After a few twists and turns, Simon Porte Jacquemus has emerged as the leading contender to succeed Virginie Viard as the heir to the House of Lagerfeld. He’s now preparing to present to the Wertheimers. (But there are some backup plans, too…) Virginie Viard needed to go—everyone at Chanel could agree on
that. The sour taste left by her collections ran the risk of souring the overall brand, the most image-conscious of all the mega-luxury players, always the second-most popular girl in the high school, never as rich or confident as Hermès. Chanel is all about perception. So, yes, she had to go.
But the 30-year company veteran’s abrupt exit in June did not occur as expected, with the ejection occurring mid-afternoon on a Wednesday and the news dripping out mere hours later. As one person close to the company put it to me, succession had been discussed at length, and Viard was going to be extended a graceful departure befitting a longtime, loyal employee. Alas, for some reason—presumably Viard’s frustration, people being petty, etcetera—the news came out fast and furious and far more abruptly than planned.
The botched handling of the timeline may be the most plausible explanation to date for why, nearly three months later, Chanel has yet to replace Viard. Instead, rumors have
abounded in her absence. There were the people who believed
Hedi Slimane was already hard at work in the atelier. (We could dream.)
Gabriella Hearst? (Would love to know where that one came from…) Others suggested that they would take their time—that Chanel didn’t really
need a creative director, at least for a while, and that the eventual occupant didn’t really matter since the position would inevitably be reduced in scope compared to what was expected of the late
Karl Lagerfeld.
Plus, there was other mishegas in the business that could change the nature of the role. Leena Nair, Chanel’s still-new global C.E.O., was looking to restructure. And Bruno Pavlovsky, the head of fashion, was the subject of his own set of rumors: Was his tension with Nair as real as with her predecessor, Maureen Chiquet? Was his own succession planning underway, with an exit in the next two years?
Whatever the case, Chanel is actively recruiting for the creative director job, with the Swiss executive search firm Egon Zehnder leading the charge. And what do you know, a frontrunner has emerged. The name Simon Porte Jacquemus—proprietor of his own business, maker of magical fashion moments—was floated early in the process, but I was told that Pavlovsky, who was rooting for Jacquemus, was “strong-armed” into going another route for one reason or another. But it seems that Pavlovsky got his way after all. Jacquemus, who has already presented to Pavlovsky and Nair, is presenting to proprietor Alain Wertheimer in London during the first week of September. Jacquemus hired an eight-person team to work on the project. (Reps for Chanel and Jacquemus did not comment.)
The Other Names
The job may be Jacquemus’s to lose, but he may very well lose it. I’m told that Thom Browne and Alaïa’s Pieter Mulier are still in the running, and there could be others, too. While the process of hiring creative directors remains opaque, what I’ve learned over the years is that it’s much more fluid than you’d imagine. Executives are always interviewing new talent, even when they aren’t sure they want to fire the current talent, and these days, it is sometimes better to have no one in a role than the wrong someone. If Jacquemus isn’t exactly right, the Wertheimers won’t move forward, because realistic or not, they want this to be a decades-long appointment. Real luxury brands think long-term.
Jacquemus, on many levels, is a practical choice. He is not only young, but also recognizable to young people, and most importantly, as one person with knowledge of the situation told me, he has a “sense of the zeitgeist.” For years, Jacquemus has claimed he has little desire to design for another house, that he wanted to continue building his own.
Chanel is different, though. Forty-two years ago, Lagerfeld and the Wertheimers transformed the luxury category by single-handedly creating the model on which most brands are still based: He made the runway, once a simple trading post, into a piece of pop culture, using it to sell fragrance and makeup and later, handbags and accessories. Today, it’s far harder to make a runway show memorable, especially on a limited budget, and yet that is exactly what Jacquemus has done season after season, from the lavender fields of Provence to the Maeght Foundation in Nice. The clothes, sure, he can do that part, too. But don’t act like it was about the clothes with Karl.
As for what might happen to Jacquemus, the label, if the man were to accept the Chanel appointment? He’s built enough brand equity that I assume he’d find no reason not to continue. (And the Wertheimers may very well be inclined to financially support his namesake brand endeavors.) Lagerfeld, after all, designed multiple lines at once—Chanel, Fendi, his own label, and, for a time, Chloé. That way of doing things has proven impossible for most people. Lagerfeld was remarkable. Perhaps Jacquemus is, too.
