The Fashion System Is Creaking. Will It Collapse?
The current formulaic, corporatised, anodyne approach to fashion is not working. The industry needs to find its courage to be creative again, writes Imran Amed.
The sheer scale of these businesses means there is a lot more at stake.(BoF Team)
By
14 June 2024
BoF PROFESSIONAL
LONDON — Lately, something has not been feeling quite right in luxury fashion. First Kering, and now LVMH and Chanel, seem to be creeping into crisis management mode.
As has been well documented, Sabato De Sarno’s creative directorship at all-important Gucci has not yet ignited industry interest. Meanwhile, customers haven’t had the opportunity to see much new product in store, hobbling Kering’s post-Covid performance. None of the other Kering brands are registering meaningful growth that can make up for this, leaving the group with a very complex multi-faceted turnaround to execute.
Over at LVMH, things are getting more challenging too. According to market sources, sales at Dior are flagging, which perhaps explains why the house’s March 23 men’s show in Hong Kong was “indefinitely postponed” just a few weeks before it was due to take place. Meanwhile, Fendi and Givenchy seem to be in stasis mode, while reports that Hedi Slimane is about to leave Celine following
“thorny contract negotiations”with his bosses at LVMH further complicates matters.
And then just last week,
Chanel suddenly lost its creative director, Virginie Viard, and in a not very Chanel way, especially for someone who had dedicated 30 years to the house. The fact that Viard’s exit happened so quickly with no succession plan in place makes it clear that neither side had planned for this to happen now. Chanel’s creative conundrum comes amid market reports that sales are down in almost every market this year.
But it’s not just these designers and these houses that are troubled. Burberry’s mooted elevation strategy is not yet delivering results and Lanvin, which has been without a creative director for more than a year, seems to be languishing even if CEO Siddartha Shukla is working hard to keep the brand relevant. After John Galliano wiped his Instagram account, the rumour mill started whirring that he would be leaving his creative directorship at Maison Margiela.
Meanwhile, a number of talented designers remain without big jobs. Pierpoalo Piccioli suddenly exited Valentino in March and Sarah Burton announced last autumn that she was leaving Alexander McQueen. Both designers had worked with their respective houses for more than 20 years and haven’t popped up anywhere else, in spite of their talent.Neither have Riccardo Tisci or Claire Waight Keller who left Burberry and Givenchy several years ago.
What explains this pattern of events? There are a variety of forces at work, but I think it has something to do with a gradual breakdown of the social contract between creatives and their corporate bosses, who are not championing creativity in the way they once did.
Once upon a time, people like Bernard Arnault and Francois-Henri Pinault were willing to take creative risks to boost the fortunes of small-ish fashion brands. When Arnault appointed Marc Jacobs to become the first creative director of Louis Vuitton in 1997, the brand had no ready-to-wear collection. Arnault knew Vuitton could benefit from an injection of creative energy, just as he did with John Galliano at Dior that same year.
Now, the sheer scale of these businesses means there is a lot more at stake. And as luxury brands brace themselves for an extended ‘normalisation’ period, it seems the mantra is to take the safe route — even if that means appointing no creative director at all. Chanel is unlikely to have a new creative director for sometime, and LVMH-owned Berluti has been operating without a creative director for several years.
Loewe Autumn/Winter 2024 (Spotlight/Launchmetrics)
There are exceptions to this fashion monotony, of course. Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe manages to both surprise creatively and create commercial impact. Prada and Miu Miu are also creative highlights that are driving commercial success. Both Anderson and Miuccia Prada have a proven ability to push things forward, while also finding ways to ensure the business is still growing. These brands may soon face a different challenge. They need to carefully balance growth with over-exposure, as if growth happens too quickly, it may not be sustainable over the long-term.
Most of the brands that compete with Prada and Loewe for attention have backed away from high-risk, high-reward fashion driven by creativity. Now the approach is more formulaic, akin to selling luxury merch in an overpriced supermarket. Karl Lagerfeld may have predicted with his Autumn/Winter 2015 Chanel show.
This is a world where one brand’s $1,000 hoodie is indistinguishable from another’s. Where it is easier to copy the shape of a box bag with gold logo hardware that is working at another brand, than coming up with a unique shape of your own. Customers have cottoned onto this, and would rather spend their money on one-of-a-kind experiences or hard-to-find vintage pieces than have the same thing as everyone else.
Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel's Fall/Winter 2014-2015 show. (Getty Images)
But the lack of creativity and magic does not end there. The fashion system has also been buffeted by the sudden collapse of Matches and Farfetch, and the slow but steady decline of the once-dominant luxury e-commerce behemoth Yoox Net-a-Porter, which is a shell of its former self. The experience and assortment at Farfetch was not so different from Matches which was not so different from Net-a-Porter. This is in part because the people who bought or invested in these companies had no real. understanding of the creativity and taste required to create world-class retail. (Some of them did not understand how to manage technology either, but that’s a whole other analytical exercise.)
This meant the only way to compete was on price, which led to a downward spiral of discounting, training customers to wait for discounts, making profitability almost impossible to achieve. Sadly, the collateral damage has been independent fashion businesses that dependend on these platforms in the early stage of growth. Independent brands on both sides of the Atlantic are now on the brink, further diluting the creative lifeblood of fashion.
The result of all this is a fashion industry that fails to inspire customers, and not even ourselves. The current formulaic, corporatised, anodyne approach to fashion is clearly not working. This leaves me with the sinking feeling that things are about to break down. Maybe that’s what fashion needs to find its courage to be creative again.
