Fashion Brief
L’Wren Scott‘s UK business has lost money ever since it was set up in 2006, but accounts paint only a partial picture of the late fashion designer’s operations.
Her main business, LS Fashion, operates primarily out of New York, and like many US firms it files its accounts in the secrecy haven state of Delaware.
The London operation was registered to offices on the Kings Road – the same building as the model management agency Oxygen Models – until moving last autumn a short distance to the New Kings Road.
Abbreviated accounts filed last October show the UK business was modest in scale, and not in great shape. The firm owed €6.75m (£5.6m) to creditors – an increase of €1.2m on the previous year – and had unsold stock sitting on the company’s books worth €1.8m. Retained losses for 2012 were €1.23m. The business has borrowed funds from HSBC.
The accounts make clear Scott pledged that her US parent operation would “provide adequate funding when necessary to enable it to meet its obligations for the foreseeable future”. The UK accounts do not disclose money flows between UK operations and America other than a €1.3m loan from the US in 2008.
There was some movement on the board of LS Fashion Ltd last year, with Scott briefly stepping down in April before being reappointed less than a month later. During her absence, her assistant Brittany Penebre – who is said to have discovered Scott’s body at the designer’s New York apartment on Monday – was fleetingly installed as a director.
Last November Scott’s brother Randy Bambrough, a Utah-based businessman, stepped on to the board as finance director. A former lecturer in finance at Santa Clara University in California, his main job is as chief financial officer of the technology company TechMedia.
Scott is thought to have had homes in Los Angeles and London as well as New York. US media reports claim a $1.25m mortgage on her $5.6m Manhattan apartment was paid off in full last year.
