As one of the highest profile partnerships in fashion explodes, with dirty laundry rather than designer labels the order of the day, some are looking back to happier times.
Friends of Swedish creative Erik Torstensson and fashion titan Dame Natalie Massenet – now embroiled in a bitter war of words with shocking claim and counter claim about their 14-year relationship – vividly remember an extraordinary break in Positano, Italy, in 2015, to mark Massenet’s 50th birthday.
Massenet, a Tatler journalist who founded the Net-a-Porter fashion website in 2010, threw a party for the ages on that July weekend.
Her ‘London crowd’ were there in force, including models Kate Moss, Cara and Poppy Delevingne and Laura Bailey.
It was a golden age for the first couple of luxury e-commerce.
In all, 150 guests gathered at Il San Pietro di Positano hotel, which has been frequented by privacy-loving celebrities such as Mick Jagger and George Clooney.
The final bill, according to legal documents lodged by Torstensson this week, was three million euros (£2.6million) – a staggering sum.
But then rooms at the San Pietro cost between £2,000 and £5,000 a night, which means the bill for accommodation alone for three nights would have come to more than £560,000. And that’s before the consumption of a solitary Aperol Spritz.
Pictured: Natalie Massenet and Erik Torstensson at The Fashion Awards in 2016
A fashion friend said: ‘Everybody went to her 50th and they were a very hard partying crowd. I remember people telling me about it when they got back.
‘It was kind of a disgusting spectacle of excess, to be honest. A very splashy, very un-English party, at the level of being Gatsby-esque.
‘The conspicuous consumption was like the parties thrown by [one-time boss of BHS and Topshop] Philip Green – lots of costume changes and dressing up, people letting loose.
‘It was also the early days of influencers and Instagramming, so it was all done to be seen.
‘Everyone stays up all night, there are a lot of drugs, mostly coke, and eventually people peel off and have sex with each other’s husbands and boyfriends.
‘That’s what you do in that world. You aren’t staying up playing Scrabble.’
The friend added: ‘The party came at a certain point in the fashion business where a few people suddenly got very rich and it was like being in the company of oil barons.
‘People who had not had money suddenly had so much of it, and what they wanted to say was, “Look at us”. But when you fly that high it is like Icarus, and a crash will come eventually.’
That crash has certainly come now, with Massenet and Torstensson filing jaw dropping lawsuits, and each already accusing the other of legal dirty tricks.
Last week, Torstensson, 47, applied for custody of their seven-year-old son, Jet, who was born with the help of a surrogate and an egg donor.
He painted his one-time partner Massenet as a heavy drinker, a regular drug user and someone who could be ‘violent’ and controlling of him. And, most wounding for any woman who’s also a mother, as an unfit parent.
The suit alleges that Massenet made all the running in the early days of the romance, at a point when she was still married to banker Arnaud Massenet.
It claims she and Torstensson had sex in her car outside her London home, while her two daughters were in the house, and again had sex in her car in Ibiza while she was on a family holiday.
Pictured: Natalie Massenet at the Louis Vuitton Hamptons Garden Party on July 20, 2024
Not long afterwards she decided to end her marriage to Arnaud and to create a new family with Torstensson.
The suit says that on occasion she ‘would lash out physically’ and that she had clawed at his arms ‘until they bled’. It also says she once overdosed on ecstasy at Glastonbury Festival.
It’s not quite the behaviour one might expect of a Dame of the British Empire – Massenet was awarded the honour in 2016 – and the first female chair of the British Fashion Council.
Massenet’s team are accusing Torstensson of leaking details of the suit to the New York Times in what they describe as a ‘vindictive smear’. His lawyers have hit back saying she is the one who has smeared him.
For, three weeks previously, Massenet, 60, had filed a lawsuit against Torstensson in California, accusing him of being a sex addict who used prostitutes, as well as being a ‘rampant’ drug addict who had lived a double life and drained her of her fortune.
She is seeking damages for breach of contract, fraud and infliction of emotional distress.
Bonnie Eskenazi, attorney for Torstensson, told the Daily Mail this week: ‘Erik Torstensson is a talented businessman with a proven track record of success, a trusted counsellor and, above all, a loving father.
‘It is sad that Ms Massenet would file a public lawsuit so vengeful and obviously meritless without any regard to the harm it would cause their family – and we will vigorously contest it.’
The belief in his camp is that Massenet’s lawsuit in California will most likely be dismissed.
A friend said: ‘They don’t live there, so there’s no jurisdiction. The suit was just a PR move to trash him.’
As for the bid in a New York court for custody, we’re told: ‘Erik wants this all to go away, which is why he filed his case in New York under seal. He wants to take the high road and the way to do that is by keeping it out of the public eye’.
Quite how details of the custody bid found their way into the New York Times last week is one of life’s mysteries.
Dame Natalie’s spokesman is in no doubt who is to blame, saying: ‘Erik Torstensson filed a confidential child custody claim – under seal – in relation to his and Natalie’s seven-year-old son and simultaneously leaked it to the media.
Torstensson went on to found the denim brand Frame, which benefited from a high-profile launch on Net-a-Porter, and the support of Massenet’s many celebrity friends
‘Torstensson’s improper use of the family court process is nothing more than a vindictive smear campaign in response to Natalie’s claim against him in California to settle financial matters.’
He added: ‘This action is clearly not in the interests of their child and is typical of Torstensson’s behaviour that led to the breakdown of the couple’s relationship and the recent changes to his professional roles.
‘Natalie remains open to mediation and to the private resolution of this family matter. Throughout her life and career, Natalie has led with integrity and transparency, expecting the same in her personal relationships.’
Her embarrassment and fury is clear in those statements. Small wonder that talk at New York Fashion Week this week was mostly about the pair, and the car crash of their split.
How their plentiful assets will be divided – they own a $25 million house on New York’s Upper East Side, plus the house next door, a beach house in the Hamptons and a country estate in Wiltshire – is the subject of much speculation.
One source said: ‘I think a lot of people who were outside their circle have schadenfreude about what is going on now, because they really threw their wealth in people’s faces.
‘She and Erik are like Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. It’s a path of mutual destruction, but she seems to be too angry and too hell bent on making him pay to see that. It’s a kind of War Of The Roses. She has been humiliated and they are so angry with each other.’
The source adds that Massenet is a combative character who can brutally cut off others, citing how she ‘iced’ her right-hand woman Alison Loehnis after Net-a-Porter was merged with the Yoox Group, and Loehnis stepped into her shoes at the new entity.
There is also a belief that her settlement with husband Arnaud involved at least one round of haggling over money. The battle now, though, is with Torstensson.
Torstensson, a dance champion in his youth, founded a fashion marketing agency, Saturday, in 2003. Seven years later he and his partner Jens Grede pitched to online luxury business Net-a-Porter the idea of launching a male fashion arm, Mr Porter. He and Natalie Massenet went into business – and fell for each other.
Torstensson went on to found the denim brand Frame, which benefited from a high-profile launch on Net-a-Porter, and the support of Massenet’s many celebrity friends, including David and Victoria Beckham.
Meanwhile, Massenet, having been pushed out of Net-a-Porter, invested in start-ups via her capital firm Imaginary Ventures. These included beauty brand Glossier, sustainable label Reformation and fashion platform Farfetch.
Their life was opulent almost beyond belief. However, in her suit against Torstensson, Massenet says their excessive lifestyle – she claims to have ‘spent more than $95 million (£70 million) during the course of their relationship’ – was mostly to impress hi business associates.
In her filing, she says the marriage first hit difficulties in 2024, when she noticed Torstensson was disappearing at night and drinking heavily. She apparently found a bottle of a prescription drug called Valacyclovir, which he told her was for hives, but which she discovered could be used to treat herpes, a sexually transmitted infection.
There were sessions with a relationship counsellor, too. But by May this year we are told Torstensson returned from working in LA and told Massenet he was ‘no longer in love’ with her and that he ‘did not believe their romantic relationship could continue’.
When, at their counsellor’s suggestion, he checked into a treatment centre, the documents say she found one of his old phones ‘which revealed the shocking details of his indiscretions’ and that he had been living a ‘secret life for many years’.
She allegedly found explicit messages and photographs showing her partner had ‘maintained multiple affairs with several younger women for years’. She added that she believed he had partied with prostitutes within days of their son being conceived.
When confronted, Mr Torstensson was said to have confessed he was a ‘liar, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a sex addict and that it had gone on for seven years’.
Almost immediately after Ms Massenet’s lawsuit became public, Frame, Mr Torstensson’s denim brand, announced he had ‘decided to step away from the company to attend to personal matters’, though he retains his ownership stake. The statement also added that his alleged behaviour did not reflect the brand’s values.
Skims has also begun distancing itself. In a statement, a spokeswoman for the company said the behaviour described in Massenet’s suit did not align with its corporate values and described Mr Torstensson as a ‘very small, early-stage minority stakeholder’.
A fashion source said: ‘Will the Kardashians want to be anywhere near this? No. I think that they have both devalued their brands. Somehow it matters a bit less to him, people knew him as a party animal, but it’s still not good.’
And what of the future for this Dame of the British Empire?
‘I think her friends are staying loyal to her but this is doing damage,’ says the fashion insider. ‘People are horrified that the child is being drawn into this.
‘It’s very bad for her and how she is perceived. She had more of a reputation to lose.’
