A WWD analysis of designer appointments shows that half the creative directors at roughly 40 houses have been in their positions for five years or less.
“Compared to other product-based industries like cars or furniture, there’s almost this fashionability of change in fashion,” observed Marco Pecorari, assistant professor and program director of the master of arts in fashion studies at Parsons Paris. “And when you change an artistic director, you change an entire team, most of the time. I think that kind of disposability of people is becoming almost anachronistic.
“After a first contract, if the objectives are not met and above all, if there is no significant growth, generally the creative team is replaced,” he said in an interview. “As long as your creative decisions are commercially successful, you are not really questioned in your artistic decisions.” “Some key players keep the same creative directors for a long time, like Hermès, or the same creative direction likeFloriane de Saint Pierre, founder and principal of executive search and consulting firm Floriane de Saint Pierre & Associés in Paris, also highlighted that most of the multibillion-dollar heritage brands in Europe and the U.S. have had the same creative director for seven years or more.
In her view, “if a creative director is there less than three years, it sends a signal that the brand made a mistake. But we’ve seen with brands like Dior after John Galliano’s and Raf Simons’ departures when ‘the studio’ took over, that sales were still increasing. Many executives understood that if it’s strong enough, the brand can withstand a change or cycles of creative directors.”
According to Pecorari, the dynamics around creative directors changed in the 2000s when Europe’s fashion conglomerates were forming — LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Prada Group and Gucci Group, now known as Kering — and designers became “more entwined with the economic mechanisms” behind this business configuration. “As soon as the numbers start to stagnate a bit, there is an attempt to change.
He described a “mania for the new” that infiltrates most aspects of fashion, and now the creative aspect, also. “Everyone is consumed quite quickly.” There can be a downside to long creative tenure, especially as fashion now runs at the accelerated speed of social media, observers note.
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