The Season of Designer Comeback That Wasn’t

(Disclaimer: the original version of this article was published in T Magazine China)

After several disastrous hype appointments last year, this season we were treated to a slew of creative director debuts at major labels that were supposed to bring design back to fashion. What happened?

This year as sales for many luxury fashion brands have dipped in key markets like China and the US, there has been much talk about fashion finally moving from product-driven, sellable but uninspiring fashion that has brought record profits for the fashion industry, but also made it into a lackluster, uninspiring discipline that by all accounts lacked creativity. To add to fashion’s tarnished image, we have seen appointments and subsequent quick exits of buzzy young designers like Rhuigi Villasenor at Bally and Ludovic de Saint Sernin at Ann Demeulemeester that has shown that hype does not equal talent and discipline required to run a major fashion brand. In such a time of reckoning the industry has two choices – to create excitement by taking creative risks or to seek refuge in bland commerciality. Much to the dismay of many fashion observers, it has chosen the latter.

The Spring / Summer 2024 season began this September in New York with the much anticipated debut of Peter Do at Helmut Lang. The young Vietnamese-American designer has brought sorely needed cachet to New York with sophisticated designs for his own label that owe a debt to the Austrian designer Helmut Lang, whose ‘90s minimalism has inspired countless designers, but whose brand has been rudderless since he left it in 2005, several years after it was acquired by Prada. Since 2006 Helmut Lang has been in the hands of Fast Retailing, the owner of Uniqlo and Theory, and the transformation of a designer fashion brand into a mass market one has been painful to watch. And so the announcement that a real designer was taking over the brand with a mandate to restore it to its former glory caused much excitement, partly because there is so much good will in the fashion world towards both Peter do and Helmut Lang, and partly because New York fashion week has been starved of major talent.

Alas, the debut was a flop. The show’s start with a live reading of a poem by Ocean Vuong, the lauded Vietnamese-American poet and Do’s friend, was meant to be dramatic, but was rather melodramatic. And the clothes themselves did not have the kind of edge and power that Lang brought to his minimalist brand of fashion. Lang made clothes for the modern city creative at the forefront of culture, the if-you-know-you-know set. Do’s designs felt flat in comparison – they lacked the kind of dynamism that Lang was famous for. It is hard to say whether the fault lies with Do, who has undoubtedly felt the pressure of an important debut, or with Fast Retailing, which stubbornly aims to keep the brand in the contemporary fashion category. If it’s the latter, then the company fails to understand the central tenet of minimalism – without excellent quality of materials and construction, minimalism is impossible, because there is no hiding behind ornamentation and color clashes. The greats like Helmut Lang and Jil Sander knew this, and so do the The Row’s Olsen twins, the current reigning queens of minimalism. And if Do will have to continue to design with one hand tied behind his back, it is unlikely that Helmut Lang will regain its relevance under his stewardship.

Even more so than New York, Milan had its share of major debuts, namely those of Peter Hawkings at Tom Ford, and of Sabato De Sarno at Gucci. The succession drama was amplified, of course, by the fact that Ford had turned Gucci from a musty loafers-and-handbag emporium to a fashion juggernaut, only to be unceremoniously ousted a decade later. Ford, who has always had a good head on his shoulders, slammed the door on his way out by building an eponymous brand that he sold to the cosmetics giant Estée Lauder earlier this year for $2.25 billion (in an act of supreme irony it was rumored that Kering, the parent company of Gucci, was also in the running to acquire the Tom Ford brand).

Hawkings has been working along Ford for twenty-five years, since Ford’s Gucci days, and was hand-picked by Ford himself to carry on his legacy. The collection Hawkings showed in Milan was a symbolic sign of deference to his former boss, with frequent nods towards Ford’s unabashedly sexy Gucci work of the mid and late ‘90s. It was lush and louche, and if it wasn’t terribly original, well, originality was never a major point of the Tom Ford brand, where Ford aimed for one thing only – making people look rich and idle. Hawkings continued in that vein through the mock croc looks and satin suits and the dark sunglasses that all had the kind of nonchalance the moneyed class possesses.

De Sarno’s task was far harder than Hawkings’s, to propel a brand at which his predecessor, Alessandro Michele, not only created a specific, pointed esthetic of luxe bohemia, but also increased sales five-fold in just seven years. Building on such a success is a heavy task – after all, how far can a $10 billion brand grow? Gucci is clearly at the cross-roads in terms of where the brand should go. This was evident in the two lackluster collections put together by a design team since Michele’s departure. The company knows that the stakes are high and it pulled out all stops in terms of marketing the new collection, which was called “Ancora.”

Gucci went all out on marketing Ancora and its attendant burgundy color (is it trying to make it the color of the brand the Bottega Veneta did with bright green?), from wrapping London’s Marble Arch and Milan’s trams into the Ancora ads, to partnering with niche Instagram fashion enthusiast accounts like @archive.pdf. As the fashion commentator Amy Odell wrote, “Gucci did everything it could to make sure that we would be so bombarded by ANCORA this or that that we would finally bother to look up what it means.” What Ancora means in Italian is “again,” and is often used by a delighted audience to demand another song from a performer, and it feels like it was purposefully chosen as if to embed the collection’s success into our minds even before it was shown.

But no marketing blitz could hide the fact that the collection De Sarno presented was disappointing. It was an utterly commercial outing that lacked a point of view that a creative director must possess in order to keep a brand like Gucci exciting. Instead of an esthetic statement, we got a merchandising one, as if the people who created the collection forgot the difference between fashion and clothes. And while it is perfectly understandable that a brand like Gucci must sell lots of easily digestible items such as a logoed hoodies and the GG belts, must it put them on a runway?

The critics were unsparing. Even the normally mild Tim Blanks wrote in his review for the Business of Fashion, “Look at the pretty young things in their tank tops and short shorts in the streets of any Italian city and it’s easy to see where Sabato De Sarno is coming from with his first collection for Gucci. It’s much more difficult to see where he’s going.” He was correct in deploring the collection’s lack of newness, which after all is the central tenet of fashion. If Gucci wants a rebirth of the brand, De Sarno is going to have to take some risks. It seems that he has the requisite talent to do so – he spent 14 years at Valentino in which the brand produced some brilliant work – but after this collection he has his work cut out for him.

Paris also had its share of debuts, of which the most anticipated one was that of Stefano Gallici at Ann Demeulemeester. The brand has found itself in rough waters after it was bought by the Italian entrepreneur Claudio Antonioli, with Demeulemeester’s blessing. For a couple of seasons the brand put out several rather uninspiring, archive-based collections designed by a team. Late last year Antonioli hired the buzzy Parisian designer Ludovic de Saint Sernin, only to fire him after his first show, which was widely criticized for being too de Saint Sernin and not enough Demeulemeester. Indeed, du Saint Sernin brought his aggressive and objectifying sense of sexuality to a brand that is known for fragility and romanticism, and it did not work.

Did Gallici’s debut work? Not really. It was not a bad collection, heavy on archival references, but it also lacked Demeulemeester’s sense of grandeur and a vision of what the brand should look like today. The question surrounding this collection was the same that Blanks put to De Sarno; we know where the collection came from, but where is it going?

And where is fashion going? It is evident that fashion has chosen to play it safe, much to the dismay of lovers of fashion with capital “F.” The designers who showed the most exciting collections of the season – Sacai, Undercover, Rick Owens, and Dries Van Noten – were those who already have a reputation for fearless creativity. But the problem with playing it safe is this – if fashion as a discipline becomes unexciting, it will in the long run cause more damage to itself by turning people’s interest away to other things. One can see the signs of this turning away already in the vast interest on the part of the young who prefer vintage fashion to new one. This Paris fashion week one could not throw a stone without hitting a vintage store.

There is only one designer left this season who can still show that creative directors, and not merchandisers or stylists, still matter. Phoebe Philo was supposed to unveil her first collection under her name during Paris fashion week. Reportedly she was dissatisfied with the results, and postponed the release until October 30th. Over her near ten-year tenure at Celine Philo has earned a dedicated following of the smart female set. Her clothes had both quirk and edge; they were made for women who don’t care what men think of them. Her departure in December of 2017 left a sizable gap in fashion, one that plenty of brands have been trying to fill. But Philo’s aura has proved to be lasting. The level of excitement amongst fashion aficionados about Philo’s return with an eponymous label backed by LVMH who have been starved of creativity has been off the charts.

The reveal will be done outside of the fashion system of shows – the collection will be launched on Philo’s website and be available to order immediately. How the clothes will be presented is anyone’s guess, but Philo’s debut may be one that the fashion world has been waiting for. At Celine Philo, who will turn 50 five days before the launch, made women’s fashion modern and proved that design still matters. One can only hope for a repeat performance.

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