Designer Reed Krakoff Leaves Coach, Heads for the Hills

After 16 highly profitable years as the president and creative director of Coach, Reed Krakoff is leaving the company to focus full-time on his eponymous luxury brand. Krakoff, who presided over Coach’s revival as a logo-laden, mass-produced but high-priced accessories brand, will leave the company when his current contract expires in June, 2014. Even back in 2011, Krakoff sounded a little bored of designing for Coach, telling the New Yorker:

“I bang it out. I know what came before, I know what’s coming next, I know how it will work in the context of the store and the ads. It’s like a code.”

Krakoff’s announcement comes in the wake of the news that Lew Frankfort, Coach’s longtime C.E.O. and chairman and the man widely regarded as the mastermind of the brand’s recent success, would be stepping down. Coach launched Krakoff’s namesake line in 2011, and the company says it will now explore selling it to a luxury group.

[WWD]

Lily Aldridge loves that her mother, Laura Lyons, was a Playboy Playmate of the Month in 1976. “I’m so proud of my mom. She was a Playmate at the pinnacle of Playboy — such beautiful women, and it was shot so beautifully.” Lyons also led a strike for improved working conditions at the Chicago Playboy Club. Aldridge says she found out about her mother’s past in nude modeling when she was 12:

“I actually was in my dad’s art studio and I saw a Playboy and I ran upstairs and was like ‘Oh my god! Mom, Dad is having an affair!’ My mom was like…ohhhh…She tried to tell me she was in one of the mag’s party pictures. Finally, it came out that she was a Playmate because I wouldn’t let it up!”

Above: an image from Lyons’ Playboy spread, and a picture of Aldridge. [Refinery29]

• Philip Treacy is declaring the fascinator dead. “The fascinator is dead and I’m delighted,” says the milliner. “The word fascinator sounds like a dodgy sex toy.” This, from the man who gave the world Princess Beatrice’s Uterus Fascinator! “Mass production means that they became so cheap to produce that now they are no more than headbands with a feather stuck on with a glue gun. We’re seeing a return to proper hats.” [Sunday Times]

• Obama has thrown his support behind legislation that would end the state sales tax exemption for online purchases. [WWD]

• The U.K. retailer Matches is changing the names of its 10 London stores and its Web site to Matchesfashion.com. Because something something omnichannel something something luxury experience something. [WWD]

• Janice Dickinson has apparently filed for bankruptcy, listing debts of $1 million. [NYPost]

• Mike Duke, Wal-Mart’s C.E.O., got a 14.1% pay rise in 2012. His total compensation ballooned to $20.7 million. [WWD]

• Jeffrey Lubell, the outgoing C.E.O. of True Religion jeans, was sent on his way with a $5.9 million severance package. [WWD]