Puck - news
A Cold Day in Chanel
On the brink of restructuring, the House of Lagerfeld is homing in on a new creative director, too. Will the Wertheimers choose Hedi, make it work with Marc Jacobs, bet on golden boy Pieter Mulier, recruit the Olsens, or opt for the brand manager route? Alas, in the end, there’s only one Kaiser…
It’s restructuring season at Chanel, which is still defining its post-
Lagerfeld vision some five years after the Kaiser’s passing. C.E.O.
Leena Nair’s effort to impose a consistent strategy across the company’s three divisions—fashion, fragrance and beauty, and watches and fine jewelry—is likely to result in a significant upheaval that will see the old guard offboarded in favor of a new generation of leadership. Finding the
right new people, though, is never easy. And while everyone in the industry is focused on whomever the mega-luxury house appoints to replace
Virginie Viard as creative director, the people chosen for a number of other open roles will also be critical harbingers of Nair’s vision.
In New York, for instance, the company has been trying to recruit a new U.S. head of brand communications. Easy enough, right? What fashion-y comms person
wouldn’t want to work at Chanel? The mandate from U.S. president
Stephane Blanchard, who joined in 2023 after
John Galantic took the opportunity to replace
Diego Della Valle at Tod’s, was to find someone who could successfully manage across each of the three divisions, which always
interacted, but didn’t always act
in accordance with one another. This role would also be different from the one previously held by
Rebekah McCabe, the well-liked Chanel executive who was promoted to U.S. general manager of the fashion division last year after
Joyce Green headed to Paris. (McCabe’s current gig is ultra-focused on managing customers—the P.R. role, I’m told, will have a direct line to Blanchard. A rep for Chanel declined to comment.)
The job comes with a relatively generous salary ($425,000 to $600,000, according to a job listing) and should attract interest from pretty much every fashion P.R.-and-marketing person desperate to do something meaningful while also staying in the U.S. (the plum jobs are in Europe). But it also comes with quirks. Chanel is a private company, so executive bonus structures aren’t tied to a publicly traded stock price, as they are at LVMH. Also, I’m told that Blanchard is eager to avoid hiring a traditional fashion publicist, and has been discussing the position with executives in tech, C.P.G., startups, and beauty—far from the obvious choices, but an interesting window into how he and Nair view the company’s future. The internal, established teams—filled with company lifers that operate via the decidedly
less strategic Bruno Pavlovsky school of communication—are not being considered. (Pavlovsky, Chanel’s president of fashion, whose relationship with Nair got off to a tense start, is expected to retire in the next two years.)
Of course, the company may be staggering the hire until the new creative director is appointed. Even if the role reports to Blanchard, most big-name designers want to bring in their own people, and their people will want to bring in
their own people. Not every designer rolls as deep as, say,
Hedi Slimane, who completely transformed Celine’s communications and design departments when he replaced
Phoebe Philo in 2018. But much of that depends on how much latitude this designer is given—which will depend, in turn, on whether Chanel wants to bring in a Lagerfeld type, who will define the brand for a generation, or more of a Viard, who will merely try to manage the codes in their shadow. Or even go the route of the leather goods houses, which have hired divisional heads to oversee various departments and balkanize power.
After weeks of silence, I started hearing murmurs once again about the creative director candidates.
A report in Glitz Paris suggests the company will announce the appointment in December, and if that’s the case, a decision has already been made. Given the messiness around Viard’s departure, it’s likely that much of the senior leadership doesn’t even know the details of Nair and the Wertheimers’ decision.
For now, then, everyone continues guessing. In London, insiders last week were harping on the idea that members of the
Wertheimer family, the longtime proprietors of Chanel, had made a strategic
investment in The Row to persuade the
Olsens to come aboard. This, from my view, seems like utter bullsh*t. The Wertheimers have invested in The Row to build the
next Chanel, not distract the Olsens from executing their vision. And their
partners in the venture—the Bettencourt Meyers family office, Imaginary, and
Lauren Santo Domingo—sure didn’t invest their capital in the business to have the Olsens abandon the company. (Fashion people, sometimes…)
Then there’s the working, increasingly convincing theory around
Pieter Mulier. The
Alaïa designer has sufficient experience dealing with multiple ateliers and managing large teams from his years working under
Raf Simons, most notably at Dior. Plus, he has shown that he can transform a precious brand without demolishing what came before him in the process.
Most recently, a
Wall Street Journal article
gave credence to the idea that Chanel could hire
Marc Jacobs, who wholeheartedly admitted that he is interested in the role. (He even enlisted his friend
Sofia Coppola, who works regularly with Chanel, to put in a good word.) If Jacobs
were to get the gig, that could free up LVMH to more seriously consider selling the Marc Jacobs business. (The company has denied that it’s for sale, but if they’re willing to
sell Off-White and announce it on
Virgil Abloh’s birthday, they’re willing to move anything for the right price.)
When all this Chanel talk started, a former Marc Jacobs employee recalled how
Robert Duffy, the designer’s longtime business partner, would make jokes back in the brand’s heyday about how Jacobs’s Chanel contract was already signed. He was being facetious, but there’s no denying Jacobs would restore the Chanel fantasy. His Louis Vuitton fashion shows were some of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen.
Of course, there are still plenty of people rooting for Hedi Slimane and his tiny tweed jackets, although I heard once again this morning from people close to the situation that he may very well be staying within the LVMH group, despite his exit from Celine in September.
In a far less exciting scenario than any of the above, Chanel could opt to mimic the Hermès, Louis Vuitton, and Dior strategy and hire different people across the maisons—i.e., the brand manager route. Perhaps that’s why Hermès’ womenswear designer
Nadège Vanhee’s name keeps popping up. I suspect that
Cathy Horyn, who mentioned her name in a piece for The Cut last summer as a potential idea for Chanel, conjured that particular rumor into existence, and that Vanhee is better off staying put at the
other independent luxury brand.
As I have underscored previously, the multi-designer strategy works better at companies like Hermès and Louis Vuitton, which are rooted in leather goods, than Dior, which is rooted in couture. Today, consumers shop leather goods brands
partially out of practicality (or at least they like to think so).
They shop fashion brands entirely out of frivolity, which requires more convincing and a strong point of view. The reality is there is no perfect person. Every candidate will check many of the boxes, but not all of them.
Nair and the Wertheimers appear to know what kind of company they want to be, but who will build it for them?
