He has just left his fourth job at a big brand. Maybe it’s time he start one of his own. Would you buy that?
It took only minutes after LVMH announced that Hedi Slimane would be leaving Celine for the Chanel speculation to start. The brand that Coco built has
It’s understandable. Slimane’s last two Celine collections veered into jolie madame territory. Chanel is one of the biggest global names in the industry, the Hope diamond of fashion. Slimane is one of the more mythic designers, not unlike Karl Lagerfeld, the designer who made Chanel into a pop culture phenomenon.
Lagerfeld was a fan of Slimane, famously shedding weight to fit into the skinny suits that Slimane designed in one of his previous gigs, at Dior Homme. Like Lagerfeld, the original archetype of a designer who reinvigorated a heritage house, Slimane has changed the industry.
But despite having generated billions in profit and having created a new silhouette, Slimane has not necessarily changed it in the best way.
At this point, he’s fashion’s equivalent of a serial dater: all sex and seduction with no interest in long-term commitment. And when he’s in a relationship with a brand — his seven years at Celine is as long as any has lasted — it increasingly seems as if it’s all about him.
Before Slimane, designers joining an established fashion house at least pretended to care about preserving the foundations of the brand’s aesthetic. Since he came onto the scene, however, a pattern has emerged in which designers take on familiar names, but rather than engage deeply with the essence of a brand, as developed over time, they make it a reflection of themselves for the time they are there. When they leave, the slate is wiped clean.
Over the long term, that creates a recipe for monotony. When brands start to blend together, consumers cannot form meaningful attachments to any of them.
You could see it last week in Alessandro Michele’s Valentino debut, which looked a lot like Alessandro Michele’s Gucci, with little of the classic Valentino sophistication that had come before.
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Advertise with NZME.You could see it in January in John Galliano’s Maison Margiela couture show, which had everything to do with the drama of vintage Galliano and almost nothing to do with the design ethos of Martin Margiela.
And you could see it in most of Slimane’s career, which began in 1996 when he became the designer of Yves Saint Laurent menswear.
That’s where Slimane introduced the super skinny men’s suit, one of the most influential shifts in how men dress since the relaxed tailoring of Giorgio Armani in the 1980s. It was a revolution — but he stayed there for only four years before jumping to Dior Homme.
At Dior, Slimane perfected his narrow suiting, which became the go-to outfit for the LVMH chieftain Bernard Arnault as well as many LVMH executives. It’s also where he started drawing inspiration from the underground rock ‘n’ roll scenes and aligning himself with its denizens, who would often loll in extravagant disenchantment on his front row.
Still, he left Dior after seven years, and went on fashion hiatus until 2012, when he rejoined Yves Saint Laurent (now owned by Kering) to run the whole brand. That’s when another Slimane signature emerged: giving a line a full reboot, including the logo and sometimes even the name. He jettisoned the “Yves”, upsetting many longtime fans of the YSL brand.
When critics panned his work, he barred them from his shows. He discombobulated the French artisans by moving operations from Paris to Los Angeles. He embraced a desiccated, after-dark youth culture, often showing his designs on models and musicians so skinny they recalled the era of heroin chic. Many men who wanted to wear the clothes simply could not fit into them.
All the furore only served to give the brand more attention, but after four years, he left again — back to LVMH to run Céline following Phoebe Philo.
There, Slimane removed the accent mark on the brand’s “e” for no obvious reason and introduced another iteration of skinny Frenchness, this time via luxury basics: a trench coat, jeans, a chain pocketbook and a je ne sais quoi scarf. (It’s the vibe, baby.) He redesigned the stores and started declining interviews except for the occasional email.
He brazenly disregarded the conventions of the fashion cycles and establishment media. He had more quarrels with members of the press. He has not allowed Vogue to photograph his clothes for years, and the magazine doesn’t review his shows. He photographed Celine’s ad campaigns himself. He held few shows after the coronavirus pandemic, choosing instead to reveal his collections at random times in the form of short videos. Reportedly, he doubled the brand’s sales.
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Advertise with NZME.And now he’s leaving again.
Maybe he’s easily bored. Maybe he thinks: my work here is done. Maybe Michael Rider, the new Celine designer, a relative unknown, will simply continue the template Slimane has set, as Anthony Vaccarello has done at Saint Laurent, albeit while being more accessible and making nice with the system. Maybe he has another bigger gig in the offing. Aside from Chanel, rumors involve Dior and Gucci. He’s only 56.
But unless such brands are actually looking for a designer to come in, seize control of every aspect of the business, shake it up according to his taste (and all of them could use some shaking up) and then depart a few years later, Slimane is probably not their guy.
Perhaps, like Phoebe Philo, another talented designer given to transforming and then leaving brands and who finally introduced her own collection, it’s time for Slimane to put his money where his aesthetic is. He should call a spade a spade and just start his own line.
That he hasn’t done it yet may say as much about the state of fashion right now as it does about him.
The big groups — the ones with all of the money — generally shy away from making fashion brands from scratch. Building the name recognition and audience required to be competitive in the global fashion world, even with the much vaunted ease of entry that social media has created, is enormously expensive and risky. Even LVMH couldn’t make Fenty by Rihanna work.
Those groups would rather springboard off a musty old maison with an ever-present perfume than try to make a new one. And once designers have had a taste of the resources that big groups can offer, they often find the idea of scrambling for themselves less than appealing.
Yet, who does it serve to make the greatest talents of today into employees of legacy houses rather than entrepreneurs in their own right? Not the consumers, who may walk into a store expecting one thing, only to be thrown into confusion when they discover something entirely different after the latest round of creative-director musical chairs.
If the designers don’t care that much about their brands, if it’s so easy for them to leave and just do the same thing somewhere else, why should the people they dress care?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vanessa Friedman
Photographs by: Valerio Mezzanotti
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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