Fashion People
Anthony Vaccarello's Exit and the Declining Power of Luxury Creative Directors
Summarised from Designer Exit Etiquette
Luxury conglomerates are shifting power away from celebrity creative directors toward CEOs and commercial operators, signaling that design vision alone no longer drives brand growth.
Summary of Designer Exit Etiquette. Every timestamp links into the original audio.
The short version
00:00:37— Chinese consumers have lost interest in luxury brands entirely, instead favoring local alternatives, forcing brands to fundamentally rethink their growth strategies.00:05:33— Rumors circulated in August that Anthony Vaccarello was considering leaving Saint Laurent after a decade, with speculation about whether the role suited him anymore given changes in leadership.00:07:10— Kering and Vaccarello’s team strongly denied exit reports, likely because contract negotiations weren’t finalized, requiring denials despite the departures being widely known in industry circles.00:14:05— Kering requested that Vaccarello make collections more commercial, reduce evening wear, and expand bags and accessories, demands he resisted.00:15:20— Leadership viewed Saint Laurent as underperforming relative to its historical importance, with the brand’s business roughly one-tenth the size of Chanel despite similar cultural significance.00:21:40— Shamina Kamali, Vaccarello’s former subordinate at Chloe, was selected as the new Saint Laurent creative director, likely because she’s younger, more flexible, and won’t challenge commercial directives the way Vaccarello did.00:38:38— Kim Jones announced his own brand launch with an undisclosed non-LVMH investor focused on Asia, exemplifying how displaced luxury designers increasingly launch independent ventures rather than take other house positions.00:45:50— Letiquette magazine operates as an independent fashion publication that treats clothing as cultural and political objects, maintaining editorial independence while remaining profitable and growing.
In depth
Why Kering actually pushed out Vaccarello
The official story and the real story diverged sharply here, and Beaujais walks through the mechanics of that gap. Lauren Sherman had been hearing since couture that Anthony Vaccarello was weighing an exit after a decade at the house, driven partly by fatigue and partly by a changed executive bench at Kering under a different CEO than the one who hired him 00:05:41. By early September, industry consensus had hardened into certainty, yet when Beaujais stated on his French TV program that Vaccarello was leaving, both Kering and Vaccarello’s own team sent him formal letters denying it, with Kering explicitly telling him such statements on television could move the brand’s market value 00:11:40. Beaujais found this response almost comic given that everyone involved, including the two parties issuing denials, already knew the departure was happening 00:07:40.
His read, which Sherman shares, is that the denials were not really about whether Vaccarello was leaving but about who controlled the timing and terms, since the exit terms themselves had not been finalized when the letters went out 00:11:12. That distinction mattered enough that Beaujais ended up revisiting the story a third time on air once the farewell show itself confirmed everything through its own staging and symbolism 00:12:12.
Underneath the procedural fight was a substantive disagreement about what Saint Laurent should be. Beaujais lays out that Kering had been pressing Vaccarello to make his collections more commercial, pull back on eveningwear, and build out bags and accessories, demands he resisted, and that resistance amounted to a kind of passive departure even without a resignation letter 00:14:05. The word ‘mutual’ never appeared in Kering’s actual release, and Beaujais treats it as a face-saving gloss over what was functionally a firing dressed as consensus 00:13:44. Sherman adds a sharper edge: the press release contained no quote from Vaccarello himself, which in her reading signals that Kering, not he, authored the ending 00:13:39. Neither host claims certainty about who pulled the trigger first, but both agree the business logic drove it: Saint Laurent’s revenue sat at roughly a tenth of Chanel’s despite comparable cultural weight, an imbalance DeMeo apparently found intolerable 00:15:20.
The case for Vaccarello, and the case Kering wouldn’t accept
Sherman pushes back harder than Beaujais does on whether removing Vaccarello was the right call, noting that among Kering’s stable of houses, Saint Laurent was arguably the strongest performer, making it an odd place to start a shakeup when Bottega Veneta or Balenciaga seemed to need intervention more urgently 00:17:06. Her argument for Vaccarello’s success is granular: he took a designer once dismissed as a derivative Hedi Slimane copyist and built a recognizable signature out of radical restraint, a nearly bagless runway in an era when bags are the entire industry’s revenue engine 00:19:08. She credits him with reshaping how a generation dresses off the runway, citing his influence on stylists, campaign imagery, and even the vintage-lace aesthetic that filtered down into fast fashion 00:20:52. Beaujais agrees, adding that the show’s atmosphere, the loyalty of a small cohort of French cultural figures like Gainsbourg and Noé, and the sense of a one-man vision gave the house an almost artisanal identity that people inside the industry responded to emotionally 00:19:01.
But both hosts acknowledge the commercial logic cuts the other way. Sherman notes that despite ten years of creative control, there was strikingly little actual product in stores, no hit handbag, nothing that captured the kind of volume business Kering needed, and she wonders aloud whether Vaccarello simply disliked handbags as a category 00:23:17. Beaujais frames DeMeo’s calculation plainly: a brand this culturally significant has no excuse being a tenth the size of Chanel, and DeMeo is under pressure to wring growth out of every asset he has 00:15:31. Neither host fully resolves whether the trade was wise. Sherman is explicit that this is a bet whose payoff won’t be visible for at least two years 00:24:09, and Beaujais agrees it depends entirely on what Kamali does next, not on any verdict available today 00:17:38.
Choosing a CEO’s brand over a designer’s
A secondary thread, raised mostly by Sherman, is whether this was really a contest between Vaccarello and Saint Laurent’s CEO Cedric Charbit, with DeMeo ultimately siding with the executive over the designer 00:24:20. Beaujais is cautious about overstating this but concedes that once you strip away the official narrative, that is functionally what occurred, and he’s been told the two men were not on good terms 00:24:40. The implication he draws is uncomfortable for the industry’s traditional hierarchy: DeMeo may be signaling that commercial leadership, not creative vision, is now the senior partner in these relationships, a preference possibly reinforced by personal closeness between DeMeo and Charbit rather than a universal principle 00:25:21.
This connects to a broader claim both hosts return to repeatedly: that creative directors have lost structural power relative to a decade ago. Beaujais explicitly asks whether designers are now just secondary characters in a story run by executives, pointing out that the last time a single designer-name truly built a brand’s fortunes alone was Demna at Balenciaga, and that was roughly a decade back 00:31:59. Sherman’s answer is more nuanced than a flat yes or no: she argues creative directors can still matter enormously, but only if they understand their job is in service of the business rather than an end in itself, citing Michael Rider at Celine as a model of someone whose influence on shows, styling, and image stretched well beyond his technical design choices, versus designers who believed their own name was the point 00:34:18. Both agree Kering’s selection of Kamali, someone described as flexible, familiar with the house, and unlikely to resist commercial direction, fits this new model rather than the old one of empowering a singular visionary 00:27:48.
Why displaced star designers are striking out alone
Kim Jones’s announcement of his own brand, backed by an undisclosed non-LVMH investor focused on Asia, becomes the anchor for a wider observation: designers pushed out of major houses in their forties and fifties increasingly have nowhere obvious to land 00:38:38. Sherman’s diagnosis is structural. These are people in the middle of long careers who made enormous amounts of money running someone else’s house but don’t own equity in a brand the way earlier independent designers like Helmut Lang or Martin Margiela did when they stepped away, so starting over from scratch becomes close to the only option left 00:37:42. Beaujais adds a harsher industry truth: fashion punishes exits regardless of how they happened, since being let go from a major house quietly strips away some of a designer’s commercial appeal even if their reputation among critics stays intact, making other houses hesitant to hire someone else’s castoff over a younger, untarnished name 00:39:34.
They use Phoebe Philo as the counterexample that complicates the pessimism. Sherman notes her brand nearly collapsed before launch, scrapping three collections and burning through money, yet has since built a devoted following and real revenue growth, suggesting that in a market where giant conglomerate brands increasingly feel undifferentiated to consumers, small enthusiast-driven labels built around a singular creative relationship might be where genuine value now accrues 00:42:52. But both hosts flag this as an unusual case rather than a replicable formula: Philo left Celine voluntarily rather than being pushed out, and had an unusually personal, near-devotional relationship with her former customers that neither Vaccarello nor most other displaced directors clearly share 00:43:07. Beaujais is openly skeptical about whether Jones’s venture will achieve real scale, calling it instinct rather than analysis, while conceding the attempt itself reflects a moment when the consolidation era of luxury has left a cohort of talented people with nowhere left to go but out on their own 00:43:59.
The China problem reshaping every brand’s calculus
Sherman opens the episode by connecting all of these individual house dramas to a macro shift she covers in her newsletter: Chinese consumers, long the engine of luxury’s growth, have stopped caring about Western logo-driven brands altogether, turning instead toward domestic labels and toward outdoor and athletic names like Arc’teryx 00:00:37. She frames this as a decisive break from the prior decade’s playbook, where brands could rely on steady, almost automatic growth from an expanding Chinese middle class; that growth, she argues, simply no longer exists in the same form, and every brand now has to figure out organic demand rather than counting on a rising market to cover for mediocre product 00:00:56.
This is the backdrop against which she reads Kering’s urgency with Saint Laurent. If Chinese demand can no longer be assumed, a house sitting at a tenth of Chanel’s scale needs to find growth somewhere else, and that pressure plausibly explains why DeMeo was willing to risk unsettling a creatively successful but commercially restrained director. She is careful to note the picture isn’t uniformly bleak: Phoebe Philo is thriving, Prada under Miuccia and Raf Simons continues to perform strongly, and Peter Mulier’s move to Versace shows there’s still appetite for distinctive creative bets, meaning the old formula of simply producing safe, logo-heavy product no longer guarantees success even domestically 00:01:04. The throughline she draws, though never fully spelled out as a single thesis, is that luxury’s growth math has shifted from volume-driven expansion into markets with ready-made demand toward brands that can generate loyalty and cultural relevance on their own, which is precisely the tension playing out inside Kering’s management of Saint Laurent, Chloe, and the broader question of what creative directors are actually for.
Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.