The Materialist : Lauren Sherman

Lauren Sherman, of Puck and The Fashion People podcast, knows exactly how the fashion trick works.

She understands the margins, the mythology and the machinery that turns a jacket into an object of desire. Amazingly, the trick still works on her.

The most recent object to break through her professional defenses was a Chanel jacket from Matthieu Blazy’s first collection. Lauren wanted it since she saw it on the runway. When she finally tried it on, it connected her to the 13-year-old in Pittsburgh who dreamed of becoming a fashion journalist and covering the shows in Paris.

“That jacket is what I imagined I would wear if I was a fashion journalist as a grownup,” she tells me.

It wasn’t just a jacket. It was proof that she had become the person she once imagined wearing it.

Lauren’s fashion education started early. Her parents met while working at a denim store in Columbus, where they also served as buyers. Her mother loved Halston and Calvin Klein; both parents loved Ralph Lauren. Lauren remembers staging photographs of herself in a leotard and red tights, what she wore on the first day of first grade and the exact color combinations that excited her as a child.

Brands entered the picture almost as quickly. Lauren grew up without much money and remembers her mother declaring that the Gap was too expensive, even though a similar outfit from TJ Maxx might have cost just as much. In high school, she bought a fake Kate Spade bag on eBay before anyone around her knew what Kate Spade was. She ordered clothes from the J.Crew catalog and arrived at school in a sweater and tweed cargo pants, prompting her classmates to tell her she looked like she was in college.

Long before she wrote about the business of fashion, Lauren understood that clothes could make you appear older, richer, cooler—or simply like someone who knew something other people didn’t.

After college, she moved to London to work for Quintessentially, the concierge service for the extremely wealthy. There, she encountered a class system far more explicit than the American version. Money could buy the country house and the impossible restaurant reservation, but it could not fix the wrong accent. At the same time, some of the richest people she met wore inexpensive clothes. As I put it, theirs was the world of a 19-pound shirt and a 19,000-acre estate.

Seeing how luxury worked from the inside did not cure Lauren of wanting things. If anything, it made her numb to extraordinary prices. She knows buying a Chanel jacket is a slightly crazy thing to do, but she can also make the case: adjust the price for inflation, buy only a few things each year and keep them forever. Voilà—practically responsible.

What knowledge has changed is her threshold. She still loves shopping, but she wants fewer, better things: the perfect sandal, the perfect button-down, the perfect black dress.

Her disinterest in fast fashion is not, she readily admits, primarily an ethical position. Once you understand how many copies of something exist, it becomes less exciting. Seeing the machinery has not eliminated her materialism. It has simply made the machinery work harder.

So what separates a beautiful construct from a con?

“It is all a con,” Lauren says, before arriving at a more useful distinction. The enduring brands tend to be built by people who are also under fashion’s spell. The designers and executives are not merely fooling the customer; they believe in the creativity and fantasy themselves. When something is manufactured simply because a spreadsheet says there is demand, consumers can usually feel it.

The magic requires talent, hard work, timing and a product strong enough to carry the story.

Charvet is Lauren’s favorite example. The mythology is excellent: a discreet Parisian shirtmaker on Place Vendôme, established in the nineteenth century and supposedly uninterested in marketing—which is, of course, the best marketing imaginable.

But the shirts also deliver. Lauren loves the way the fabric falls, the way they fit and how easily she can throw one over almost anything. At around 400 euros, a Charvet shirt is objectively expensive. But beside the $1,000 shirts sold by designer brands in department stores, it begins to look almost sensible.

This is what Lauren calls the “price-value equation”: not whether something is cheap, but whether it gives you enough for what it costs. Charvet’s colors, fabrics, history and French production all add to that equation. The occasional imperfection does not bother her. Human beings made the shirts; they are not supposed to emerge from a laboratory.

The online quality police may count loose threads. Lauren cares about how the shirt makes her feel.

She is similarly skeptical that consumers express much morality through shopping. People like to say they vote with their dollars, but if a bra fits well, they are probably going to buy it.

Victoria’s Secret proves the point. The company became a symbol of everything supposedly wrong with the old fashion system. Its recovery did not come from becoming especially virtuous. Under female leadership, it returned to sexy products without quite as much leering or corporate self-flagellation.

As I put it, “Vicky went to therapy.”

The company also caught the return of the underwire bra at exactly the right moment. The turnaround was not ideological. Victoria’s Secret rediscovered what people wanted, improved the way it delivered it and stopped apologizing for being Victoria’s Secret.

The bigger challenge for fashion is that status spending has moved elsewhere. Lauren recalls visiting an affluent shopping center in La Jolla and realizing that she and her husband were the only people wearing “hard pants.” Everyone else was in leggings or sweatpants.

These consumers have not stopped spending. The money has migrated to $50 exercise classes, lymphatic drainage, cosmetic procedures, teeth whitening and the full-body renovation that can follow a GLP-1 prescription.

The body, in other words, is the new handbag.

Americans see much of this spending as virtuous because it is framed as an investment in oneself. But it is still consumption. Jewelry may benefit from the shift because it feels more permanent. A bag gets beaten up. Shoes become dated. A diamond necklace can be understood as an asset or heirloom—even when it is also something beautiful that you simply want.

Lauren sees the cooling of the luxury market as a story of consolidation and saturation. For years, consumers around the world signaled taste through the same handful of objects from the same enormous European houses. The pandemic extended the cycle: with nowhere to go, people bought more stuff. Now the monoculture is finally weakening.

That creates an opening for independent brands, although not an easy one. Lauren points out that a fashion company producing $100 million or $200 million a year can be an excellent business without becoming a global conglomerate. The difficulty is reaching customers as multibrand retailers disappear and brands are forced to finance their own stores.

The Row demonstrates the power of patient capital. Its founders had enough security to remain disciplined, choose investors carefully and survive the moment when the whole world moved on to another aesthetic. Most independent designers do not have that luxury. Lauren’s advice is to start small, accept how much is outside your control and understand that most brands do not work out.

People start them anyway because they feel possessed by an idea.

The same dynamics are reshaping Lauren’s own industry. Media is becoming increasingly divided between enormous institutions such as The New York Times and smaller publications built around distinctive individual voices. Puck’s insight was to build its business around its journalists rather than treating them as interchangeable content producers.

As artificial intelligence takes over more commodity news, readers will still pay for expertise, access, taste and personality. I don’t really think about subscribing to Puck. I subscribe to Lauren.

Her recommendations at the end of the conversation reflect that affection for singular voices: Caitlin Phillips’s wonderfully idiosyncratic Gift Guide; artist Sophie Treppendahl; and independent jewelers including Charlotte Chesnais, Sophie Bille Brahe, Danielle Sherman and Sophie Buhai. Lauren reserves special praise for Buhai, whose work consistently passes the price-value test and who, after years of quietly making excellent things, “deserves her flowers.”

We close with one last object.

If Lauren’s son had to understand her through a single possession, she would choose a secondhand red Hermès Bolide given to her by her husband. It is beautiful and deeply coded, but discreet enough to carry to soccer practice without anyone realizing it is Hermès.

The bag contains both versions of Lauren: the 14-year-old who dreamed of attending Paris Fashion Week and the adult who made that dream real while remaining, in her words, “a normal human being.”

She knows exactly what the bag signifies. She knows how its value was manufactured and how the mythology works. She loves it anyway.

She hasn’t been fooled. She has simply decided that some things are still worth believing in.

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