If someone can be kind enough to share the full article, i would like to know Vogue's take on this..lol
Let’s dish: Racing to the bottom of fashion’s gossip problem
Fashion gossip has become a commodity for which an apparently endless supply meets an insatiable demand. This is fashion gossip’s golden age. But why?
BY
LUKE LEITCH
February 14, 2025
What’s cooking at Dior? Who’s next at Gucci? And what’s up at Fendi, Versace, Burberry, Jil Sander, Balmain, Ferragamo, Jean Paul Gaultier, or even Giorgio Armani? These are just a few of the questions for which answers are currently generating sweet, sweet spikes of engagement on multiple platforms. While the fashion industry languishes in economic doldrums, fashion gossip has become a booming commodity for which an apparently endless supply meets a seemingly insatiable demand. This is fashion gossip’s golden age. But why?
“For me, it’s an obsession within fashion that’s now spread beyond it,” one creative director said (off the record, like nearly everyone quoted in this piece). Another has suggested that there is an informal Whatsapp group among designers dedicated to keeping track of the latest rumours and either pouring scorn on them or declaring them likely. “It’s a very weird time,” he added.
Supply-wise, gossip’s through-the-roof contemporary currency can be directly connected to fashion’s current
misfortunes. And like much else in fashion during the last decade, its point of origin can be traced in part back to Alessandro Michele. The surprise
departure of Michele from Gucci in November 2022 came as its then-management looked to impose a creative refresh in order to get ahead of
slowing revenue growth at a brand that represented over half of Kering Group’s sales. It was also the canary in the coalmine that signalled a dawning broader nervousness that any post-Covid recovery might prove only a brief respite from a whiplash of factors including Russia’s war against Ukraine, and China’s Evergrande-sparked property market crash (allied with shifting consumer sentiment in a nation whose market size had tripled between 2017 and 2021). Or as one senior executive told me off the record in June 2022: “We think the next few years could be extremely rough — a bloodbath — and we need to start preparing now.”
Just as corporate communications will always pitch financial results to shareholders in the most flattering possible light — where even downturns are framed as turnarounds-in-progress — so press and marketing teams will always default to the superlative when describing their house’s creative leadership, output and impact. However, the wave of human resource reshuffling that Michele’s ousting augured spoke to a broader urge among management teams to reignite excitement and sales by imposing fresh creative leadership. “People weren’t aware of how bad it was going to get,” one creative director said in 2024. “So now they have to think what is going to get people to come into the stores?”
The departure of designers from houses including
Alexander McQueen,
Valentino,
Givenchy,
Moschino,
Chloé,
Chanel,
Missoni,
Fendi,
Helmut Lang,
Maison Margiela,
Celine,
Tom Ford and various others all happened at different times and in different specific circumstances. Collectively, however, the overlapping interim periods in all these regime changes created an ongoing information vacuum — a yawning fact-chasm — apropos one of the most easily processed and fundamental signifiers relating to any fashion house: who leads its design? Added to that was the long-term leadership limbo Louis Vuitton Men’s elected to live through as it processed the passing of Virgil Abloh before
appointing Pharrell Williams in 2023. And then there was the fact that Michele remained unattached for 14 months before eventually landing at
Valentino.
Gossip loves a vacuum. And fashion loves to gossip. Because even when it’s wrong, it’s fun. But the difference between fashion gossip now, and as recently as the great menswear
reshuffle of 2018, is the extent to which gossip has bubbled up from its traditionally unpublished milieus — gleeful whispering in between shows, on Whatsapp, or at the bar of the (Gucci-terminated)
Casti — to become an above-the-line category in fashion publishing.
In part, that’s courtesy of the democratisation of fashion discourse that has reflected fashion’s broader, digitally driven democratisation over the last decade. “There’s now a huge audience of people that are casually interested in fashion drama, spilling tea and all that noise even if they’re not part of the industry. It’s a spectator sport,” says one contributor to a rival publication to
Vogue. “The temptation to serve that audience is huge, because it engages with the content. There are also plenty of people who try to manifest wish fulfillment into fact, because they support one designer over another, or denigrate one designer over another.”
Adds a senior executive at one Paris-based house: “What’s especially nuts today though is that people inside the companies are seeing all these posts and reading all these stories — they read everything — and whether it’s conscious or not, they are affected by the sentiment of the consumers of this information. It’s also crazy that there are some people inside the houses who are leaking information to serve their own agendas.”
Reporting rumours might seem like fair game: because after all, it’s frustrating when you 99 per cent know something to be true, but can’t secure a nailed-on confirmation. Especially when in today’s gossip-hungry climate, a declarative ‘X is going to Y’ story can bring immediate tangible material benefits in engagement. Compared to the appetites of the news cycle, houses often seem glacially ponderous when it comes to unveiling their new hires.
Says one creative director: “And this is where I think the industry becomes really concerning. Because when I read a lot of business news and platforms in fashion, more and more I find it very speculative. I find it sometimes, not very thorough. Sometimes I read it and I feel like, ‘Do they even have any idea what is going on in the fashion industry?’ Because it undermines this idea of the continuity of a brand. And we should not wish on brands to fail — we should wish on brands to be successful platforms that ultimately employ people.”
One problem with filling the vacuum by breaking stories ahead of time — maybe when you’re assured by a trusted source that a designer is interviewing for a position, or in contract talks but hasn’t yet signed — is that plans go awry. Houses change their minds at the last minute, and so do designers. I still feel grimy after last year hassling the office of a house I was absolutely sure had signed a big-name designer, but which turned out to have shut down negotiations close to the point of agreement over a non-negotiable sticking point. Shamefully, I had repeated the rumour I had mistaken as fact to several friends: rightly, they still tease me about it. Lesson learnt.
Pumping out to publication putative fashion appointments — Jacquemus to Chanel? Galliano to Dior/Fendi/Chanel/Somewhere else? — and then dumping them when they turn out to be false is fashion’s equivalent of speculating on memecoin; you might make a short-term gain, but someone somewhere will lose out. Yes, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, but as one creative director tells me: “These leaks and rumours weigh on the psychology and well-being of the teams, and sometimes they truly affect decisions of management. They only add to this weird thing right now in a market that gets bored so quickly, where the moment someone does anything remotely interesting people feel the need for them to be taken away from the place they have done that interesting thing in order to try and repeat it somewhere else.” An executive adds: “A sudden wave of noise about a new creative director, or a new CEO, or even the sale or takeover of a house doesn’t just affect psychology, it can also affect the value of the company in the market — even when the noise turns out to be a false flag. Who benefits from that?”
Serving up content for the spectator sport of fashion industry speculation has become a fruitful angle to pursue, because there are a lot of positions open and because the audience is there for it. And it seems pretty hypocritical for anyone in the fashion industry — an industry where the customer is always right — to carp about that. Still, says one senior executive: “The endless speculation and gossip is unfair to everyone involved. It’s demeaning, and it’s counterproductive. Just because it’s popular doesn’t make it good, and it’s certainly not good for all the people involved at the houses and in the teams. Because fashion isn’t a reality show, it’s a reality. There is always going to be change in an industry that is predicated on change, and at the moment we are going through a particularly high rate of change. But the level of speculation and gossip we are seeing now? It’s bad for business.”
Or as Thom Browne said after his most recent show: “With everything changing
so much I feel like designers are not treated so well… I think it’s time for each and every designer to really be looked at, and appreciated for what they did.”
George Harrison sang that gossip is “the Devil’s radio”. Right now in fashion, that radio is turned up to full volume, and it’s the soundtrack to fashion eating itself. Or as another creative director commented this week: “When we’re focused on the personnel more than we’re focused on the product, then that’s a problem.”
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