On Trend & Beyond

Alumni visionaries lead the way

By Mary Howard

Several Trinity College alumni have made their way to the cutting edge of fashion, beauty, and global retail. Read on to learn about four such individuals and how their liberal arts education at Trinity contributed to their success.

Megan Williams Grant ’97, P’29

President and CEO, Louis Vuitton Americas

“Brand building is in my soul,” says Megan Grant ’97, P’29. As president and CEO for Louis Vuitton Americas, she works with the fashion giant’s team in North and South America to grow brand desirability and further elevate the company’s exceptional client experience. Grant accepted the position in June 2024 after a successful 22 years with L’Oréal Paris.

“You can’t say no to a brand like Louis Vuitton,” she says. Grant says the company, known for its high-end, LV-monogrammed handbags, ready-to-wear fashion, watches, and jewelry, is considered the largest luxury brand in the world.

Based in New York City, Grant enjoys the diverse aspects of her job. On any given day, she can be poring over budgets, planning client events, or meeting with teams about the most recent product launches—the company unveiled its first makeup brand, La Beauté Louis Vuitton, in August 2025. “Every day is different, and I love it,” she says.

Though this is her first position in fashion, at L’Oréal, Grant held numerous leadership roles in marketing, working with the cosmetics company’s subsidiaries, including Lancôme, Kiehl’s, and Giorgio Armani. But after 22 years, she was ready for a new challenge. “My experience at L’Oréal was amazing,” she says. “But my brain was running on autopilot. I wanted to be curious again.”

In 2017, she was given L’Oréal’s Working Mother of the Year Award for her ability to balance the demands of being a mother and running a business. She has been married to Tim Grant for 23 years, and the couple have two children, Lily and Timmy. In August 2025, the Grants became Trinity parents when Lily joined the Class of 2029. “This was an amazing, full-circle moment for me—seeing the beautiful campus through the eyes of my daughter.”

After graduation, Grant traveled to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she worked as a front-desk clerk for a year. “I learned a lot about life and how to deal with people,” she says. Afterward, she moved to New York City, where her first job was working as an hourly temp with Estée Lauder.

An economics major at Trinity, Grant says the program was modern in its approach, giving her the benefits of a liberal arts education along with business fundamentals through an accounting class and internships. She also enrolled in art history classes and took advantage of the proximity to the Wadsworth Atheneum. “My experience at Trinity developed both sides of my brain.”

And the combination was perfect for her future career. “I can run the numbers and leverage the insights of the profit and loss, but I can also pick the right lipstick shade and handbag for the model at the store.”

John Howard ’74

Founder and Co-CEO, Irving Place Capital
Founder and Co-CEO, Celebrands

John Howard ’74 has a reputation for growing fashion companies. With more than 40 years’ experience in private equity investing, he says, he has a “fingertip feel” for the industry. Many investors are hesitant to back fashion, he says. “It’s faddish. It changes from season to season,” but he says that finding the right business partners is the key to his success.

“It’s being comfortable that you’re with the kind of people that can responsibly, thoughtfully lead a business,” Howard said during a 2024 talk at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

In 1997, Howard founded Bear Stearns Merchant Banking, now Irving Place Capital. One of the firm’s largest success stories was investing in Aeropostale in 1998. At the time, the mall-based apparel company was languishing. “Nobody wanted it,” he says, but the firm saw its initial investment become a $1 billion return. Over the years, Howard has been behind the success of other clothing retailers, including New York & Company, 7 for All Mankind, and Frame Denim.

Now his focus is on Celebrands, an investment and growth firm he launched in 2020 with media executive Allen Shapiro. The business creates, acquires, and grows consumer brands in partnership with celebrities. Howard joined forces with Kim Kardashian to launch her apparel company, Skims, and with her sister, Khloé Kardashian, to launch Good American, which offers women’s casual wear in a wide range of sizes. “[The businesses] were highly successful, right out of the box,” he says.

Ironically, when Howard came to Trinity, he was not interested in fashion or finance; he wanted to be a writer. An English major, he spent the year after graduation in New York City writing and “being active socially.” While he did have some success—he came in second in an Atlantic Monthly poetry contest—he ultimately gave up the idea of writing as a career. Instead, he applied to the Executive Development Program at Macy’s. He notes, “I heard it was harder to get into than business school.”

Howard thrived there and was promoted quickly. After three years, he enrolled at the Yale School of Management, earning an M.B.A. in 1980. After graduation, he acquired a cosmetics and hair-care company, but running the business didn’t hold his interest. “I wanted to invest in other companies and make deals,” he says.

He became a vice president in the mergers and acquisitions department of The Bear Stearns Companies before securing a position at Wesray Capital, a private equity firm. While there, he led the firm’s investments in Avis Car Rental, Simmons Bedding Company, Wilson Sporting Goods, and other consumer-focused companies. “It was then that I realized what I was made to do,” he says.

Though he never took an economics course at Trinity—“it wasn’t cool in the ’70s”—he says the liberal arts education he received is at the root of his success. He says he enjoyed classes in history, psychology, literature, and art history, most notably a “crazy course” on Alexander the Great with Eugene Davis. “It was beautifully done and taught me about perseverance and focus.”

David Hayne ’00

President, Nuuly
Chief Technology Officer, URBN

“We want to make life easier for people with busy calendars,” says David Hayne ’00, president of Nuuly, an online clothing rental company.

For a monthly fee, subscribers can rent any six items on the nuuly.com website and return them at the end of the month. If they want to keep an item, they have the option to purchase it online. The company, explains Hayne, offers a way for consumers to add “newness” to their wardrobes in a more sustainable and cost-effective way.

Nuuly is part of URBN, the parent company of Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People, and other retailers. The clothes on the Nuuly site are from the URBN sister companies and from other brands, including Levi’s, Madewell, and Ralph Lauren. “We want to offer as much variety as possible,” says Hayne. “Whatever the occasion is, we want to have something that will work for it.”

Though it was launched in 2019, right before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Nuuly has 380,000 subscribers and a half billion dollars in sales as of September 2025. The business, like so many, suffered during the pandemic, “but we stuck with it. We didn’t shutter the company,” says Hayne.

Fashion and retail run in the family. Hayne’s father, Richard, co-founded Free People in 1970 as an assignment for an entrepreneurship class. The business was incorporated in 1976 as Urban Outfitters and has been growing ever since. The elder Hayne serves as CEO of URBN, and several other family members hold positions within the company.

Hayne joined URBN in 2001. “We were beginning a new initiative with e-commerce, which I was interested in,” he says. To gain a better understanding of the business, he spent his first six months folding T-shirts and assisting customers at an Urban Outfitters store in Philadelphia.

Since then, he has held numerous positions within URBN. In 2004, as web development manager, he launched the Free People website, and in 2016, after serving for three years as COO of Free People, he became URBN’s chief digital officer. In 2020, he was promoted to chief technology officer. In this position, he focuses on using technology to streamline the company’s digital platform and to drive innovation in the retail sector, hence Nuuly.

As a student at Trinity, Hayne met the woman who would become his wife, Jessica Martin Hayne ’00. The two have five children, from a high school senior to a fifth grader. An English major, he credits his college experience with developing his writing skills, which he uses daily. Says Hayne, “I learned to write well and form opinions, which comes in handy, whether I am sending an email or forming a pitch.”

Linda Wells ’80

Founding Editor-in-Chief, Allure
Editor, Air Mail Look
Columnist, Air Mail

Early in her journalism career, Linda Wells ’80 thought it was curious that beauty and fashion were not treated with the rigor, analysis, energy, and humor of other topics. In 1990, when she was tasked by media company Condé Naste to create a new beauty and fashion magazine, she decided to do things differently. Allure was first published in 1991, and under Wells’s editorship, the magazine brought real reporting to an industry “that was seen as frivolous and superficial,” she says.

“I wanted to give the subject respect and liveliness,” says Wells, who was editor of Allure for 25 years. “I asked questions like, ‘How does a product work? Is this legitimate? Is this a scam?’ ”

She says the magazine gave honest reviews of beauty products—even after numerous companies pulled their advertising. Allure also published articles on women’s health issues and was the first women’s magazine to write about the risks associated with silicone breast implants. “Of course, now we talk about all kinds of things that were once taboo—like Botox and facelifts—but at that time, no one was talking about it,” she says. “There was enormous stigma about appearance and any efforts to manipulate it.”

Wells began her career at Vogue, where she was hired as an assistant. “Which means I fetched coffee and made copies,” she says. But in the evenings and on weekends, she would write, and gradually her articles were published in the magazine.

“The writing was everything,” she says. “I was learning from the best and taking it all in.”

From Vogue, she went to The New York Times, where she worked as a style reporter. There she learned to approach beauty from a journalistic perspective, she says. Along the way, she also became food editor for The New York Times Magazine. “They even sent me to culinary school.”

After leaving Allure in 2015, she served as the chief creative officer at Revlon, where she created a makeup line called Flesh.

Since 2019, Wells has been a columnist for the weekly digital magazine Air Mail and is the editor of Air Mail Look, the magazine’s beauty and wellness newsletter. She brings the same journalistic perspective to this position, with recent stories focusing on the torture of swimsuits and the effects of our noisy world on our health.

An English major and studio arts student at Trinity, Wells says she was more interested in creative expression than fashion or beauty as an undergraduate. She particularly enjoyed a poetry writing class with Professor Hugh Ogden and artist-in-residence Philip Levine. She notes, “It taught me the love and economy of language.”

 

Above: Dima Sidelnikov/iStock Photo