We Are All Guilty for This Mess
By SUZY MENKES
MILAN — The current state of fashion, with designers enticed to houses where they may be rejected, removed and re-embraced, leaves a queasy feeling.
The drama that started almost exactly a year ago with the breakdown and departure of John Galliano from Dior has spread across the fashion universe.
The moving end to Raf Simons’s seven years at Jil Sander dominated the Milan scene over the weekend as much as the news that Ms. Sander herself will be returning.
Speculation now has Yves Saint Laurent taking on Hedi Slimane, who was a designer choice to follow the original maestro. The idea that Mr. Slimane, who has followed a photographic career since his departure from Dior Homme, would move back to YSL, where he once designed men’s wear, has created yet-another firestorm across the cybersphere.
Caught in this maelstrom are the designers. By their nature artistic and fragile people, they see themselves treated like commodities, bought and dispensed with as the corporate house pleases.
There is a reason that long-serving fashion executives have been replaced in recent years by chief executive officers whose history is in ice cream, yogurt or other marketable products. With a global society hungry for luxury, distribution and supply chains are now as important for executives as a hands-on feel for products.
But not all the blame can be put on the corporate conglomerates, who have, like a flood tide, been inundating family-run houses. In Italy, La Familia just about hangs in there, hoping that each generation will serve up a smart son or daughter. But it is increasingly hard for small Italian brands to keep a mom-and-pop business going, especially when China’s industrial base for fashion will soon outstrip Italy’s.
Designers, too, are not blameless victims of the new deal. They have also become commoditized, picking the right lawyer to fight for sky-high salaries and sweet treatment as if they were Hollywood stars.
Cut off from reality, as Mr. Galliano was and many others still are, in the world of first-class travel and the chauffeur at the door, they find themselves enmeshed in a web of their own making.
They are too used to a lifestyle that has brought them fabulous apartments filled with contemporary art and photography to break out of this lush gilded cage, where they are obliged to dance again and again: fashion show, store opening, midseason presentation, second line, media interviews, team meeting, ad shoots, global travel. Smile, smile, smile — and rock until you drop.
Then there are us, the journalists surrounded by a sea of bloggers. The Twitter world magnifies and distorts reality, as I found out last autumn when my speculation, based on sound information, that Raf Simons had been talking to Yves Saint Laurent people was transformed by the Twitter world into a done deal.
No grain of gossip is too small to grow into a mighty story.
Designers in the past have fought with the “suits” and turned to alcohol and drugs. Why do things seem such a mega-drama today, ending any chance of a sad situation being resolved with dignity?
The natural end of an era, as designers whose houses bear their names grow old and pass away, combined with the arrival of digital cameras and Internet exposure, has created a perfect storm.
Fledgling designers need investment — but how much easier it is to put them in a dead man or woman’s shoes, perhaps also backing the new designer’s namesake line, but only as what the French call a “danseuse,” a plaything.
Karl Lagerfeld’s success at Chanel and Fendi (if not with his own various lines) is the template. Marc Jacobs is one of the rare designers who has fought and won, from LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the right to build a global empire in his own name. Yet when he was approached to take over at Dior, he reportedly asked for too much in return.
If designers suffer, what about the toiling teams behind them? They are mostly unknown — loved and hand-picked by a designer, yet abandoned or even thrown out after a change of leadership.
The situation is not universally toxic. The collaboration between Donatella Versace and Christopher Kane with his sister Tammy is a sweet reminder of the Gianni Versace/Donatella years. But what if — as the rumor mill claims — Mr. Kane has been put up for the Dior job? There will be yet another round of musical chairs.
As a journalist, I cannot help imagining with excitement a new era with a face-off between Hedi Slimane at YSL and Raf Simons at Dior — a magnificent battle of style and wills to echo the Armani/Versace, Gucci/Prada or even Chanel/Schiaparelli face-offs of earlier years.
But I remind myself that this is not a game of chess. And that real people — especially sensitive designers — deserve not to be treated as pawns in someone else’s game.
jil sander back at jil sander 
and hedi at ysl 
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