This story is part of ‘Debunking the Dream: Part Two’, a series based on an exclusive survey of 300 fashion designers, examining how they are navigating luxury's current crisis and how the industry might emerge stronger from it. Read it all here.
Fashion designers are perceived as the pinnacle of the industry’s dream-making machine. They’re the ‘backstage’ fashion workers with the most potential to become household names. Star designers — whether creative directors of long-standing brands or successful independent talents — are presented as singular creative geniuses, their fame boosting the allure of their designs.
In an exclusive survey of 300 anonymous fashion designers and over 30 on-record interviews with renowned designers and prominent industry figures, Vogue Business found that the dominance of star designers may be problematic for the long-term health of the fashion industry — as well as the designers themselves. They are expected to possess an unrealistic list of skills: to be creative masterminds as well as to have an understanding of the marketing and business expertise needed to steer brands and navigate the industry’s stormy waters.
All this exerts heavy pressure on individuals (and, in turn, other talent at the company, which remains underdeveloped), while the brands themselves may also be negatively impacted. When designers have to wear too many hats, they don’t have the time or space to be creative and genuinely innovate — they simply get caught in the churn. Design, their key skill set, is underplayed. Sales may blip upwards for a season or two, then the newsworthiness of the latest appointment fades, and the product design is exposed to unforgiving scrutiny.
Does the fashion industry place too much emphasis on the ability of an individual designer to transform the fortunes of a brand? The near-constant hirings and firings show just how much pressure is on designers and how little time they are given to deliver results. Alessandro Michele bowed out from Gucci to fill Pierpaolo Piccioli’s shoes at Valentino, while Piccioli’s number two, Sabato De Sarno, stepped into Michele’s role at Gucci. Meanwhile, Matteo Tamburini replaced Walter Chiapponi at Tod’s, who replaced Nicola Brognano at Blumarine, before later being replaced again by David Koma. Fans and critics alike love to predict who will move where, and industry gossip goes into overdrive whenever a seat is left open (speculation is currently concentrated around Chanel since Virginie Viard’s departure).
This game appears to follow a one-dimensional recruitment pattern, which may also be a disservice to the progress of a brand. The majority of appointments are white and male. Of the 16 major creative director appointments since June 2023, only four have gone to women (Sarah Burton at Givenchy, Chemena Kamali at Chloé, Veronica Leoni at Calvin Klein and Michelle Ochs at Hervé Léger), and only three to people of colour (Ochs, who is half-Filipino, sits alongside Colombian Haider Ackermann at Tom Ford and Argentine Adrian Appiolaza at Moschino).
A high media profile is part of the job role. In one sense, a historic feature of the modern fashion system since the late 19th and early 20th century (both Charles Frederick Worth and Paul Poiret were talented self-publicists), yet the advent of online and social media has taken this to new levels. When Martin Margiela, one of the few designers to sidestep the media flurry, quit his fashion house in 2009, he commented, “I was not made to cope with that system.”
Could a media-shy Margiela survive in the fashion world of the 2020s? “There are unconscious beliefs about what a creative director should look like, not just in terms of their physical appearance, but also in how they conduct themselves,” says Karen Harvey, founder and CEO of Karen Harvey Consulting, which has recruited top names in the industry (most recently Leoni at Calvin Klein). Those beliefs do a disservice to designers who don’t fit the stereotype — and to the industry at large. “These roles naturally go to bigger personalities, but some of the most brilliant designers I’ve met are quiet; they need media training and support around them. If we commit to that, then we’re actually creating a framework for some of the best talent, who might not be the loudest talent, to emerge.”
How is a star designer made?
How do you become a star designer? There’s a well-trodden path to follow. First, gain a spot at a top fashion school, the perfect springboard to a luxury internship, after which your final collection will be selected for a prime spot in the graduate fashion show. If you’re lucky enough to open or close the show, you have a better shot at capturing the imagination of fashion’s media machine or even a luxury retail buyer. Maybe you win a scholarship or an award sponsored by one of fashion’s luxury conglomerates.
Then, there is a fork in the road. If you’re scouted by a luxury brand, you might go in-house, working your way up the ladder until you reach the coveted job usually known as design director, which puts you second in command and a likely successor to the creative director (aka artistic director).
The other option is as follows: your graduate collection is picked up by buyers. You open your own brand with your name above the door, a one-way ticket to showing at fashion week, ideally as part of a talent incubation scheme like London’s Fashion East or the British Fashion Council’s Newgen programme. At some point, you apply for further awards — the LVMH Prize, an Andam Fashion Award or the International Woolmark Prize. An award win secures you a cash injection to take your brand to the next level. Maybe you widen your appeal and step up your income by collaborating with a mass-market brand (former Chloé and Givenchy creative director Clare Waight Keller just became creative director of Uniqlo, while more than 20 brands have created capsules for H&M since a debut collaboration with Karl Lagerfeld in 2004). Now you’re a star designer, leading your own successful brand or readying yourself to be poached for the creative director role at an already established one. Maybe you can do both.
Of course, there are exceptions: Simon Porte Jacquemus and Olivier Rousteing both dropped out of fashion school after a year. Pharrell Williams sidestepped it altogether, starting his career in music, and Raf Simons studied industrial and furniture design.
These pathways have very different focuses, even if the destinations are similar. Starting up an independent brand — which is preferred by 60 per cent of the under 35 designers surveyed by Vogue Business — is much more visible. Somewhere along the road, however, the prime ability to design great fashion may become diluted.
“In the beginning, you became a designer because you wanted to learn about dressmaking and it was very technical,” says Edward Buchanan, who started his career as the first artistic director of Bottega Veneta ready-to-wear in the 1990s and has since designed and consulted for high-profile brands from Off-White to Giorgio Armani. Buchanan also runs his own luxury knitwear label, Sansovino 6, and co-founded BIPOC collective We Are Made in Italy. He believes that the obsessive media spotlight on fashion designers has “invited people into the creative space who weren’t necessarily designers but wanted to do something creative — maybe they liked shopping, or they were good on camera — and it made them famous.” His conclusion is bleak: “Now, I see this desire to be a celebrity designer [in students and young designers]. Only a small percentage are really interested in the trade.”
In our current decade, stardom needs to be constructed — and fast. Waiting to rise organically after proven success can be too little, too late, even for Gucci, who created a documentary to boost the visibility of its latest creative director, titled Who is Sabato De Sarno? A Gucci Story. Emerging designers often try to get ahead by building a social media platform. Of the 300 designers surveyed by Vogue Business, 60 per cent say they feel pressure to post their work on social media. This can play a pivotal role in image-building and has helped designers to land creative director roles at heritage brands in need of an overhaul.
“In any other industry, you wouldn’t take a 24-year-old kid and put them at the top of a $20 million brand with a team of over 100 people,” says Olya Kuryshchuk, founder and editor-in-chief of fashion education platform and creative network 1 Granary, which has sat at the forefront of the discourse around the challenging designer ecosystem. Willy Chavarria, who founded his brand in 2018 after almost 30 years of experience, including stints at Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, predicts a backlash: “People will begin to crave more authenticity in talent and not just a shiny object at the top of a fashion house.”
Who’s to blame? There is a symbiotic relationship between designers’ self-mythologisation and the media’s need for a narrative. This incentivises aspiring designers to hone certain skills over others, pandering to the machine and potentially to the detriment of their own longevity. Very few designers reach the top of the tree, but the dream that they might creates unrealistic expectations among the thousands of young people who graduate from fashion design courses every year.
Designers’ anxieties around their success are largely internalised. Among survey respondents who say they feel pressure to follow a particular career path, 34 per cent say that pressure comes from themselves, compared to 21 per cent citing professors and teachers and 16 per cent from pop culture and social media.
“There are examples of people who do make lots of money, and the media and the industry glorifies those stories because it’s good for the industry, but that’s not the standard, and it’s not what people are entitled to,” says Jamie Gill, a non-executive director at the British Fashion Council and founder of non-profit The Outsiders Perspective, which helps people of colour working outside of fashion enter the industry. “Of course, that has an impact on how people perceive their potential, but young designers need to stop comparing themselves to really famous creatives. It doesn’t help.”
Following the formula doesn’t guarantee success
Fashion course leaders fear that an obsession with the star designer archetype is having a negative impact on their students’ evolutions, in particular, on their devotion to creativity and craft.
“People don’t want to go into fashion for its ethical qualities; they want to get into it because of the glamour or achievement of expression and exposure. It’s an odd world because what you should be promoting is craftsmanship, but that’s shifted,” says Fabio Piras, course director of Central Saint Martins’s MA fashion course. Central Saint Martins (CSM), which has produced a stream of star designers since John Galliano and Lee McQueen, attracts students who want to follow in their footsteps. These students are more likely to reinforce the star designer trope once they enter the industry, adds fellow CSM lecturer Matthew Needham. “We see many designers who focus on themselves. I think the most successful designers are those who think about others, who recognise the collective journey.”
Of survey respondents who had not attended fashion school, only 10 per cent say they felt pressured to pursue a particular career path within the fashion industry, compared to 37 per cent of fashion school graduates and 49 per cent of current fashion students.
The formula for becoming a star designer may have worked for a while, but industry representatives say it isn’t future-proof. “The biggest difference today is the speed of change in the industry, the speed of going uphill or down,” says Scott Lipinski, CEO of Fashion Council Germany and chairman of the European Fashion Alliance. “They can make you a star overnight and ruin you overnight.”
Brands should focus more on building design teams and less on individuals, suggest survey respondents. When designers fail to perform, they tend to be replaced swiftly, and the design studios that relied on them can struggle to cope with the pace of change. “The creative director was overly controlling and wanted to manage everything [themselves], not giving any authority to senior management and other staff,” says one respondent, who experienced this churn less than two years into a role. “The quick turnover rate, where senior staff were constantly leaving, meant that there was no proper training for junior staff.”
The fast pace of churn in top jobs isn’t helped by the quick-tempo fashion calendar — which even the most established designers have tried to kick back against — and the industry’s short attention span, exacerbated by social media. “You’re only ever as good as your last trick and everyone always wants to know what’s next,” says KidSuper founder Colm Dillane, who was selected by Louis Vuitton to co-create its first menswear collection after Virgil Abloh’s passing. “You can’t be a one-hit wonder in fashion. People are really quick to forget and move on. You don’t get a tonne of credit for what you’ve done.”
“The biggest gift as a creative is having the time to carve out your identity and direction and not feeling rushed,” says Astrid Andersen, who shuttered her namesake label in 2021 and took a three-year hiatus to start a family. She recently launched her new brand, Stel, at Copenhagen Fashion Week.
Decentring the star designer
The industry’s glorification of the star designer sets unrealistic expectations for students and aspiring designers while overlooking the contributions of others in the supply chain. The dream of becoming a star fashion designer persists, so fashion schools are oversubscribed on design courses and under-resourced on technical and operational programmes.
This is where the industry’s obsession with design talent becomes part of the problem. “The reality is that we don’t have the operational workforce we need to support creative talent,” says Gill. “We lack the partner, the skill set that supports creative talent to scale up. We don’t have the management and operational expertise to turn designers’ creativity into viable businesses.”
At New York’s Parsons School of Design, educators are working to dethrone the star designer by lifting up other roles, says Ben Barry, dean of the School of Fashion. “One common misconception fashion students have is the continued glorification of the lone creative director and the runway show as the ultimate achievement in the industry,” he explains. “While fashion design attracts a large number of students, it’s important to note that our programmes offer a variety of inflections.” Undergraduate fashion students, for example, can choose from four pathways — collections, materiality, systems and society, or fashion products — depending on their interests and aspirations.
It’s time to shift the emphasis from star designers to master collaborators, suggests recruiter Harvey. As it’s ultimately the infrastructure around designers that secures long-term success. “There are very high expectations when a new creative director comes into these roles. The hardest part of the job is leadership and bringing the teams along. While you don’t want to sacrifice your vision, you also don’t want to alienate your teams.”
Moving past fashion’s fixation on the star designer would open up a whole world of potential, says Kuryshchuk of 1 Granary. “Brands are missing out on additional communication and community-building. This narrative [of the star designer] stagnates talent development because people working in-house are excluded from designing other categories, meaning they end up with such a narrow vision.”
A team-building philosophy that takes on board sustainable values would be a start, says upcycling designer and author Orsola de Castro. “When we talk about fashion as an art form, we turn designers into heroes, which they absolutely do not deserve, and we often disregard the people making and selling fashion. Sustainability changes everything because it introduces the question of product. We have all these designers, but do we need more product? It’s much easier to have conversations about humility and teamwork with designers who have sustainability at heart,” she says.
When the star designer steps away from centre stage, there is space for an ensemble to come forward. Being part of that ensemble should become aspirational, says de Castro. “I can’t stress enough the importance of worshipping at a completely different altar.”
Read ‘Debunking the Dream: Part One’ — last year’s series on achieving success and avoiding burnout — here.
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This story was updated to reflect Jamie Gill's role as a non-executive director at the British Fashion Council (14/10/24).
