Designers Switching Houses & Moving to New Brands

[Lola701]

What if this is simply a discussion for a collab and its been leaked to create a buzz (and based on the reactions here, hysteria)?

He leaked it. We will see the reviews for his shows. I’m sure it will be part of the conversation. It may also allows him to have more coverage and stuff like that.

 

[PDFSD]

possible marriage of Ralph Lauren and Burberry rumours ...would this mean also change of CD and management at Burberry ?

 

[Olaffo]

possible marriage of Ralph Lauren and Burberry rumours ...would this mean also change of CD and management at Burberry ?

I mean I can totally see that - RL is financially on the rise and has enough cash to merge or acquire so wouldn’t be surprised if American CEO of Burberry actually prepare ground for the operation. In that case I’m sure he will stay but Lee - well I’m not sure about that though.

 

[fashionmarketeditor]

Friends from Milan told me Corriere della Sera is speculating about his replacement being Nicolo Pasqua letti

Niccolò Pasqualetti just started at Jil Sander this year as Simone Bellotti's design director for women's RTW

 

[Thefrenchy]

^ I'm aware

 

[Lola701]

possible marriage of Ralph Lauren and Burberry rumours ...would this mean also change of CD and management at Burberry ?

That would be such a mistake for Ralph Lauren…

 

[PDFSD]

Niccolò Pasqualetti just started at Jil Sander this year as Simone Bellotti's design director for women's RTW

lolz maybe subpar x subpar equals greatness ? at jil sander with these two?

 

[tricotineacetat]

Jil Sander (the brand) is dead to me, ever since the last remains of it‘s ties to the woman herself and it‘s remains of German staff (during Onward‘s purchase) were laid down.

Rodolpho Paglialunga had a few decent collections (the men‘s AW'16 comes to mind) but really, the ethos of this house is not to be such an off-the-moment 'fashion conversation' brand and more about a sense of timelessness we might connect with Jil’s peers, Yohji Yamamoto or even Giorgio Armani.

 

[PDFSD]

lol so funny this Circus if it happens !!!

via Susanna Nicoletti

Valentino what if Maria Grazia Chiuri joins the brand replacing Alessandro Michele?
- she knows the brand by heart
- she made for the brand the most successful leather products
- she has the support and respect of Valentino himself and Giancarlo Giammetti. She was the only former and present Valentino designer attending the inauguration of the Valentino exhibition by the newly minted Fondazione Garavani and Giammetti
- she has a perfect and sharp creative vision merged with fantastic business acumen
- she deeply respects the brand

This could be really the surprise of the year and the start of a new, successful chapter for the Roman brand

but not yet it seems .............

Valentino, shareholders confirm full confidence in Alessandro Michele
30 June 2025
TPF-ThePlatform
No change in style. According to informed sources consulted by TPF-ThePlatform, Mayhoola and Kering have, in fact, confirmed full confidence in Alessandro Michele's work and the designer can proceed according to the path he has started. Reassuring Michele was the first thought of the two shareholders of Valentino after the confusion that was created within the maison by the decision of CEO Jacopo Venturini to take leave for health reasons, as we wrote yesterday 29 June. The extraordinary board of directors and the hypotheses to cope with this delicate moment in the article by TPF-ThePlatform in the first comment

Venturini's departure is not only due to health reasons, Miss Tweed found out.

Jacopo Venturini leaves Valentino, Mayhoola continues to back Michele

Valentino CEO Jacopo Venturini has quit, citing health problems, and his sudden exit adds to confusion at the Roman brand as creative director Alessandro Michele fails to ignite sales, industry sources said.

 

[PDFSD]

via Stefania Scrivani, Co-Founder of Aimaze and of the Legaltechadvisor Association.

VALENTINO AFFAIR
From potential rebirth to corporate mystery

According to the newspaper Il Foglio, and for many fashion and luxury experts, Valentino is going through a critical phase: CEO Jacopo Venturini is on sick leave (and there is talk of a possible change at the helm), while the strategy of the new creative director Alessandro Michele has not affected the accounts. We are talking about a decline in revenues and a significant reduction in profits

During the couture presentation in Paris, it is said that about 30% of the most important customers, those used to spending millions of dollars, declined the invitation for fear of having to commit to unwelcome purchases. Often, those customers preferred other brands they liked, such as Dior or Armani.

Because this is a wrong choice from the beginning: the strategic direction (Venturini + Michele) started off on the wrong foot: leadership changes and non-aligned vision have established internal insecurity and disaffection among top customers.
In a luxury market where "experience" is everything, the defection of the top spenders is an unequivocal signal: if there is no trust from the beginning, the entire relationship and sales system fails.
Now the situation has turned into a real mystery: illness of the CEO, possible resignation of the designer, accounts in crisis, without a clear narrative that reassures investors, customers and employees.

My verdict
Valentino has lost the track of consistency and strong leadership that is needed to maintain credibility in luxury. The lack of an integrated plan, covering product, communication and exclusive relationships, has made one of the spearheads of Made in Italy fragile.

Conclusion for those who follow me on LinkedIn:
When a luxury company simplifies its value proposition and fails to protect ties with high-end customers, it may present a large fashion show, but it risks losing the decisive vote of its most important audience. This is the demonstration of how fragile the boundary between art and business is, if not supported by clear leadership, shared vision and careful management of relationships.

 

[PDFSD]

www.ilfoglio.it ​

(text auto translated from italian) ​

Why the Venturini-Michele team didn't work this time​

Fabiana Giacomotti Jul 01, 2025
Valentino's CEO on sick leave, designer's exit not ruled out, accounts sinking. It's not just a market crisis. Reasons for a failure

The last time I met Jacopo Venturini, CEO of Valentino who is about to leave after the Alessandro Michele operation led to a collapse in turnover but who is officially on sick leave and, although I want to respect his privacy, it is not the first time this has happened and we hope for the best, it was the end of January and the maison was presenting the first couture collection signed by the new creative director in Paris. On my way to the post-show meeting with the designer on the upper floors of the old Palais Brogniart, home of the ancient Stock Exchange, I met the saleswoman from a geographical area historically very receptive to Valentino collections, I won't say which one because the climate in the company is very tense, who confessed to being very worried because "at least thirty percent of the customers" had preferred to decline the invitation, fearing having to make purchases . In couture, the most important clients, ladies who spend two million euros a year and up, are in fact invited to Paris at the company's expense and participate not only in the fashion show, but also in private dinners, visits, breakfasts with the designer of the collections but also with actors and celebrities hired for the occasion, in short leading what is now defined, banally but inescapably, as an "experience". Being invited without ordering anything, which also means doing fittings and therefore investing additional time and money, in this specific case in Rome, is obviously not possible and therefore, in order not to be put in the position of having to spend a mountain of money on clothes they did not want to wear, the clients in the high-spending geographical area stayed at home . Or, perhaps, they accepted someone else's invitation since at Armani they had to organize as many as two fashion shows and at Dior not a pin dropped to the floor .

Two weeks ago, Michele “rilascio” – a poor translation of the English verb “to release” which means to spread but which the fashion world translates literally – the collection for next spring, in the same time, manner and style as last year and in reality the same winter collection presented last March in Paris, which will go down in history as “the fashion show in the red bathrooms” (incidentally: how it was possible that the Institut du Monde Arabe agreed to host that presentation, despite the power of Valentino’s parent company, Qatar’s sovereign fund Mayhoola, is still a mystery). In any case, a beautiful digital presentation landed in the emails of a few tens of thousands of people during the men’s fashion shows in Paris, which I must say was brilliant in form (the girls are filmed lying on beds, a leitmotif of the season) but identical in substance to the dozens of Michele collections we have seen since his debut as creative director at Gucci, in January 2015, to today. Wherever he goes, whatever archive he deals with, this fifty-year-old who is closer to a stylist or a costume designer than to a designer continues to propose clogs with the logo on display, patent leather baby shoes, short dresses with big collars, bandanas, shoulder bags, big Sixties glasses, embroidered socks. In short, Michele continues to like what Michele likes, which is fine if, as happened in the Gucci years, one has the good fortune of being able to apply one's aesthetic, one's taste, to a favorable and receptive historical-social moment . When this doesn't happen, as at Valentino where the clientele isn't satisfied with a belt and wants the "core", that is, beautiful, flattering clothes - the corset is even back in fashion, the tacky Sanchez-Bezos wedding was all a squeeze - the result is a turnover drop of 22 percent, some internal voices say that the percentage is even higher . To these rumors - that Rome is a small city after all - are added others that speak of internal disagreements, of an excluding climate for those who are not part of the team, numerous in any case, that Michele had hired upon his arrival, of difficult relations with one of the founders, Giancarlo Giammetti , who a few weeks ago, on the very popular fashion account Fashion Cricket, responded with a resentful post to a public observation by the designer on the subject of beauty.



In the capital, the creative director's exit is also considered very possible and imminent ; after which, it is assumed, there will be a deluge.
If many, at the end of May, had noticed Michele's absence at the dinner celebrating the opening of PM23, the foundation named after Giammetti and Valentino Garavani that overlooks the same square as the fashion house, unlike his predecessors Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri, almost no one knows, instead, that Venturini had been living closed first in the Milan office, and now at home, for many months. It is very unfortunate to witness such a rapid downward spiral in a fashion house that in the world's imagination is substantially superimposable to the very idea of Made in Italy, and it is strange to see how the repetition of the same dynamics is impossible from one year and from one brand to the next: the reconstitution of the Michele-Venturini dream team that, excluding CEO Marco Bizzarri, had characterized the irresistible rise of Gucci in the middle of the last decade, proved to be a failure at Valentino, and this despite the fact that for Venturini it was the third hire in the maison founded sixty years ago. Why? For many reasons, not only social-cultural and not even exclusively linked to the current crisis in fashion. Gucci was born as an accessories house and is still experienced as such; and excluding the Tom Ford period, its sales have always been determined by bags and shoes, not by clothing; Valentino, on the other hand, is the fashion house that dressed Jackie for her wedding to Aristotle Onassis with a dress that is still reproduced today, which gave life to its own shade of Pantone red and which, after an intense repositioning effort among the younger age group, had once again become an object of desire for eighteen-year-olds.



At the time of the “rilascio” of Michele’s first collection, we wrote in the “Foglio della Moda” that if Valentino thought they could generate revenue with hair clips and lace stockings, they had not understood the context: Michele’s entire community, so interesting and alternative, is not enough to cover the lack of rich women in the high-spending geographical area who do not get on a plane even if you ask, and success on social media does not automatically translate into sales. When Piccioli, now appointed creative director of Balenciaga to general satisfaction, was removed from Valentino, in March 2024, the results were slightly in the red but the prospects were excellent. Years of expert work on the collections and careful communication had multiplied the value of the maison to the point that, in July 2023, Kering had secured 30 percent for 1.7 billion, with the commitment to acquire all the rest of the capital by 2028, for a figure that now weighs intolerably on the strategies of the group in crisis in which the former number one of Renault Luca de Meo has just been appointed as CEO, it is said with strong pressure from the French government. The accounts will now have to be reviewed, as will "the product", as they say in jargon. That things were going, or rather are going, very badly, was understood when, for the first time in history, the windows of the historic boutique in Piazza di Spagna were decorated with only bags. According to rumors, Venturini could be succeeded by Riccardo Bellini, former CEO of Chloé and Maison Margiela, who joined Mayhoola last January, but it is clear that this appointment will also have to be approved by Kering.


As I wrote a few weeks ago, the difficult times that pret-à-porter is experiencing now have in fact turned out to be excellent and interesting for haute couture , which has returned to that kind of clientele tired of paying a thousand euros for a t-shirt with four machine-embroidered details around the neckline reproduced in thousands of copies, but still rich enough to want a well-made garment, exclusively for themselves.
Crossing paths with Venturini at the entrance to the salon where Michele couldn't help but confess that the premières had made him see green mice for months, continuously testing his – moreover and honestly declared – sartorial incompetence, I addressed him with one of those kind phrases that anyone expects to receive after such an important debut, and he replied that it was only the beginning. In reality it was, and still seems to be, the end.

 

[Olaffo]

There are rumours in Milan that Francesca Bellettini is going either to Valentino or to Prada...

Well, I hoped that Alessandro could evolve and add something remarkable to Valentino but now I'm not sure if he'll survive another 2 years if things will spiral down at this pace....

 

[fashionmarketeditor]

Lauren Sherman is reporting that Meryll Rogge (who just won the ANDAM Prize) will be the next creative director of Marni.

 

[helmutnotdead]

ughhhhh

 

[Rigida]

Lauren Sherman is reporting that Meryll Rogge (who just won the ANDAM Prize) will be the next creative director of Marni.

Her design aesthetic works for Marni imo. More in line with Consuelo than Fransisco’s.

 

[LadyJunon]

Lauren Sherman is reporting that Meryll Rogge (who just won the ANDAM Prize) will be the next creative director of Marni.

That's not actually a bad idea. While Rogge leans quite young and subcultural, there's an actual interest in dressing people present in her work. Risso's Marni was more of an art project, than an odd subversive wardrobe proposition. Also, a female designer who isn't trying to create Philo's Céline 3.0 is always a plus.

 

[youthinasia]

I can see her at Marni looking at her last collection

 

[Deneuve]

Lauren Sherman is reporting that Meryll Rogge (who just won the ANDAM Prize) will be the next creative director of Marni.

she's skilled, 41 and belgian. what do you want more?

 

[susseinmcswanny]

Is there any way I can elect a Donald Trump like figure to be the president of the fashion industry so they can just f*ck sh*t up and put an end to this crap once and for all. No one CARES who the f*ck is going to be this creative director that creative director of some TIRED *** life support *****BRAND*****. No ONE CARES !!!!!!!!!!!

 

[andrew]

Jil Sander (the brand) is dead to me, ever since the last remains of it‘s ties to the woman herself and it‘s remains of German staff (during Onward‘s purchase) were laid down.

Rodolpho Paglialunga had a few decent collections (the men‘s AW'16 comes to mind) but really, the ethos of this house is not to be such an off-the-moment 'fashion conversation' brand and more about a sense of timelessness we might connect with Jil’s peers, Yohji Yamamoto or even Giorgio Armani.

jil just needs to do me a solid and bring back some of the tailor made suiting; mine is getting a little long in the tooth and the vintage sites are slim pickings.