Fashion Week Roundup: Donatella at Revolve, Dario at Armani, and Christopher Kane's Mulberry Moment

Christopher Kane’s return to design at Mulberry has everyone excited, but the collection’s geometric harshness and the broader question of whether a brand can succeed on house codes alone reveals deeper issues about vision in contemporary fashion.

Summary of Scarabelli’s New Dress. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:06:08 — Donatella Versace is launching a line with Revolve, which makes strategic sense given the platform’s success at scaling designer brands and its understanding of the customer base through female executives.
• 00:16:02 — Dario Galliano moving to Emporio Armani is significant because he’ll need to navigate the brand’s locked-in house codes and infrastructure challenges while managing the business’s attempted sale.
• 00:17:41 — Versace’s infrastructure was chaotic under previous ownership, but Dario accomplished remarkable results despite limited resources, and Armani will present similar operational hurdles with a very different cultural environment.
• 00:20:43 — The Burberry show under Daniel Lee impressed with strong styling and fun patterns that felt like practical London dressing, showing his Prada and Miu Miu influence translated into something fresh.
• 00:25:11 — Christopher Kane’s Mulberry collection was skillfully executed but felt like a single idea that could have been a lookbook, with aggressive 90-degree angles on details that made it visually uncomfortable despite wearability.
• 00:29:51 — Kane references Helmut Lang from the 1990s and uses archival materials from his previous work, showing he has a point of view but raising questions about whether that’s enough without a cohesive brand narrative.
• 00:37:09 — Simone Rocha delivered the strongest collection of the season because she has infrastructure inherited from her family business, allowing her to maintain creative control without constant financial stress.
• 01:03:04 — The CFDA resignation drama revealed deeper issues about the organization’s governance, with defenders citing his fundraising work while ignoring behavioral standards that would be unacceptable in any professional context.
• 01:05:28 — The fashion industry may benefit from having fewer brands rather than democratically accepting everyone with money, since sustainable creative vision requires more than financial entry into the system.

In depth

Why Donatella at Revolve is a smarter bet than it looks

Sherman frames the Donatella Versace-Revolve tie-up not as a curiosity but as a calculated move by a platform that has quietly built real designer infrastructure 00:06:08. She points out that Revolve’s co-founders, Michael Mente and Michael Karanikolas, have been running the company since roughly 2010 and have already absorbed other name talent, including buying out Dion Lee’s label outright while also launching a separate venture with him 00:07:18. The pattern, in her telling, is that Revolve isn’t just licensing a famous name for a capsule; it’s building semi-permanent business relationships with designers who need scale.

What makes the fit work, she argues, is less about Donatella’s name recognition and more about who sits underneath the two male founders. Revolve has stacked itself with senior women, a chief brand officer and a chief merchandising officer, who are also, crucially, the company’s actual customer demographic 00:09:04. That’s presented as the real strategic asset: retail savvy paired with lived understanding of who buys the clothes, which is different from a traditional licensing shop that just extracts a designer’s name.

Sherman does flag the plainer commercial reality underneath the glamour. Revolve’s stock is up only marginally on the day the deal broke, and the company is still down roughly 30% year-to-date and far more over five years, evidence that the public market remains skeptical of multi-brand retail generally regardless of headline partnerships 00:10:45. For Donatella specifically, though, the appeal isn’t share price, it’s autonomy. Coming off years of being managed within Capri’s ownership structure, a deal like this gives her more creative control than a conventional licensing arrangement would, since Revolve will build out the infrastructure to let the line scale without her having to run a company herself 00:11:53.

Dario at Armani: talent versus a locked house

The move of Dario Galliano to Emporio Armani is treated as the week’s most consequential appointment, and both hosts are optimistic but cautious for different reasons. Scarabelli’s read is that Galliano is closer to a master stylist than a traditional designer, someone who reads what a wardrobe wants to be and edits it rather than reinventing it, which is exactly the skill a brand with rigid, decades-old house codes needs 00:16:18. Her doubt isn’t about his taste; it’s about whether that instinct can travel beyond the runway into stores, merchandising, and show format, the parts of a brand that determine whether a creative reset is felt by the customer rather than just critics 00:17:10.

Sherman pushes the comparison further by revisiting what Galliano actually inherited at Versace: a genuinely chaotic operational structure under prior ownership that has only recently been rationalized by the new corporate owner, and yet he still produced results with a strong in-house atelier behind him 00:17:41. Armani, she argues, is a different kind of hard. The infrastructure problems may be comparable, but the culture is not: Galliano spent his formative years at Prada and Miu Miu, and Armani is described as an entirely different Italian fashion world, more insular, more procedural 00:18:42. Sherman adds a wrinkle from her own reporting: Armani’s accessories business had been run as a licensing operation out of Singapore until fairly recently, meaning Galliano isn’t just inheriting a house, he’s inheriting a business that’s still being reassembled internally even as it’s for sale 00:19:20.

That sale process hangs over everything. Sherman’s sense is that the wider Italian fashion establishment has a collective interest in Armani succeeding commercially, not just creatively, which she believes will produce behind-the-scenes maneuvering to protect the brand’s future regardless of how the ownership stake plays out 00:19:59. As a kind of proof of concept for the Galliano effect, both point to Burberry’s Daniel Lee show, whose strength they attribute partly to the same Prada-and-Miu-Miu lineage now heading to Armani 00:20:43.

Christopher Kane’s Mulberry: skill without a story

Kane’s Mulberry debut produces the most divided reaction of the episode, and both hosts land on nearly the same paradox: it’s clearly good work by a clearly talented designer, and yet it doesn’t fully cohere. Scarabelli says she’d wear much of it and respects that Kane resisted overloading the collection with ideas, but admits the restraint made it feel more like a lookbook built around a single concept than a full statement 00:25:09. Her deeper worry is about desire: with so much goodwill already banked in Kane’s favor before the show even happened, she questions whether the collection would generate real commercial heat if stripped of that sentimental context, especially given her own uncertainty about the bags, the category that actually needs to sell 00:25:44.

Sherman’s discomfort is more specific and physical. She keeps returning to a detail: many of the scalloped and cut-out elements were rendered in hard 90-degree angles rather than softer curves, which she found genuinely unsettling to look at even while acknowledging the pieces would read as cool and wearable on a body 00:28:56. She traces some of this to Kane referencing his own archive, including a fabric from his spring 2012 collection, and to what read as clear homages to 1990s Helmut Lang, evidence of a strong point of view rather than an absence of one 00:29:51. Her critique isn’t that Kane lacks ideas; it’s that there were almost too many strong ideas competing with too much leather, when he had the freedom to build dresses from lighter materials instead 00:30:16.

Both agree the deeper issue is what a heritage handbag brand’s codes are worth aesthetically. Sherman notes a specific reference to a 1975 Mulberry collection worked into an embroidered look that she thought successfully cut through the harshness elsewhere, suggesting Kane can honor house history without being flattened by it 00:33:03. But the throughline both land on is that this reads as very much Kane’s own aesthetic project, executed with real conviction and a strong relationship with Mulberry’s CEO, even if the ultimate test, whether the bags actually sell, isn’t really his problem to solve alone 00:35:22.

The ‘class of’ problem: why so many recent hires haven’t worked

McQueen’s collection becomes the jumping-off point for a broader argument about how fashion houses have been staffing themselves. Scarabelli’s diagnosis is blunt: the clothes are competently made by a good atelier, but there’s no vision and no story, and she connects this directly to hearing, off the record, from more experienced women designers who were passed over for the job in favor of someone she considers the wrong pick 00:38:46. Sherman agrees and widens the frame to Kering’s new group CEO, Luca DeMeo, who inherited a slate of designer appointments made before he arrived and is now left managing the fallout of decisions she characterizes as mostly wrong: Anthony Vaccarello’s exit at Saint Laurent was a correct call whose time simply ran out, Demna is likely to succeed at Gucci, and Louise Trotter’s fate at Bottega Veneta depends on whether customers respond to her direction 00:40:08.

The McQueen hire specifically gets framed as symptomatic of an industry-wide pattern rather than an isolated misjudgment. Sherman points out the new designer had been working at Uniqlo before a brief stint with JW Anderson, and argues it was foreseeable that he wouldn’t be equipped for a house of McQueen’s scale, a point she says applies to much of what she calls the ‘class of’ hires from the early 2010s, where by her rough count only a handful were clearly right, a few showed promise but got held back, and several were simply wrong 00:43:22. Notably, she doesn’t let the designer off the hook entirely either, since he did choose to take the job, even as she stresses the more structural failure sits with executives making short-sighted appointments during a period of mass turnover 00:42:51.

The unresolved question both keep circling is what a brand like McQueen is actually supposed to be replicating: the emotional register of rebellion and avant-garde spectacle Lee McQueen himself embodied, or the literal house codes, skulls, tailoring, silhouette, that could in theory be handed to a completely different kind of talent. Scarabelli name-checks the underground design collective Fecal Matter as proof that people capable of channeling that spirit already exist and are visible online, which makes the miss feel more like a failure of imagination than a lack of options 00:44:38. Sherman’s own prescription is oddly conservative: anchor the brand in salable tailored suits and disciplined merchandising of the codes, then layer a genuinely inventive designer on top, rather than betting the whole house on one unproven hire 00:45:48.

A scandal, a resignation, and what it says about fashion’s institutions

The Stephen Kolb story functions less as gossip than as a case study in institutional dysfunction, and Sherman is careful to explain why his resignation took as long as it did. Her account is that the CFDA is structurally odd: a trade organization that charges member designers on a sliding scale while functioning largely as a fundraising and complaint-fielding body, which bred a certain institutional loyalty toward Kolb regardless of his conduct, since he’d put in the unglamorous work of managing donor relationships and constant member grievances for years 01:03:11. That loyalty, plus what she calls fashion’s general instinct to forgive and resist change, meant that even physical misconduct toward a protester didn’t automatically end his tenure, board members reportedly wanted him to stay through it 01:03:04.

Both hosts express genuine disbelief at the specifics rather than treating it as ordinary industry scandal, singling out a moment where Kolb was recorded behaving as if nothing had happened immediately after the incident, and noting that it happened not once but twice, which is what tips it from bad judgment into something closer to a Will Smith Oscars-slap-level cultural moment, minus the same intense media context 01:07:32. Sherman’s blunter framing is simply that in almost any other professional or personal setting, physical assault would end someone’s job immediately, and it says something specific about fashion’s tolerance for bad behavior that this became a genuine debate 01:04:38.

The conversation broadens into a critique of what the CFDA has become financially, increasingly dependent on big sponsors like H&M, which Sherman connects to reporting suggesting the organization’s desperation to keep those relationships intact may have shaped how leadership handled the crisis 01:05:01. That, in turn, feeds a larger argument both hosts make about American fashion’s structural openness: unlike some other national fashion systems that gatekeep more tightly, the U.S. trade apparatus tends to let in anyone with money, which Sherman suggests may be diluting the industry with more brands than it can sustain rather than fostering genuinely differentiated talent 01:05:28. The unresolved test, in her view, comes in November, when the CFDA Awards will show whether the organization’s next leadership can actually recalibrate around talent and accountability rather than sponsor comfort 01:06:06.

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.