Creative Directors in 2024: In or out?

By: George Shi

2024 has been a turmoil year for the fashion industry.  

First, the growth of the major luxury fashion houses halted. In October, Kering, one of the biggest luxury groups, announced its 2024 Q3 revenue. With the large effect of the continued weakness in the Asia-Pacific market, the cash cow of Kering, Gucci, Q3 revenue plunged 25% to 1.64 billion euros. Other brands, such as Yves Saint Laurent, dropped 12%, and Balenciaga dropped 14%. Yet, Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE (LVMH) 2024 Q3 revenue also dropped 2%.

 Second, creative directors of the big luxury fashion houses experienced an unprecedented change. In early December, Women Wear Daily (WWD)published an article to allude to the possibility that the current creative director of Bottega Veneta, Matthew Blazy, will become the successor to Virginie Viard for Chanel. Earlier this year, we saw the new appointment of Gucci – Sabato De Sarno after Alessandro Michele left. Sarah Burton was replaced by Seán McGirr for Alexander McQueen. Kim Jones left Fendit. From Dior to Fendi, from Chanel to Maison Margiela, the big fashion groups seem to have increasingly less patience for creative directors with the pressure of growth and stakeholders’ responsibility.  

If we clock back to 2018, creative directors are still seen as the key drivers for the brands. LVMH and Kering even had a battle for those directors.  

In 2018, LVMH gathered industry-recognized top designers, including Nicolas Ghesquière, Raf Simons, and Kim Jones. Also, LVMH recruited rising young talent Jonathan Anderson to Loewe. LVMH made another big move by bringing back the renowned Hedi Slimane from the Kering Group. 

The Kering Group, on the other hand, focused on developing star designers internally. Both Alessandro Michele, who boldly transformed the old Gucci, and Daniel Lee, who continued the old Celine's legacy, became industry stars almost immediately after launching their first collections.  

Earlier in October, Celine announced Hedi Slimane’s quitting after 7 years of being creative director for the brand. From 2018, LVMH brought back Hedi by entitling him to the total freedom to control the creative process of Celine. What has happened?

There are a lot of rumors about the “break up” between LVMH and Hedi Slimane. One of the most widely mentioned aspects is the disagreement between the degree of control towards the product creativity. Hedi, one of the top designers in the 21st century, wants total control of the creative process, which is against LVMH’s strategy.

With the exile of Hedi Slimane, we are witnessing one of the biggest shifts in the current fashion houses: Logos over creative directors. In other words, the depersonalization of the big fashion houses. 

We cannot deny that those genius designers always left strong personal aesthetic marks on the fashion houses. In the 1990s Dior, John Galliano’s runways exhibited his “ferocious creativity.”He created these theatrical and wistful dream-like runways. Similar to Hedi Slimane — 90s rock teenagers,  Michele’s maximalism-oriented and Rococo style monograms, or Phoebe Philo’s minimalism. In some ways, it left a strong archive for successors to use and expand. Yet, those genius designers are rare. There might be a backlash to the brand due to disappointment and changes in the tonality of the brand. 

Those backlashes are detrimental to fashion houses and create a lot of uncertainty. Ultimately, fashion houses are like finance companies: they are risk-reverse. By depersonalization and erasing the strong personal aesthetics of the fashion houses, it means the aesthetics and tonality of the brand will not change. The targeted consumers will maintain their elasticity to the brand. It also prevents consumers from establishing emotional dependence on one specific star-designer.

It is all about the brand, not the designer. Brand comes first.  

It is all about smooth and steady.  

If we take a look at the most successful brands in the fashion industry, it seems true of depersonalization. If we think Hermés, what is the first thing that pops up in your mind? I would guess probably not the current designer, (I have no clue who it is) but the Kelly or Birkin bags. Those classic items seem to be what luxury brands are looking for. It also brings the conversation of what is luxury goods and what is fashion products. There is a subtle distinction. Fashion goods rely on ephemeral, constantly changing cyclical trends, while the latter is characterized by scarcity, timelessness, and durability, being less susceptible to trend fluctuations. What fashion brands are doing is an attempt to luxurize the existing fashion products — to let them become classic.  

This is what the new Gucci tries to do. By introducing numerous top designers from Dior, Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci tries to strengthen the existing creative team, to let them create something classic. What Francesca Bellettini tries to do is to create a Gucci of Gucci instead of Sabato De Sarnon of Gucci.

 For luxury brands, they operate on a foundation of creative uncertainty balanced against business-related certainties. This approach maximizes predictable brand revenue. By synthesizing consumer demands, market trends, and product lifecycle considerations, brands can roughly calculate controllable business volume, leaving the rest to creative expression. When lucky, creativity can propel a brand skyward, like Gucci during Alessandro Michele's era, but when luck isn't favorable, solid merchandise operation strategies can at least ensure stable brand revenue.

In the end, it seems like the importance of creative designers is diluted. People no longer worship designers, nor do they worship individuality. If fashion faithfully reflects the trends of the times, then this era appears increasingly youthful on the surface while growing increasingly aged at its core. Although at the marketing level, all brands are striving to be vibrant and distinctive, desperately trying to connect with the new generation, in an environment of economic weakness, the brands achieving growth against the trend have become Brunello Cucinelli and Loro Piana — the Uniqlo for the wealthy. 

*For fashion brands, creative directors are no longer the greatest assets but risks.