Lately, the Chicken Littles of fashion are reading dire omens into a cluster of design world shake-ups. Coming soon after changes at the top at Dior, Lanvin and Balenciaga, startling personnel shifts at prominent men’s wear brands have left some in the industry wandering around dazed, waiting to be smacked with a piece of falling sky.
But while this turmoil seems to point to an industry in disarray, the chief cause may be as simple as a generational shift in consumer habits. Look to the waning fortunes of the suit.
First, though, a recap: In early February, Stefano Pilati, the head of design for Ermenegildo Zegna Couture, parted ways with the Italian luxury goods behemoth — to which he went in 2013 after leading Yves Saint Laurent as creative director for most of the decade before — to pursue “other projects.” The announcement of the move came two days after news broke that Alessandro Sartori was leaving his post as artistic director of Berluti, a label he and the luxury goods scion Antoine Arnault (whose father, Bernard Arnault, controls LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) had transformed over half a decade from a high-end cobbler into a sort of Urban Outfitters for the 1 percent.
Unlike Mr. Pilati, Mr. Sartori knew where his next paycheck would come from: He was hired as the artistic director of Ermenegildo Zegna. It was an easy fit, given that Mr. Sartori had served as the design director of Zegna’s more casual line, Z Zegna, for eight years before joining Berluti.
On the same day the news of Mr. Sartori’s departure from Berluti became public, the multinational Kering group announced that a “joint decision” had been reached between its high-end Italian tailoring house, Brioni, and the label’s creative director, Brendan Mullane, to go their separate ways. Toward the end of March, Brioni appointed a new creative director, Justin O’Shea, a heavily inked man with few design credentials, a lively social media presence (roughly 85,000 Instagram followers) and a résumé whose top-line item was his successful efforts to transform mytheresa.com, where his title was buying director, from a small store in Munich to a luxury e-tailer generating a reported $130 million in annual revenues.
Next up in the fashion follies was Costume National. Its founders, the brothers Ennio and Carlo Capasa, citing the age-old conflict between art and commerce, announced that they were exiting the hipster-rocker-minimalist brand after conflicts with the Asian investment firm Sequedge, which had become a minority shareholder in the company in 2009 before exercising its option to buy it this year. “A vision that is only pleasing the market destroys business,” Ennio Capasa told The Associated Press. “It loses innovation. It becomes like selling detergent or a product to wash your hands. That is not fashion.”
As if to prove the point, Kering soon confirmed the worst-kept secret in the industry by announcing that Hedi Slimane, the creative and image director of Saint Laurent, was leaving the storied label he had roused from torpor with his singular take on Los Angeles rocker chic — a style some critics derided even as consumers lined up at the registers, leather perfectos and ratted-out skinny jeans slung over their arms. Mr. Slimane was almost instantaneously replaced by Anthony Vaccarello, a quiet Italian-Belgian designer lately of Versus Versace whose unobjectionable creations, seldom varying from one collection to the next, have so far proven to be the fashion equivalent of “Groundhog Day.”
As if the exits weren’t crowded enough, in late March, Salvatore Ferragamo announced that its talented and low-key creative director, Massimiliano Giornetti, was ending his stint as creative director of the family-run Italian label he joined a decade and a half ago.
To the electronics and gear that traditionally served as cornerstones of male buying habits you can now add moisturizer and $400 boxer shorts. Even as China slumps and India continues to put up last-ditch resistance to the incursion of Western capitalists, nimble industry players have begun to focus less on geography than demographics.
Thus, the ruptures and personnel shifts that shook up major design houses were in some ways to be expected, said Raffaello Napoleone, the chief executive of the Italian trade group Pitti Immagine. “The moment is right for everyone to alter their approach,” he said by telephone last week. Not only is the era of the star designer on the wane, but a newly informed generation of consumers now coming to maturity already knows what it wants.
By some estimates, a cohort born at the end of the last century and in the early years of the current one could grow to 60 million by the end of the decade. Technologically fluent and imbued with the entrepreneurial ethos that is a hallmark of the start-up era, those consumers — quite a few of the male ones, anyway — are so accustomed to pursuing their careers in their skivvies that a traditional suit seems about as relevant to them as a toga.
And that as much as anything helps explain why tailoring houses like Brioni find themselves suddenly scrambling for relevance. “Nobody was looking to Brioni to have an Acne feeling,” Mr. Napoleone said, referring to the Swedish label whose perennially hip style is more in line with that of the sharply natty Mr. O’Shea.
“The complication in men’s wear is that the formal suit is a relatively mature category,” said Luca Solca, the chief luxury goods analyst at Exane BNP Paribas.
Costume scholars argue that the sartorial formula of jacket and trousers (and, intermittently, vest) has proved nearly indestructible for nearly four centuries. “Historicize it and the suit is always there,” said Sharon Sadako Takeda, the head of the department of costume and textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curator of “Reigning Men,” a three-century survey of men’s wear running until Aug. 21. Yet not only are men “starting to be more independent and creative in their dress,” she said, “they’re working in industries where you don’t necessarily require a suit.”
True, museum executives — like Lacma’s director, Michael Govan — and politicians and lawyers and bankers and many of those who toil in public-facing jobs still wear a suit to work routinely. The question is, how much longer will this be the case?
“Definitely men’s wear is taking more and more share of the market but, increasingly, by using the same tactics as women’s wear,” said Federico Marchetti, the chief executive of the Yoox Net-a-Porter Group.
Instead of depending on the traditional suit and other durable basics to carry a brand, men’s wear designers may win over a 21st-century generation by stimulating appetite for accessories and separates and seasonally shifting objects of desire, as the Yoox Group’s e-tailing site, Mr Porter, has done with great success.
“There have always been times when the suit was weaker or stronger, but don’t worry about the suit,” said Carlo Capasa, the former Costume National executive who is also chief executive of the Camera Nazionale della Moda, the trade group for the Italian fashion industry. “Definitely, the suit is suffering in this moment from this challenging shift to casualization.”
And with that, he was echoing the critic and essayist John Berger, who observed that the economic logic of fashion has always depended on making whatever style preceded that of the current moment look absurd.
Written By GUY TREBAY
Source: New York Times
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