Fashion Is Having A Meltdown Over Fake News & Theories

By Vanessa Friedman

Tuesday Jul. 30, 2024

New York Times

The spectre of rampant gossip hangs over the fashion industry. Photo / Michel Euler/Associated Press

Between designer-less brands and rampant gossip, fashion is having a meltdown. And it’s not because of the heat.

There is yet another job opening in fashion. On Monday, Tom Ford (the brand) announced the departure of Peter Hawkings as creative director after just over a year. That company now joins

It’s an unprecedented state of uncertainty, not helped by the fact that at the same time speculation is swirling about a host of other brands that still have artistic directors, though you’d never know it by the gossip.

A brief sampling of the theories floating around:

— Sarah Burton, the longtime designer of Alexander McQueen who left last year, is definitely, positively going to Givenchy. Soon. Everyone says.

— Hedi Slimane is 100% leaving Celine, going to Chanel and being replaced by Michael Rider, late of Ralph Lauren. (Never mind that the move was supposed to have happened in June and that Slimane is not only still at Celine, but Bruno Pavlovsky, the head of fashion at Chanel, pretty much dismissed the idea.) Or maybe Slimane is going to Burberry? They just changed chief executives. Who knows? If there’s smoke, there’s fire.

— John Galliano is leaving Margiela, and he’s going to Chanel. No, wait, Dior. No, wait, Fendi.

— Kim Jones, at Fendi womenswear, is being replaced by Alessandro Michele. (Oops, that didn’t happen. Michele actually went to work at Valentino.) Okay, by Pierpaolo Piccioli. By Maria Grazia Chiuri, who happens to be artistic director of Dior womenswear. By (fill in the designer’s name).

Enough.

This kind of rampant, unfettered speculation, while occasionally entertaining in a fantasy-football kind of way, is often rooted in nothing more than whispers and wishful thinking — or the product of strategically deployed leaks used as a tactic in a contract negotiation. And it is, in the end, good for no one. Not for the designers concerned or the hundreds of people who work for them or the consumers who buy their clothes — or who just follow the celebrities who wear them on social media, and thus are influenced by those clothes.

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A look from the Maison Margiela haute couture show in Paris in January. John Galliano's couture collection for Maison Margiela in January captivated fashion observers. Photo / Simbarashe Cha, The New York Times

Insecurity just leads to boring fashion, even bad fashion. Most often, it makes designers choose the safe option, the thing that worked well last time — the banal. It mitigates against the wild ideas — the why nots? — that change what everyone wants to wear.

And yet the chaos of the current situation, which has even fans on social media tearing their hair, seems to reflect the general state of chaos in the world, the shortened attention span of the social media era and the reality that, as fashion itself has become entertainment, designer turnover has itself become a spectator sport.

The problem is the same one that bedevils retailers, who historically order stock based on what they know. Think of it as the purple pants problem: last season, purple pants sold wildly well; ergo, this season, purple pants will also sell well. That’s not necessarily true: Once you have one pair of purple pants, you probably don’t need another. But it’s how most stores operate. Now it’s the way those playing the designer odds are operating, too.

The familiar names are the safe names. They’ve shown what they can do. But that doesn’t mean they are the only names.

There are numerous, probably extremely talented designers waiting in the wings whose names are not part of the public discourse. And not just at fashion brands, as Pharrell Williams’ appointment at Louis Vuitton menswear showed. Most people have no idea what is going on in the minds of decision-makers in these houses, or the conversations they may be having about assessments of talent, or the financial and personal calculus involved.

(For example, there was a time when Riccardo Tisci, before he went to Burberry, was set to be Donatella Versace’s heir — only to have the entire deal fall apart at the last minute over whose name went on the label.)

This is most clear when it comes to Galliano, who has been a rumour target extraordinaire since his much-ballyhooed couture show in January. In that, he has supplanted even Slimane, whose tendency to abandon his jobs every five or so years has made him the go-to name whenever an opening comes up.

The source of the current scuttlebutt about Galliano was the fashion newsletter Miss Tweed, which first suggested that Dior was in play. This because of the fact (confirmed) that Galliano has not re-signed his contract with Margiela, which expires in October; that he has been seen multiple times at the headquarters of LVMH, Dior’s parent company; and that he probably wouldn’t want to go back to a smaller brand like Givenchy, which is going to Burton of Alexander McQueen anyway, or so the gossip goes.

Not to mention the fact that Galliano worked at Dior for 14 years before being ignominiously fired in 2011 after his drug-and-alcohol-fuelled antisemitic rant in a Paris bar. What a redemption tale, were he to return! What a full circle moment!

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What hooey.

Dior is exponentially larger than when Galliano was its creative director. It now stages six major womenswear shows a year, two of them in far-flung countries. At Margiela, Galliano often doesn’t even hold two shows. His kind of magic takes time and experimentation to produce; it doesn’t happen on a fashion schedule. The pressures involved in such a punishing timetable are exactly the pressures that led to his initial downfall. Why either side would invite that again — even taking into account whatever “work” Galliano has done in the meantime or what support is available — is hard to imagine.

Besides, why would we want to go back to what we have already seen? There were dream shows, sure, but also grandiose flops, not to mention bad behaviour, as detailed in the recent documentary, High & Low: John Galliano.

Maybe, in the end, some of the rumours will be proven true. Maybe in the next week, even. But wouldn’t it be more shocking if LVMH were loyal to the person it already has at Dior? And, perhaps, welcomed Galliano back to the brand he founded, which bears his name and which has remained largely fallow since his departure in 2011.

The Galliano brand is small enough to be treated like a fashion laboratory, a jewel of experimentation, without the need to produce an ever-flowing river of stuff. Each show, then, when it happened, could become an event. That really would be a happy ending.

As would the idea that those other four fashion houses, currently designer-less, might take a chance on moving the needle forward with someone new. And then stick with those designers long enough to let them develop their own aesthetic voice, a bit of alchemy that often happens in fits and starts, through trial and error.

That, after all, is the glory of fashion, and its engine: giving people the things they didn’t know they wanted. The clothes that don’t exist in your closet, but which, when you see them, ignite a flame of desire because they offer the promise of the next you. That, more than any tittle-tattle, is what keeps everyone coming back to the shows, to the Instagram and TikTok feeds.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Vanessa Friedman

Photographs by: Simbarashe Cha