High above the Hotel Bel-Air, inside a pale yellow pavilion, Lauren Sherman sits quietly and watches as models glide by in leather riding boots and silk scarves. A parade of luxury executives, fashion journalists, and a few celebrities have been shuttled up the hills to be here just before golden hour. The man who owns the property, a prime three-acre tract with sweeping views of Los Angeles, whispers that Hermès spent millions of dollars to build this butter-hued extravaganza from scratch.
Sherman is sitting across from Kerry Washington and Miley Cyrus, who bounce in their seats and gossip giddily with one another. She keeps mostly to herself, occasionally filming a model with her iPhone or jotting down notes. “I would say my biggest weakness as a reporter is I do feel uncomfortable being in the way,” she will later tell me.
Sherman continues scanning the crowd. “Shows are a great place to see power dynamics shifting,” she says. She points out that a specific Hermès executive who would normally languish in the second row of a show like this is now ringside. “That’s how I know he’s moving up in the world.” She pays close attention when Nadège Vanhée, artistic director of Hermès womenswear, pauses her sprint down the runway to hug OpenAI executive Charles Porch.
The next morning, in Line Sheet, the sharp-edged fashion-industry newsletter she writes for Puck, Sherman dutifully sizes up the collection. But it’s her bloodless assessments of the shifting fortunes of fashion’s creative stars—and even their lowliest subordinates—that keep readers hooked. Sherman is known to savage, with unglamorous insensitivity, the vaunted creative directors of the great houses. Hermès is off the hook today. Vanhée’s embrace with Porch, Sherman writes, demonstrates her “sprawling, unexpected network of friends.” The headline of Sherman’s column declares, fortuitously for Vanhée, that the 10-year veteran of Hermès has “increasing allure.”
Sherman, 44, is not a critic in the style of New York Times writer Vanessa Friedman, nor is she trying to be. “No one cares what she has to say about the clothes,” says one fashion editor. What she offers is a blend of provocative industry analysis, who’s-up-and-who’s-down speculation, and bona fide scoops. This mix, delivered with an insider’s voice and tart-tongued certainty, has made Sherman one of the most influential—and polarizing—figures in fashion media. In just three years she has transformed Line Sheet into the second most profitable franchise at Puck, complete with a four-person reporting team, podcast, events business, and audience that stretches from luxury conglomerate executives to editors, designers, investors, publicists, and fashion obsessives.
Fashion magazines, with few exceptions, are known to offer flattering coverage of the industry—if they criticize, it’s by omission. At Line Sheet, Sherman is disrupting a hidebound industry with an old-school playbook: lavishing praise on some, drubbing others, and allowing vendettas to play out inside the confines of her newsletter, printing rumors that may or may not become fact. Her readership has never seen anything like it.
That audience has helped Sherman break major news. Last year she was first to report Chloe Malle’s appointment to run American Vogue; more recently, she reported a week before the official announcement that New York magazine creative director Jody Quon “was in the process of working out her deal” to be the next editor in chief of T, the style magazine of The New York Times. Before that, she broke the long-awaited news of Chanel’s pick of Matthieu Blazy as its new artistic director.
Sherman is keenly aware of her own power—and bullishly confident in it. “Mark is smart to assign this story,” she tells me at the Hermès show in June, referring to my boss, Vanity Fair’s editor Mark Guiducci, and suggesting he believes a flattering profile will earn Vanity Fair gentler coverage in Line Sheet. She shrewdly praises editors who have nurtured relationships with her, like Sara Moonves, the editor in chief of W magazine. “She’s such an influential voice in our industry,” Moonves later writes in an email.
“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.”)
It also means she can cover the word on the high street more liberally than the competition. “A more mainstream newspaper has to be very careful about rumors, but she has the freedom to write about things that aren’t 100 percent confirmed but often become correct,” says the curator and art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, a devoted Line Sheet reader. “It makes for much more interesting reading.” Sherman often ends speculative columns about swirling gossip with casual entreaties: “Anyway, if you know more, call me about this, too!”
Her approach has made for a polarizing rise. Sherman has made enemies at the highest levels of fashion’s major conglomerates and among the press she both covers and competes with. “The Puck approach in general is they hear a rumor and they write it,” says one fashion journalist. “Often they frame it as ‘We have special inside info.’ It drives everyone nuts because everyone has the inside info. Everyone’s heard that rumor, but it’s a rumor and other institutions have different rules around what you can print. They essentially play the odds. Write a rumor, and if it’s right, then we get to be the ones who broke it. If it’s wrong, then it doesn’t matter because everyone will have forgotten and there’s new news anyway. It’s a pretty good roulette game.”
“Our journalists are deeply sourced in the industries they cover,” says Puck cofounder Jon Kelly (who was once an editor at Vanity Fair), calling Sherman a “best-in-class, once-in-a-generation journalistic talent.” “As a result, we’ve cultivated a loyal audience of readers that turn to us for reporting they can’t find anywhere else.”
In the image-obsessed world of fashion, hostility manifests in peculiar ways. Some cattily point out that Sherman doesn’t have the clearest sense of personal style. One friend of Sherman’s says that’s improved with the success of Line Sheet: “Lauren now clearly makes a lot of money and wears that money.” At the Hermès show, she wore Versace shoes by Dario Vitale and a Phoebe Philo–era Chloé jacket bought on The RealReal for $125. On her wrist she wears a Cartier Panthère watch. She could expect to face some knives given the way she wields her pen. Paris, where Sherman recently moved her family in order to be closer to the action, is a tough town—and Sherman isn’t the most natural fit. She sometimes pronounces the first name of Blazy as “Match-yoo” instead of “Ma-tyeuh.”
“There are people who hate her,” says Parisian PR chief Lucien Pagès. “She makes people nervous—those who compete for scoops and also those who have something to hide. She can make me nervous!” The angst Line Sheet inspires is part of the appeal for its readers. “If you don’t have enemies, you’re not doing the job right,” says Black.
Sherman admits she can be subjective and play favorites. “That’s the thing that drives me nuts more than anything,” she says. “If you’d ask Cathy Horyn, I think she would probably say no, but she totally does. We all know who she loves, who she’s been on vacation with. This is a New York Times reporter who’s going on vacation with Karl Lagerfeld. I’m not going on vacation with these people.” (“Lauren is mistaken,” says Horyn, who now serves as fashion critic-at-large at The Cut. “I don’t believe Lagerfeld ever went on vacations.”)
The mercurial nature of Sherman’s coverage can inspire insecurity in her subjects. “Her opinion is capable of evolving,” says Stella Bugbee, the Styles editor of The New York Times who has known Sherman since 2013. “One day she’ll be like, ‘I love that person.’ And then she’ll call them out if she doesn’t like something they did. I think that’s probably why people fear her.” In person, Sherman is equally keen to deliver such verdicts, whether on the niche menswear newsletter Blackbird Spyplane—“That guy takes himself too seriously”—or the illustrations that accompany Puck writer bylines: “You can be on the record that I don’t like the stupid sketches.”
This is all in keeping with the well-honed style of Puck: sweeping declarations delivered with either real or feigned institutional omniscience. In one newsletter on the promotion of an editor at The Wall Street Journal, Sherman managed to cram both self-congratulation and a spritz of venom into one sentence: “Sarah Ball, editor of WSJ magazine, is a master of managing up, and this week she pulled off a maneuver that was long expected—at least by me.” When I ask Sherman about Puck’s reputation for being impressed with itself, she replies: “You know what? I do think I know better than everyone else. I mean, no, I don’t really. But we talk the way everybody talks behind the scenes. We’re trying to say the quiet thing out loud.”
Sherman is sensitive to the notion that she’s made enemies. “It’s hard for me too,” she says. “I don’t like people to not like me. It’s not fun. And it often feels not right. There are certain people, I get why they don’t like me, but not everyone.” But she’s defiant in the face of the frosty treatment she gets from some of the houses she covers. “I’m sort of the sacrificial lamb for everyone who’s going to come next. I’m making it much harder for myself so that other people can cover this industry pretty honestly. And the thing is, this is not the first time I’ve not been invited to fashion shows.”
Born in Trenton, Michigan, to parents who met working at a denim store, Sherman was raised in Pittsburgh, a world away from fashion’s capitals. Her parents didn’t have much money but cared deeply about style, and she longed for New York from when she was old enough to read Sassy magazine. By her teenage years she had settled on a plan: “Move to New York and cover Fashion Week in Paris and live in a shoebox and have a Chanel bag.” Other experiences fueled her ambition. “I was friends with these mean girls in high school,” she recalls, “and one of them was like, ‘Lauren is so lucky. Everything she wants ends up happening.’ Which is true. And another girl was like, ‘She’s not lucky. She’s fat and she’s poor.’ And I’ll never forget it. It’s kind of like fuel.”
After college and a brief stint in London, she moved to New York and took a series of jobs at Forbes, Fashionista, Lucky, and eventually Business of Fashion, where she served as chief correspondent and built a bursting rolodex. By that point, Sherman and her family had moved to Los Angeles, where she soon grew restless. She had become “completely obsessed” with Matthew Belloni’s enormously influential Hollywood newsletter at Puck and considered covering the entertainment business herself. Whatever she did, she wanted to work at Puck. “From the beginning you could tell she was going to make a mark, and she didn’t really care whether or not that would be in legacy media,” says Bugbee.
Sherman was on leave writing Selling Sexy, her 2024 book about Victoria’s Secret cowritten with The Cut writer Chantal Fernandez, when she reached out to a friend who worked at Puck to pitch herself. “I don’t care, I’ll write about Walmart,” she recalls saying. “If you guys are going to do fashion or retail or anything, I need to be in the conversation.” It turned out Kelly was looking around for a fashion writer. “It was immediately clear, within 15 minutes, that Lauren had all the things you could possibly look for and more,” he says. “Forty-five minutes in, I stopped her. I said, ‘You’re hired. We’re going to do this.’ I had never done that before, and I’ve never done it since.”
When Puck announced Sherman as its new fashion writer, the outlet crowned her “the preeminent fashion journalist of her generation,” an honorific that raised eyebrows in a competitive industry. “We were all like, that is insane,” recalls one fashion journalist. But Puck’s inflated branding has, over time, come to look almost prophetic. “The joke is on us because it’s kind of become true in a certain way.”
As Line Sheet’s audience grew, Sherman launched a private-dinner series spanning cities from Los Angeles to Milan and landed a contributor deal at CBS News. Sherman joined the network in January, alongside a raft of new contributors recruited by its new editor in chief, Bari Weiss. She sighs when I ask about the network. “I would say that I’m—I’m watching the way it develops and we’ll see, but for now I’ve had a good experience,” she says. And then, “It seemed like a great idea when I did it—and so far it’s been a good experience.”
Earlier this year Sherman and her husband, the fellow journalist and media founder Dan Frommer, moved from Los Angeles to the east side of Paris and enrolled their five-year-old son in a bilingual Montessori school. “The business is concentrated in Europe now,” she says. “There aren’t many companies in the US that I cover other than Nike and Skims. So why not be here?”
In 2024, the Financial Times reported that LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault had sent a furious memo to staff ordering an “absolute ban” on speaking with journalists at several publications. There was only one US outlet on the list: Puck. “I formally condemn any behaviour consistent with maintaining relationships with unscrupulous journalists and giving them information or comments on the life of the group,” Arnault wrote. “Any breach (and this will inevitably be known) will be considered a serious infraction, with the corresponding consequences attached to it.”
Sherman says the order from the head of the world’s biggest luxury group didn’t hurt her business: “The relationships I have are the relationships I have.”
She may not receive the warmest welcome at Louis Vuitton shows, but Line Sheet still ferrets out scoops from inside Arnault’s heavily guarded fortress. “Clearly people are telling her information,” says Max Stein, a manager and longtime friend of Sherman’s. “And those are the exact same people that are complaining that she has the information.” Even Sherman’s critics agree she still has the ear of many, including the money people. “A lot of the people who don’t like stories that she’s written still speak to her very regularly,” says the venture capitalist. “Lauren is focused on uncovering elements of businesses that a lot of people don’t want written about.”
Sherman has been a thorn in the side of Condé Nast, the parent company of Vanity Fair and Vogue, which she covers with the same dramatic zeal as the memoirists who dissected the court of Versailles. She’s similarly prone to inserting a sharpened epithet when a milder one may have sufficed. Malle, in the story announcing her appointment to the top of American Vogue, was deemed “a longtime supplicant” of Anna Wintour. A Vogue staffer who decamped to The Wall Street Journal is described as a “longtime Anna Wintour lackey,” only for Sherman to clarify in the next line: “I say ‘lackey’ with affection.” Lackey, in Shermanese, apparently means “an integral part of the Vogue machine.” Guiducci has also been labeled a lackey in Line Sheet. [Editor’s note: Wintour did not read this article before publication.]
Her aggressive coverage may have attracted subscribers, but it’s been complicated for the advertising side of the business. When Puck acquired Air Mail, the media company founded by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, the latter’s luxury advertisers revolted. According to a source familiar with the merger, Air Mail received “a flood of concerned emails” from advertisers, including LVMH, threatening to pull their business. “All the luxury advertisers had huge concerns with appearing, specifically in Lauren’s newsletter,” the source says. “She is great and deeply talented and very well sourced—obviously—but she’s considered a brand safety risk for a lot of those luxury companies.” The source points out that the Line Sheet dinners that Sherman hosts have struggled to attract luxury advertisers. Puck did not provide a list to Vanity Fair, but sponsors have included Starbucks, Saks Fifth Avenue, and American Express; Burberry and Rolex have advertised in Line Sheet.
The relentless pace of Line Sheet is forgiving for its author. When Sherman is wrong, well, on to the next column. Errors and whiffs are briskly airbrushed away by the unending march of content. “Lauren is never wrong in Lauren’s eyes,” says one fashion journalist. “You can tell that from how she writes her, quote, unquote, ‘corrections.’ ” For the Line Sheet reader, the sausage-making is part of the experience, no matter how messy it gets. In the middle of one particularly egregious correction, Sherman promoted Line Sheet’s premium $250-per-year “inner circle” subscription, noting that the offending newsletter was “available to top-tier subscribers only, mind you.”
“I don’t think she does enough reparation when she is wrong,” says one fashion editor. “She gloats on the scoops, and she wants all the glory of reporting things first. But a lot of people wish they would suffer a little bit more when she gets it wrong.” Another editor who has been the subject of speculative coverage in Line Sheet says that’s shaped their view of Sherman’s work: “Because I’ve seen so many lazy inaccuracies, I now don’t trust the harder-hitting stuff.” That Sherman can be speculative and freely declares whom she believes will be right for what jobs has consequences beyond bruised egos. “It can hurt your career,” says a fashion journalist. “Because if someone like Lauren is happily publishing that you’re not right for a job, it might actually impact your ability to get that job.”
Sherman insists that she isn’t so cutthroat. Or, at least, wasn’t always. One day in March of last year, she addressed the speculation swirling around the industry that Demna, the artistic director of Balenciaga, would decamp to be the new head of Gucci. She dismissed the notion as “silly.” Sherman reminded readers of that reaction three days later in a column on the news that Demna would be the new head of Gucci. Sherman tells me now she found out in those intervening days about the appointment and could have reported the scoop. “The way I found out was very embarrassing for an executive,” she says. “They might have gotten fired if I had run it.” Because of sympathy for the executive and a (currently healthy) professional relationship with Kering, the parent company of Gucci, she decided not to publish.
She pauses to think. “If I could go back,” she says, “I would have run it.”
Hair, Sébastien Le Corroller; makeup, Tiina Roivainen. For details, go to VF.com/credits.
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