TheChek News Flow

Sales doubled in 2019, but the industry’s tipping point — severing ties to the gas pump — still lies ahead. These cars will help make that happen.

The hedge fund industry’s bloodbath continued in 2019 with more hedge funds shutting down than launching for the fifth year in a row.

Some 540 hedge funds had liquidated by the end of October, according to Hedge Fund Research. Meanwhile, the number of funds to have opened last year is projected to fall short of 500 — marking the fewest new funds since 2000, according to HFR data.

The industry’s dwindling size comes as a seemingly endless stock market rally makes it difficult for so-called smart money investors to locate investment opportunities that might justify their high fees.

The average hedge fund this year is up 8.5 percent, a marked improvement from the average 6.7 percent loss they managed in 2018. Unfortunately, the rebound is still short of the S&P 500 index, which was up almost 30 percent this year.

Things are so bleak that normally stoic hedge fund managers are groaning about their woes on the record. “It’s not an easy business and with the increase in compliance and cost … for many people it just isn’t worth it today,” Thomas Thornton, president of Greenwich-based research firm Hedge Fund Telemetry, said in a note published Monday morning.

“That being said I also believe this business is not dead, it just sucks right now,” Thornton moaned in his note.

This year, only a select handful of winners materialized, including:

And 2019 losers include:

Virgil Abloh Says Streetwear Will Die — Many Disagree

Grow, evolve, change? Yes, but die? No.

To Virgil Abloh, the answer is yes, but to streetwear brands and commentators, he’s dead wrong.

In a recent interview with Dazed magazine, as part of the publication’s series featuring this decade’s top players, Abloh predicted streetwear is going to die in the coming decade, and consumers will “hit this like, really awesome state of expressing your knowledge and personal style with vintage.”

“In my mind, how many more T-shirts can we own, how many more hoodies, how many sneakers,” he said in the interview. “There are so many clothes that are cool that are in vintage shops and it’s just about wearing them. I think that fashion is gonna go away from buying a box fresh something; it’ll be like, hey I’m gonna go into my archive.”

But his comments raised the hackles of the streetwear community.

“He’s part of the reason why streetwear is the new high fashion, and luxury today is sneakers and T-shirts. Him saying that is like the biggest rapper saying hip-hop is dead and then making different music,” said Broken Promises designer Mandee Bence. “He’s just outgrown it.”

“I believe Virgil has an interesting perspective that I respect, but I disagree with his statement that streetwear is going to die,” said Dre Hayes, president of Kappa North America. “People are not going to stop wearing hoodies, Ts and sneakers. To me, that is like saying hip-hop is dead. It didn’t die, but rather it evolved into what we have today. Evolution is happening to streetwear. In regard to the vintage comment, streetwear is already part of the vintage experience. The resell market for sneakers and apparel is very much an integral part of the streetwear. People are already wearing their archives every day.”

ComplexCon in November held a panel discussion about the future of streetwear with Chris Gibbs of Union, Guillermo Andrade of 424, Matthew Henson, and Don C and Ev Bravado, all of whom have close ties to Abloh. No one on the panel believes streetwear will die.

“I would have to disagree. I don’t believe streetwear will ever die, but I do believe there are major changes coming,” said Renowned ceo John Dean. “I believe streetwear will evolve especially with this push for sustainability and tech. I do agree with us having too many hoodies and T-shirts, and I believe streetwear will purge itself and create a new style that’s more tailored. The styles will be more high-fashion based with more subtle graphics. It’s all a revolving door though, heavy graphics will be back a few seasons after that.”

Nick Diamond, founder of Diamond Supply Co., said, “I understand the concept of the ‘streetwear look’ losing popularity in high fashion, because it is just a trend among luxury consumers and brands right now. I appreciate the idea and use of more recycled vintage clothing for the great pieces you can find but also from an environmental standpoint. The less clothing manufactured, the better for the planet. However, streetwear and skate clothing are where brands and designers can be innovative and still affordable. The skate uniform of T-shirts, hoodies, sneakers and hats is not going anywhere. As long as there are new young creative designers from the streets there will be streetwear.”

Huf creative director Romeo Tanghal also disagrees with Abloh’s opinion and believes, “As long as people continue to make art and their opinions known, whether on an expensive garment or pedestrian T-shirt, streetwear is definitely here to stay.”

“I don’t think streetwear is necessarily going to ‘die’ but I do believe there is going to be a big step in a different direction,” said Alejandro Rodriguez, founder and designer of Btfl, formerly known as Beautiful Fül. “As far as vintage goes, I think it’s always been part of the conversation for people in the know, the difference now is items from the Eighties and Nineties are considered vintage and it’s easy for these kids to relate to them because of movies they’ve seen or artists that come from that period, so there will definitely be a lot of focus on that. However, streetwear has solidified itself in the fashion world and won’t disappear, I just think it’ll put on a new pair of sneakers.”

In the Dazed interview, Abloh also spoke about the famous group photo Tommy Ton shot in 2009 of himself with Kanye West, Don C, Taz Arnold, Chris Julian and Derek Watkins, better known as Fonzworth Bentley; his first Off-White and Louis Vuitton shows and frustrations of his designs being categorized as streetwear.

“At the time,” he said, “the formal press was only just categorizing that type of design as ‘streetwear.’ As a designer, you get confronted with the term of your generation which you have no control over. From that frustration I decided if ‘streetwear’ was gonna be the sign of the times I was gonna define it rather than be defined by it. I needed to do a show to define what ‘streetwear’ could be, and do it with urgency, you know.”

He wasn’t defining streetwear alone. Brands and designers such as Palm Angels and Heron Preston ascended during streetwear’s takeover and the influence was evident in moments like Louis Vuitton collaborating with Supreme, and James Jebbia of Supreme being named Menswear Designer of the Year at the CFDA Awards in 2018.

Abloh succeeded in his task, leading streetwear’s evolution and takeover of men’s wear. But he doesn’t appear to be done just yet. He last week revealed a collaboration with A Bathing Ape and Human Made founder Nigo. They will partner on a capsule collection for Louis Vuitton to launch in 2020.

A Decade of Stock Market Winners and Losers

The winners in the 2010s rode major trends — from the rise of ath-leisure to the massive growth in beauty — to outsized stock market gains.

The value of the web giant’s shares shot up 1,492 percent since the end of 2009, giving Amazon a market capitalization of $927 billion as it headed into the final, short week of 2019.

That’s an increase of almost $870 billion — a gigantic leap that speaks to, yes, the transformative force Amazon has been in the commercial world, where it accounts for about half of all online sales. But it’s also a measure of the company’s early leadership in the cloud computing sector (a cash cow for its operations), the lingering obsession with all things tech and a bull market that not only charged out of the Great Recession, but just kept going. (But Amazon itself has some catching up to do if it wants to match Apple, which added $1.1 trillion to its market cap over the last decade, expanding its stock market value to $1.29 trillion).

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 175 percent for the decade, going from strength to strength and setting a new all-time high last Friday.

Amazon is not only good at what it does — it was in the right place at the right time in the 2010s. And more so than perhaps any other company.

But there were other waves to catch coming out of the recession and one didn’t need to be a master of the tech universe like Jeff Bezos to take advantage of them:

• Activewear rose as the ath-leisure and wellness trends expanded.

• Beauty gained as the YouTube tutorial, Instagram and the mega influencer took root.

• Luxury perked up as brands tapped into the Chinese market and took control of their distribution, opening more stores and launching online while pulling back from department stores.

• And the offprice sector threaded the needle, serving up brands and discounts to no-nonsense shoppers shying away from the mall.

Benefiting from these trends was the eclectic group of Lululemon Athletica Inc., Ulta Beauty Inc., Estée Lauder Cos. Inc., Ross Stores Inc. and Hermès International — the top five market cap winners after Amazon, each of which drove stock increases of more than 600 percent for the decade.

The increases equal more than bragging rights or even shareholder gains. Power on Wall Street — where paper money rules — can also equate to real-world power.

Lauder, for instance, started off with a market cap of $9.5 billion, a tidy sum that ballooned over the last 10 years to $74.8 billion. That financial cushion helps as the company looks to its future and fills out its portfolio. In context, the firm’s $1.1 billion deal to move more aggressively into Asia and buy full control of Have & Be. Co., the parent to Dr. Jart+, looks small. To pay for the acquisition, and refinance $500 million in debt coming due, Lauder issued $1.8 billion in debt at interest rates of 3.1 percent and lower.

Likewise, Lululemon started off with a market cap of $2.1 billion and over the course of the decade added another $27.9 billion to it for a total of $30 billion — giving the company much more heft when it comes to attracting talent, raising money to fuel further growth and crowding out competitors.

While these companies with ultra-strong brands, deep connections with consumers and the wind at their backs have gained clout and financial might, the giants of old are limping into the 2020s.

The mall-based department and specialty stores have struggled to capture the hearts of investors as foot traffic waned, outdated leases lingered, debts piled up and many struggled to draw shoppers who are looking for new kinds of experiences.

Victoria’s Secret parent L Brands Inc., Nordstrom Inc., Macy’s Inc., Gap Inc., Abercrombie & Fitch Co. and J.C. Penney Co. Inc. were among those not only failing to keep up with the market during the 2010s, but losing ground. Even the off-mall alternative Kohl’s Corp. logged a decline.

Collectively, those seven companies gave up $29.2 billion in market cap — a decline of 46 percent for the decade. That’s not far off from the $27.9 billion Lululemon gained.

But if Lululemon, Lauder and the rest are going to keep up, they’re going to have to use their scale to master what is surely going to be another new kind of retail for another new kind of consumer in the 2020s.

And they’ll also have to make sure to be — once more — in the right place at the right time.

Mary Cassatt’s ‘Girl Arranging Her Hair’ was thought to have been painted by Degas

Beware of art teachers who approve of their students’ work only when it resembles their own. Near the end of his life, the painter Lucian Freud recalled that when the sculptor Henry Moore taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, Moore would inspect the students’ sculptures, looking for signs of his own influence. At the time, Moore was the most famous and distinguished artist in England. According to Freud, “every fifth or sixth sculpture, was a ‘Moore,’ and he said, ‘I like that! I see the point of that one!’ Which was nothing if not naive.”

What, then, are we to make of this painting by Mary Cassatt, which is so superb and, at the same time, so much like something Edgar Degas might have made that, after he died, Degas’s own executors mistook it for one of his? They were in a position to do so because Degas had acquired it in a swap with Cassatt after the eighth, and final, Impressionist exhibition, in 1886. He hung it in his private salon, and kept it all his life.

Did Degas choose it because he could think of it as a “Degas” — a flattering homage by a talented student?

It might look that way. But in reality, Cassatt was never Degas’s student. Three years before they met, upon seeing one of her paintings, he said, “There is someone who feels as I do,” which is subtly, but crucially, different from saying, “Ah, look! A Degas.”

Degas could be withering about artists who tried to emulate him. Suzanne Valadon once told him that Toulouse-Lautrec “dresses in your clothes,” to which Degas replied: “But adjusting them to his size.”

Ouch.

It’s clear from the record that Cassatt and Degas admired one another. (Their relationship was the subject of a brilliant show, “Degas/Cassatt,” at the National Gallery in 2014.) But I think it went deeper than that.

Degas acquired “Girl Arranging Her Hair” not, I think, because it reminded him of himself. He acquired it because of the astonishing feeling of freshness it gives off, the skill in the drawing (that right hand!), and the gorgeousness of the coloring. He saw straightaway its greatness, and was greedy to have it. (“If you are going to paint,” said Freud, “you’ve got to use any art you see as being there entirely for you, to help you. If you ‘admire’ it in that sense, I think maybe you’re gone.”)

Look at the set of the mouth of Cassatt’s girl, her squashed bottom lip, the oily sheen on her chin, the coloring in her cheek. She’s not falsely pretty. She’s real. Even as she reaches back to gather her hair and twist it into manageable form, she is acutely aware, conscious, noticing. She’s complex in ways we perceive in others only when we open ourselves, without prejudice, to their specific presence, their particular energy.

Before this painting came into the world, I don’t know whether any artist had managed to portray a young girl occupying such a narrow and fleeting slice of time so confidently and fully. Degas, evidently, was among the first to realize this.

From top design in Paris, Copenhagen and Madrid to safari lodges in Botswana and Mozambique

The Spanish capital has lacked a properly grand hotel for two years now, ever since Mandarin Oriental closed the Ritz to embark on a €99m refurbishment by the French designers Gilles & Boissier. It is due to be unveiled this summer but the first quarter of this year should see the launch of a new rival: Four Seasons’ reinvention of seven historic buildings, among them the Banco Hispano Americano and the Palacio de la Equitativa, into a 161-room, 39-suite hotel, adjoining the elegant Galeria Canalejas shopping arcade. Aside from the architectural heritage, what makes it a really alluring prospect is the fact that Dani Garcia is overseeing its rooftop restaurant (designed by Martin Brudnizki) and terrace. If it’s as good as Bibo, Garcia’s self-styled “bistro for the bold” in Marbella, let alone his Michelin-starred restaurant next door, it will be worth the trip in itself.

fourseasons.com

LVMH’s €750m transformation of the venerable 19th-century Parisian department store La Samaritaine is due for completion in April. It will contain both expansive retail space — with an emphasis on LVMH brands — and, less predictably, 96 social housing units and a nursery as well as offices, set behind a striking new undulating glass facade designed by the futuristic Japanese architects SANAA on the Rue de Rivoli. The original store’s Art Deco extension meanwhile, has been reconfigured as a supremely refined Cheval Blanc hotel overlooking the Seine, with 72 rooms (from €1,150) and suites (the penthouse has its own swimming pool), 26 of them the work of Peter Marino, who has also designed its Christian Dior spa. Chef Arnaud Donckele of La Vague d’Or at the hotel’s sister property in Saint-Tropez, which has three Michelin stars, will take charge of its restaurant.

chevalblanc.com

The trend for repurposing municipal landmarks as hotels continues in Denmark where the imposing Central Post and Telegraph Office, built in 1912, is due to open as Villa Copenhagen on April 1. In contrast with the marble-and-parquet splendour of the public areas, its 390 rooms (from DKr1,940, about £220) will be decorated in a coolly Nordic style. And in addition to the usual facilities, there will be a winter garden with a glass roof, as well as a roof garden, where they’ll grow vegetables and herbs for use in the informal brasserie, plus a 25-metre pool, heated, in accordance with the hotel’s aspirations to be environmentally friendly, with excess heat from the building.

villacopenhagen.com

Built in 1681 for the Duc de Saint-Aignan, first gentleman of Louis XIV’s bedchamber, and later used as the exchequer (hence its name), L’Hôtel du Grand Contrôle is a petit palais overlooking the Orangery parterre in the gardens of the Château de Versailles. Meticulously restored and furnished with Aubusson carpets and Pierre Frey fabrics in an appropriately antique style, based on an inventory of the building taken in 1788 (the last before the revolution) the clunkily named “Airelles Château de Versailles, Le Grand Contrôle” opens this spring as a 14-room hotel (from €1,300 a night) with an Alain Ducasse restaurant. Among the perks of staying there will be out-of-hours access to the palace, the Petit Trianon and their gardens, as well as the chance to take a boat on to its mile-long canal.

airelles.com

Benedikt Bolza, an Austrian-born architect, and his Florentine wife Nencia Corsini have spent the past 25 years restoring the farmhouses on his family’s 1,500-hectare estate, Castello di Reschio, close to Umbria’s Tuscan border. The estate is home to long-established vineyards (Cesanese, Cillegolo, Sangiovese and Merlot), 5,000 olive trees, more than a million bees and an organic farm, as well as meadows, woods and a lake you can swim in. As each house was completed, they would sell it (10 are available to rent). In time they added an equestrian centre and, last summer, a 70-cover restaurant. And this June sees the opening of their first hotel, a conversion of the estate’s 11th-century castle, with 36 rooms, a second restaurant and a spa.

reschio.com

The news that South Africa’s Tollman family, owners of Red Carnation Hotels, have lavished $35m on their next venture, a safari camp with just 12 bedrooms, seems surprising — until you consider the details. Xigera Safari Lodge, due to open in June in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, will be powered by the delta’s biggest solar farm, so its diesel-free, disposable-plastic-free environmental credentials are impressive. (Hot water comes from geysers.) And by hiring 105 permanent staff, it’s certainly created employment. But much of the investment must surely have gone on art and design: works and furniture by more than 30 African artists (those by the young South African Chris Soal, still only 25, are a revelation). Sourced or commissioned by Trevyn McGowan of Cape Town gallery Southern Guild, the collection promises to be almost as fascinating as the wildlife on the floodplain it faces.

xigera.com

Six years on from its first urban property in Tokyo, Aman Resorts opens in New York towards the end of the year, in the 26-storey Crown Building at 730 Fifth Avenue (and 57th), the 1921 tower with a distinctive oxidised-copper pyramid roof and almost 40kg of gold leaf on its facade. Designed by long-time Aman collaborator Jean-Michel Gathy of Denniston Architects (the vision behind Aman properties in Indonesia, Rajasthan, Turks and Caicos islands, Beijing, Montenegro, Venice and Vietnam), the 83-room hotel will share the building with three floors of shops, a triple-height spa, two restaurants (Japanese and Mediterranean), a 10th-floor garden terrace, private members’ club, basement jazz club and 22 residences, among them a five-storey penthouse with a reported price tag of $180m.

amanresorts.com

Until the outbreak of Mozambique’s civil war in 1977, the 4,000 sq km Gorongosa National Park was the jet set’s safari destination of choice. Now the park National Geographic has called “Africa’s lost Eden” — home to lion, leopard, giraffe, zebra, elephant, waterbuck, sable and much more — is being put back on the luxury travel map by the opening, later this year, of the Royal Gorongosa. Each of its eight tents, practically marquees, will cover at least 86sq metres excluding their decks and private plunge pools, and if it lives up to the standards of its sister properties, including Royal Malewane in the Greater Kruger National Park, La Residence in Franschhoek and the Silo in Cape Town, its guests shouldn’t want for much.

theroyalportfolio.com