How long should brands give a creative director to succeed?

To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here. From Gucci to Louis Vuitton Men, some of luxury’s biggest houses have had a changing of the guard over the last year. And there’s more to come in 2024, as the industry anticipates debuts from Seán McGirr at Alexander McQueen, Chemena Kamali at Chloé, Matteo Tamburini at Tod’s, Alessandro Vigilante at Rochas, Walter Chiapponi at Blumarine, and new appointments at Lanvin and Moschino. For executives, the expectation and hope is that a new creative director will immediately launch a new creative era and drive a sales uplift from the very first collection; based on success stories like that of Alessandro Michele, who propelled Gucci’s sales from €3.6 billion in 2015 to almost €10 billion over his eight-year tenure. Or Daniel Lee, who revived Bottega Veneta to become an accessories powerhouse, with sales up 28 per cent from €1.17 billion in 2019 to €1.5 billion in 2021, over his three years in the role (he exited suddenly in 2021). But in reality, this kind of revamp isn’t so easy to achieve. Brands including Ann Demeulemeester, Trussardi and Bally all hired young creative directors in recent years, only to replace them after less than three seasons. It remains to be seen if Lee can replicate his Bottega Veneta success at Burberry, where sales growth is slowing in line with the wider market. And even when a designer manages to invigorate a house, they’re still not in the clear – a plateau in revenue growth can be enough for the company to pursue a new creative leader. “[The brand] may still be making money and have sound financial health, but more than [that], brands with weak top-line growth would seek out new creative energy,” says Luca Solca, managing director of luxury goods at Bernstein. This impatience for commercial success could be damaging to the industry and its design talents, critics say. “The hiring and firing of creative directors and the teams behind them — in the space of a few seasons — has reached an unprecedented level of what I can only call cruelty,” says Sarah Mower, Vogue chief critic, BFC’s ambassador for emerging talent and chair of the BFC Newgen committee, who has nurtured many of the UK’s most prominent talents, including Loewe’s Jonathan Anderson. “The truth is that brands only risk their own credibility when they do this. The way it puts the ‘blame’ on designers after putting them in the spotlight, and then damaging their reputations makes me very uncomfortable. Turning around the fortunes — and the design style — of any company takes longer than five minutes. It can’t just be on the creative director to do this cosmetically.” Is it all just part of the package? Fashion wasn’t always this way, experts agree. The concept of a dramatically stark brand reset arguably began with Tom Ford at Gucci in the early ’90s, critics say. But the expectation truly arrived in the 2010s, when Hedi Slimane was appointed creative director of Saint Laurent in 2012. Slimane dropped the Yves from Yves Saint Laurent, assigned the label a new rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic and relocated the design studio from Paris to Los Angeles, in a move that polarised the fashion crowd but performed well commercially (Saint Laurent sales grew 75 per cent to €974 million from 2013 to 2015, before Slimane’s departure in mid-2016). Michele’s Gucci turnaround followed, and in 2018 Slimane once again transformed a label when he took over a minimalist Celine from Phoebe Philo, bringing in his signature edge once more. A lightning strike then became a strategy to be pursued: seeking a brilliant creative mind that could overnight revive a brand that’s hit a growth plateau or is facing losses. “The reality is that as the brands become bigger and bigger, they become bigger businesses that are oftentimes publicly traded and there are quarterly reports so they want consistency. But fashion is not about consistency, it’s about newness,” says luxury retail analyst Robert Burke. The need for newness has led to a higher turnover rate for creative directors. “The creative director’s role is to make the brand prominent in the current zeitgeist, so that it grows faster than competitors. The faster the market growth, the higher the pressure,” says Solca. Analysts say the commercial success of a creative director should be clear early on. “In the most relevant success cases, I have seen that the new creative director has immediately started on the right foot. Even if success has built up over time, there was never a sense that this may not be the right person,” says Solca, referring to Demna at Balenciaga and Alessandro Sartori at Zegna, who also shook up their brands for commercial success. “We should expect to see signs early on, at the very least in terms of buzz, and then immediately thereafter in terms of sales.” Within a year or so, the results should be reflecting the success of the first few collections, analysts believe. The risk with young creatives Big brands feel the need to act fast when they realise a creative director isn’t a good fit, but the danger with a revolving door is that designers become less invested themselves. “Now, creative directors are looking at it like any job they’d put on their résumé, they know it’s temporary and they’re doing it for the [name and] experience, even if it’s only for a few seasons,” says fashion commentator Osama Chabbi. Some designers — especially those at the early stages of their careers — spread the risk by keeping their own brands going alongside their major roles, such as Nina Ricci creative director Harris Reed. “Even with Peter Do at Helmut Lang, it made sense with the way the system works that he kept [the best bits of] his collection for himself. As much as you can disappoint the business imperatives of a corporation, if you’re true to your vision at your namesake label, you’re unlikely to self-disappoint,” says Chabbi. In cases where young designers have shuttered or scaled back their own brands to take on a major creative director position, they’re left with fewer prospects if ousted. Once a fledgling designer is “just about established”, they are pushed to keep delivering more and more each season, says fashion critic Suzy Menkes, who has covered the industry’s musical chairs for decades and sees the pattern. “The idea seems to be to squeeze the young designer until another takes over,” she says. “Everything is on the side — and in the hands of — the business managers.” An internal hire has proven a strong strategy for many brands. “The middle ground that brands have ended up with is an internal hire, someone with a fresher perspective who still speaks the corporate language,” says Chabbi. It’s also often quicker for an internal hire to lead a turnaround. “Michele came on very quickly and very strong because he was from the inner workings of Gucci, so he understood the DNA of the brand, the culture, the corporate structure,” says Burke. That’s not to say young creatives shouldn’t be hired, Chabbi says, they just need more support to understand the inner workings. Brand desirability vs creative talent How long a designer gets depends on the circumstances. In instances where the designer wasn’t a good fit to begin with, or when the brand itself is stuck and its positioning needs a rethink, no amount of waiting can change things. It’s a gamble between whether a brand reignites the interest of existing customers or acquires new ones, and there’s often a disconnect between what’s commercially successful among luxury consumers and what the fashion crowd likes. “Newness and numbers are totally different things,” says Chabbi. “You can bring on fresh blood and it can be perceived as cool by the public but then will perform terribly business-wise. There’s a gap between real consumers and what people like on the internet.” The risk is higher at smaller brands, like Ferragamo, Trussardi and Bally, because they don’t share the brand equity and the carryover product sales success of heritage houses. Ferragamo, for instance, says the sales rebound following Maximilian Davis’s appointment will take more time. But not all brands need a bolt of newness, particularly if their success is rooted in heritage: “I’m not sure if an Hermès or a Loro Piana really needs a new strong creative director to come in,” Burke says. A brand that doesn’t require a full revival but rather new creative energy to maintain commercial success is easier to hire a new creative director for. Houses like Dior or Louis Vuitton (which are closely associated with the founding designer’s aesthetic) have “the weight of history” behind them, whereas other labels are more open to re-interpretation from each new creative director, says Menkes. Burke adds: “It’s about the brand finding its positioning in the market as much as the creative director finding a positioning for the brand.” Solca references Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton and Kim Jones at Dior Men’s, who sustained and enhanced already-successful brands rather than revolutionising them. “A stitch at a time, saves nine. You don’t need to revolutionise and relaunch if you manage a constant level of energy and interest around the brand,” he says. A holistic approach Experts agree that it takes more than just new creative energy to turn around a struggling brand, and the creative director is just one piece of the puzzle. Burke says the factors required for a brand rebirth include “having the corporate structure that allows it, a consensus from the business that they need change, being able to balance the creativity with the commercial and business needs, and being able to communicate with the client effectively”, he says. “The litmus test is when the brand can create desire for something the customer didn’t even know they wanted.” That includes executive buy-in as well as aligning the marketing, communications, visuals and retail teams to support introductory products and designs. “The best strategy to maintain relevance over the long term is to have a multifaceted creative team,” says Solca. “[Successful brands] anticipate, rather than remedy problems. They rely on a team of creative talents, rather than on a star designer.” “When it works, it’s always because there’s a proper coalition between management and creative teams,” agrees Mower. “When it doesn’t, there’s always the suspicion that there’s a lot more going wrong behind scenes — not to do with the talent or character of the designer — but with the whole strategy and machinery of a brand.” Press and social media are also “culpable” in making trigger-happy premature judgements on designers after one or two shows, she says. “We should give people a chance to develop. But it also behoves wise brand managers to hold the line and not react instantly to the court of public opinion.” In this sense, a struggling brand may need to look to improve its structure as much as looking for fresh talent, says Burke. “If they don’t have enough support and the right corporate structure, even the best designers who walk into a house can only do so much.” Additional reporting by Christina Binkley Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com. More on this topic: Why are so many creative directors white men? How to diversify the creative director talent pool The young talent exodus: How to keep a creative director

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