This Week: Back to School for American Teens, Back to Work for European Luxury

It’s Labor Day Weekend in the US, which means it’s back to school for the kids (here in the New York area at least) and back to work for the adults.

Back to School

Retailers have been bragging about strong back-to-school sales all summer. What are kids and their parents buying this year? Not as many Nikes as they used to, apparently. The investment bank Stifel surveyed 110 US sneaker retailers to see what brands are most popular with school-aged kids. Two years ago, the answer was Nike a whopping 88 percent of the time. This year the swoosh’s share has plunged to 38 percent. New Balance and Adidas have scooped up most of the difference, with On, Hoka and others nibbling away too.

Did Nike really lose 50 percentage points of market share in a year? Almost certainly not. But this and other surveys repeatedly show that the brand’s utter dominance of the sneaker category is not translating to Gen Alpha. If you want to go deeper, our sports reporter Mike Sykes has an excellent newsletter on the Stifel survey.

When it comes to clothes, recent back-to-school seasons have typically turned into a dogfight between American Eagle and Abercrombie & Fitch-owned Hollister. The latter saw sales jump 19 percent in the second quarter, A&F reported last week. American Eagle has grabbed the spotlight lately, however. Both the Sydney Sweeney ad and the Travis Kelce collaboration fall outside the second-quarter results executives will be discussing on Wednesday. But they’ll almost certainly be asked about both, and it will be interesting to see how they characterise the response.

Back to Work

Luxury is back on the clock as well, and the countdown has begun to Sept. 23, when Demna’s first show for Gucci kicks off a sequence of debuts and brand relaunches that represent the industry’s best shot at regaining its footing.

While we’re still a few weeks out from the Milan and Paris runways, the teasers started coming fast and furious last week. There was Givenchy’s fall campaign starring Kaia Gerber and Maison Margiela’s deployment of its first celebrity ambassador ever, Miley Cyrus. Jonathan Anderson gave us our first glimpse at his plans for Dior womenswear, dressing the Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher for a Venice Film Festival red carpet, while fashion pundits were debating whether Tilda Swinton’s Chanel look was from Matthieu Blazy.

This week, expect more reveals from Venice (the festival runs through Sept. 6), and more campaigns to drop as brands look to generate buzz around their new creative directors’ first collections. One representative example: Bottega Veneta is opening a Harrods pop-up on Sept. 2 that runs through most of September. The LVMH Prize winner will be announced on Sept. 3. And of course there’s Post Malone’s show in Paris on Sept. 1, which probably wasn’t on anyone’s bingo card.

One question these shows can’t answer is where the clothes sent down the runway will be sold. Ssense’s bankruptcy filing last week, coming on the heels of LuisaViaRoma’s earlier in August, was the latest reminder that luxury wholesale is in a dire state. Neither retailer carries core collections from big European labels like Gucci and Dior. But as these two financial dramas play out in the coming weeks, it will only reinforce the need for luxury brands to invest in their own sales channels, and rely less on third-party retailers.

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