Perspective | Does it really matter when a designer leaves a high-fashion brand? (2024)

Hating on Viard quickly became a pastime on social media’s highly active but loose commentary communities. Her clothes were too dowdy, too aging, these critics said, and lacked the fantasy and extraordinary technique of her predecessor, Lagerfeld, with whom she worked for several decades. Detractors also thought that celebrities were not well served by her designs (aw, poor celebrities), and an Instagram account was even made to chronicle the house’s red carpet faux pas, called @Chanelflopsagain.

For what it’s worth: Viard’s point of view did work financially and at times aesthetically. Last month, the business announced its 2023 revenue hit a whopping $19.7 billion, up over 75 percent since Lagerfeld’s death. Except in its earliest days, Chanel was never about innovation and freedom, but about the strength of conservatism, the imperiousness of an upper-middle-class uniform and a crystallization of status symbols like quilted bags and tweed blazers into a globally understood language. Viard’s oddball styling, at its best, read as a portrait of the kooky inner life of an eccentric French woman, which was a human alternative to Lagerfeld’s epic productions featuring models dressed to theme like dancers in a George Cukor musical about supermarkets, waterfalls or spaceships.

Most of these commentators, though, have no skin in the game. How many people can afford a $10,800 bag? In fact, designers — or creative directors, or artistic directors, or image directors, as they are sometimes called — regularly tell me that they assume many of their brand’s shoppers do not know their name, that customers think the surname on the tag is still the person making all this stuff, even if they are long dead. So why do people care? Does it really matter when a designer leaves a luxury brand?

Actually, yes. First, shoppers may experience the changes a designer implements, even if they are not hyper-attuned to its every move. Rickie De Sole, Nordstrom’s vice president and fashion director, wrote in an email that whether or not a customer follows the output of a designer obsessively, that person’s mark will be evident in the things they put out, including bags, shoes, clothes and, increasingly, beauty products.

“Great creative directors set the tone and help to refine and enhance the overall image and seasonal direction of a brand,” she wrote. “This keeps labels at top of mind for many customers, and while sharpening that brands perception and awareness are important, what also resonates and comes through to our customers is the strength of the product.”

In other words, you may not know that something happened behind the scenes, but you’ll notice when bags start to look better to you, or shoes cooler, or a jacket appears that feels like a new classic from a label you’d never thought you’d wear.

“This isn’t just about the pieces and whether you can purchase them,” Mikelle Street, an editor and former digital director of Out Magazine, wrote to me via direct message. He called the question of why people care about fashion shake-ups “silly.”

“There is a massive audience now, more than before, that watch this as content and entertainment.” He compared the banter and commentary to the way another audience might follow sports, trading barbs and theories about players heading from one team to another, or a coach retiring or moving to a new job.

Jeremy Lewis, a fashion critic known for his brutally honest Instagram runway reviews, said that in fashion, the creative director is more significant than the CEO, which is unusual in the world of business. “A change in creative director usually represents a fundamental shift in positioning or strategy,” he said. “It puts the business at tremendous risk. Gucci is currently dealing with the fallout of a change in creative leadership that did not go as expected” — a reference to Gucci’s sliding sales figures, which have put a damper on Sabato de Sarno’s tenure as the label’s creative lead.

“Fashion is a business based on aesthetics, image and perception. Yes, it sells handbags, apparel, footwear and cosmetics, but ultimately, the look and feel create value in its products and attract customers,” Lewis said. “And that is all the purview of the creative director.”

You could take this further. Luxury fashion provides a singular lens into two pockets of our culture. First, the taste, interests and even obsessions of the global 1 percent, a disturbingly powerful entity that otherwise shrouds itself in mystery. Fashion, which at a label like Chanel must appeal as readily to French consumers as those in the Middle East and Asia, is practically an Esperanto for the very rich — only the rest of us can understand it, too, if we pause and listen.

Even if we do not wear runway clothes (and most of us do not wear them, or even something like them), designers shape our sense of what looks contemporary. It is no longer so simple as editors and garmentos persuading everyone to wear a particular style of pants. To use a very recent example, the pieces that come out in the great churn of fashion houses — like Gucci, under Alessandro Michele, and much smaller ones, like Emily Bode Aujla’s Bode or Willy Chavarria — have ushered the culture at large into an era of gender fluidity. They tell us what aspiration and beauty look like, whether by reflecting and distilling them, or creating them. The similarities between much of what appears on runways could be seen as a new self-consciousness in an industry that, not so long ago, was at its most visually inventive. It’s as if clothes, and acquisitions, are meant to be armor, not delights.

To Street’s point, think of fashion as a fantasy football league with extraordinary merch. “Hearing something behind the scenes is changing in a sport you watch is justifiable cause for conversation, no matter if you are financially linked to it in any way,” he said. Rarely are sports fans criticized for their excitement over changes in their favorite pastime. One has to wonder if, as obvious as it sounds, the eye-rolling that inevitably follows fashion news is just a classic case of misogyny.