee stock ownership plan. – Read More on CNN 

3. Glossier founder Emily Weiss: People are the key to Weiss’s vision, which has set a new blueprint for success for the cosmetics industry. She often talks about the “democratization” of beauty, about how Glossier came up with its products by asking women what they wanted, rather than telling women what they needed. She built awareness through word-of-mouth on social media, and the community that lives for its famous pink bubblewrap bags, chic design and solid, functional basics is deeply loyal. – Read More on the Guardian 

4. RETRO READ: Glossier Filed 2 Trademark Applications This Spring That Say a Lot About Modern Branding. Glossier is essentially claiming that in much the same way that consumers link the word “Glossier” with its brand, they make a connection in their minds when they see boxes with pink interiors and pink bubble wrap pouches. – Read More on TFL 

5. Is Canada Goose losing its mojo? Early data suggests cooling customer interest. New data has revealed that the Toronto-based outerwear company has had to discount its jackets an average of 13% to move inventory in a signal that consumer enthusiasm for the brand is waning. – Read More on Thinknum 

6. In 2020, retail is moving back to Main Street: In 2019 alone, more than 9,300 stores across the spectrum, from the Dollar Store to Barneys, closed locations. But as we’ve seen, consumers are still eager to spend money in physical stores, as long as the retail experiences is well-designed, entertaining, and integrated into our lifestyles. – Read More on Fast Co.

1. The Rise and Fall of Fast Fashion Purveyor Forever 21: While its core demographic of teenagers were flocking to online shopping, Forever 21 and its founders have been near-constant lawsuits for everything from labor department violations to copyright infringement. – Read More on Thinknum 

2. Fashion industry’s ageism could cost it £11 billion in next 20 years: Older people increased their spending on clothes and shoes by 21% – or £2.9 billion – between 2011 and 2018, according to the analysis. By 2040, people aged 50 and over are expected to be this sector’s key consumer base. But … many women older than 75 stop spending on fashion altogether due to fashion and beauty industry’s institutional ageism. – Read More on the Guardian 

3. How Walmart Can Win in Fashion: Walmart has responded to Amazon’s foray into fashion  by way of an overwhelming amount of fashion brands – 600 was a recent count – and, in addition, has about 150 premium brands that are available through its Lord & Taylor association. – Read More on Forbes 

4. How department stores lost their clout in the beauty industry to Ulta, e-commerce and influencers: Ulta’s appeal has been helped by its celebrity brands, such as an exclusive in-store distribution deal for the Kylie Cosmetics line last November and its relationship with YouTube star James Charles. These relationships help drive traffic to the store. – Read More on CNBC 

5. Chanel and champagne: How luxury goods stores are trying to lure shoppers from the internet. Brands and retailers are using new services – from Rent the Runway offerings to luxury resale options – as well as food and alcohol to lure back customers who were once exclusively theirs. – Read More on USA Today