Arnault’s Bad Press & Vogue’s Anonymous Foe

**Lauren Sherman** (0:01)
He very much cares what French people think about him. He believes he's created many jobs for France. The role of the French people is to criticize their government in some ways. Like, this is the culture of that country. So I think in the end, he probably regrets granting the interview.

**Peter Hamby** (0:20)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Puck's podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Tuesday, July 28th. Today, I'm joined by Lauren Sherman, who reports on a pair of stories roiling the fashion world in Paris. Le Monde just released a huge investigative series on billionaire Bernard Arnault, the secretive leader of LVMH, which apparently got under Arnault's skin so much that he joined X, and suddenly became a poster. Lauren also tells me about an anonymous Instagram account that's tormenting Vogue France, and why the regional versions of Vogue around the world are all under a microscope. We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.
Happy Tuesday everybody and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my erstwhile colleague, Lauren Sherman, who has not been on the show for a while, because she moved to Paris. Hello, Emily.
Emily.

**Lauren Sherman** (1:33)
No, I know, it's too much. The Emily in Paris, like every-

**Peter Hamby** (1:36)
They must hate it over there.

**Lauren Sherman** (1:37)
I think they, you know who hates it? The Americans who live there, which like, give me a break.

**Peter Hamby** (1:42)
That's some self-loathing psychology going on.

**Lauren Sherman** (1:44)
They get very annoyed. I'm like, who cares? It's funny. It got, you know, my bigger concern is like the plotline not being correct, which we've discussed before. But I have had a couple of moments where I've been like weird galas that are very French and they're like smoking and they're putting their lighting, their cigarettes with candlesticks, a gala.
And I'm like, this is my Emily in Paris moment, truly.

**Peter Hamby** (2:10)
Yeah. I don't want to reduce our mutual knowledge of fashion and the beautiful country of France just to the silly Netflix show. We do talk about it a lot though.

**Lauren Sherman** (2:19)
We do.

**Peter Hamby** (2:20)
Let's try to prove our smarts here because now you live there. We're going to talk about the state of play at Vogue France. We're also going to talk about a big splashy multi-part series about the LVMH dynasty that would be the Arnault family that ran in Le Monde. That according to your piece in Linesheet, was the talk of the town recently and Bernard himself joined X to respond to it, which is just full of so many amusing storylines.

**Lauren Sherman** (2:49)
He initially did not join.
He sent the note out via LVMH's X account and the response was so amazing from the likes of Bill Ackman, congratulating him on this incredible, which the response was incredible and we'll get into it, but that he was so grateful to the X community that he joined himself. You cannot make this up. This has been a great weekend for me. That's all I'll say. You have to work on the weekend. This is worth it.

**Peter Hamby** (3:14)
Even the billionaire class is not immune to the dopamine hits of social media as this proves. Anyway, let's start with Vogue France. By the way, before starting with Vogue France, let's start with an Instagram account called boring.com, which I have not heard about.

**Lauren Sherman** (3:28)
Oh, God.

**Peter Hamby** (3:29)
I went here. By the way, boring.com, you're kind of boring. Your Instagram is kind of boring.
The vibe here I think is snark about fashion and culture and music. Some of it is like maybe they're getting little scoops like Dumois here and there. Anyway, I think this is what you were referencing in Line Sheet. They wrote, and by the way, this is all just to me at least, anonymous, maybe you know who runs it.

**Lauren Sherman** (3:53)
I'm close to knowing who it is. They're getting freaked out.
It's a side story. Yeah.

**Peter Hamby** (3:58)
Side story. Great.

**Lauren Sherman** (3:59)
We'll discuss that another time.

**Peter Hamby** (4:00)
So boring.com, how could Condé Nast let Vogue decline this rapidly in such a short space of time? The once most influential fashion publication in the world now feels so irrelevant that people can't even be bothered to talk about how shit the covers are anymore, blah, blah, blah. They just basically attack Vogue France. I haven't looked at the covers.
They're okay, whatever. I don't have that much of a palate. They seem fine to me. So they're dragging, as you write in Line Sheet, the head of editorial content in France for Condé Nast, for Vogue, Claire Thompson, Jean Ville, you checked in because it sort of seemed like she might get laid off and fired after this account posted this. What's the state of play over there?