From 2024 to 2026, European luxury went through the fastest creative reshuffle in its modern history.
It all began in March 2024, when Pierpaolo Piccioli left Valentino after twenty-five years. A record for loyalty in an industry that has never cared much for continuity. The trade press immediately dubbed it the fashion mercato, but the remarkable thing is that the creative directors’ waltz had only just begun.
Over the following eighteen months, the creative map of European luxury is rewritten almost entirely. Piccioli moves to Balenciaga, where he replaces Demna. Demna goes to Gucci, where Sabato De Sarno had just failed. De Sarno had come from Valentino, which in the meantime had taken Alessandro Michele, who left Gucci in 2022. Jonathan Anderson leaves Loewe for Dior. Maria Grazia Chiuri leaves Dior after nine years for Fendi. Matthieu Blazy leaves Bottega Veneta for Chanel (the first external hire in that role since 1983). Louise Trotter takes over Bottega Veneta in place of Blazy.
Every change of creative director has been presented as a strategic choice. Yet the result is closer to a round-robin than to a series of independent decisions. Each designer brings with them the creative vocabulary of a house that is no longer theirs, to apply it to a house that had been looking for it elsewhere. And all this, in fairness, says something deeper about how these organisations govern their own identity.
The economic cause
As always, it is the financial results that accelerate everything. Kering, the group that controls Gucci, Valentino, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, saw revenue at its main brand collapse by 20% in 2024. Gucci, which for a decade had accounted for half of the group’s operating profit, was no longer working with the maximalist aesthetic of Alessandro Michele, which Kering had brought to an end in 2022. De Sarno had been chosen for a radical change of course towards sobriety. But in three years that change of course had not delivered the expected results. And so De Sarno was removed in February 2025.
For Burberry, the story is no different. Daniel Lee, who had turned Bottega Veneta into one of the most desirable brands in luxury between 2018 and 2021, was unable to produce a similar effect at Burberry. As a result, sales fell by 18% in 2024 alone. The brand promptly announced a £65 million cost-reduction plan.
Did the designers fail? That is the simplest reading. The more useful reading, however, is that the system in which a designer operates can shape their actual results. And that opens up interesting scenarios.
The creative-director-as-brand model
To understand what went wrong, let us first try to understand what had worked.
The decade 2012-2022 produced a generation of creative directors who had, in effect, become the brand itself. Alessandro Michele at Gucci. Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino. Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton. Demna at Balenciaga. Each creative director had built a recognisable narrative universe, a core community and an aesthetic vocabulary that the public associated with that director’s personal vision.
The result: extremely high brand equity, concentrated in a single individual. An extraordinarily powerful asset, but also a fragile one. As the English say, a glass cannon. Because when that individual leaves, the asset leaves with them.
This structure worked as long as the industry was growing and demand for luxury sustained any strong creative vision. When the market slowed after Covid, owing to war, inflation and geopolitical uncertainty, every structural fragility was exposed, and the major industrial groups of high fashion found themselves having to reshuffle the cards on the table in search of new opportunities.
The governance of creativity
Every change of creative director has been announced as a moment of transition: an update to the brand’s vision, let’s say, and a bold choice. Yet the numbers say the opposite, and speak instead of a desperate scramble to catch up.
Gucci changed its creative head three times in three years. Dior lost both its menswear and its womenswear creative directors within six months. Valentino replaced a creative director with twenty-five years’ service with a designer who brought an aesthetically opposite vision. A creative reshuffle unprecedented since Tom Ford left Gucci in 2004, the last time a single change had redrawn the map of the industry.
The governance questions raised by this case are several. First, if a brand’s identity depends decisively on the presence of a single person, is that person an asset or a liability? Does all the credit for success belong to them? And the blame for failure? Meanwhile, what is the brand doing in all this? Is it merely a passive spectator, supplying materials to the director, or should it perhaps step forward to reassert itself as the true intermediary with the public?
Why some brands remained consistent
A few exceptions indirectly answer the questions we have raised.
Hermès, for example, changed its creative director for women’s ready-to-wear in 2021, when Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski took over the vacant role. It did not happen because of an economic or identity crisis, but out of necessity. Perhaps partly for this reason, Hermès’s revenue grew by double digits every year from 2020 to 2025. After all, Hermès’s identity resides not in the creative director but in its craftsmanship, its materials, its production structure and the consistency across every touchpoint. The creative director simply expresses that structure.
The same applies to Chanel, with the difference that for more than thirty years Chanel operated with an extremely rare arrangement: Karl Lagerfeld governing an identity that was not his own, managing not to become the brand itself but to serve it. His succession was the first real test of the solidity of the house’s identity. The identity held.
The difference between a brand that withstands a change of creative leadership and one that falls into crisis, then, does not lie in the quality of the successor. You can change a thousand directors, but if there is no structure in place to receive them and enable them to do their best work, it is all pointless. No, the real differentiator is how deeply the brand’s identity is rooted in something that exists regardless of who signs it.
The organisations that know this thrive, avoiding the directors’ waltz.
A lesson for those whose name is not Gucci
The luxury case is extreme in scale and visibility, but it is not so different from what happens in any organisation where the identity of the brand coincides with the identity of a key person.
The founder who has become the face of the brand. The marketing director who has built the brand’s voice over the past five years. The professional whom the market identifies with the organisation they represent. In all these cases, the risk is identical to Gucci’s: every departure takes with it a share of the asset that the organisation no longer owns.
Brand identity governance is built to ensure that the brand exists autonomously, with an architecture solid enough to withstand a change in who inhabits it without losing what makes it recognisable.
The creative director waltz is the most visible manifestation of a governance problem that runs through any organisation that has delegated its identity to a person instead of governing it as a structure.
Today it is happening in fashion. Tomorrow, it could happen in your industry.
New Connections (FAQ)
If a brand as strong as Gucci can lose 20% of its revenue in a year, what should a smaller brand do to protect itself?
Paradoxically, the answer is more within reach for smaller brands: document the brand’s identity and make it explicit, so that it does not depend on the memory or presence of a single person. The tone of voice, the visual architecture, the principles that govern every communication choice. Gucci had not done this because it did not need to, as long as the system worked. A smaller brand that builds this structure before it needs it protects itself against a fragility that Gucci discovered only once it had already cost billions.
Has the superstar creative director really run its course, or will it return?
It will not return in the same form. The model of the creative director as the brand worked in a context of sustained growth, in which every strong vision was rewarded regardless of its consistency with the house’s historical identity. That context has changed. Luxury groups have rediscovered that dependence on a single creative point is an operational risk, not merely an aesthetic one. The superstar designer will not disappear: Blazy at Chanel, Anderson at Dior and Piccioli at Balenciaga are all highly visible names. But the system around them will have to be built differently, with more institutional architecture and less dependence on the individual.
Hermès does it all on its own, without high-profile creative directors. Is it a replicable model?
Replicable in its logic, not in its specific form. Hermès’s logic is that the brand’s identity resides in the production process, the materials and the craftsmanship: elements that do not depend on who signs the collections. For a brand that does not produce physical objects with these characteristics, the same logic applies to principles, stated values and behaviour that remains consistent over time. The identity that withstands changes in leadership is always the one built as architecture, not as the expression of a specific person. Hermès did it with the product. Every organisation must find its equivalent.