How Luxury Fashion's Creative Director Reshuffles Are Reshaping Brands

Chanel’s new creative director has cracked the code by combining accessible silhouettes with visible craftsmanship, proving that creative vision alone cannot save a brand without smart moves across the entire organization.

Summary of The Verdict on Luxury Fashion’s Designer Reset. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:00:49 — Chanel is experiencing measurable success from its creative director change, with sales reportedly up 16 percent in the first half of the year in a largely flat luxury market.
• 00:07:51 — Mathieu Blasie refreshed Chanel’s image by making fashion more wearable and youthful rather than purely institutional, moving away from status-symbol positioning toward pieces that fit naturally into customers’ daily lives.
• 00:08:30 — Blasie paired accessible silhouettes with visible, touchable craft techniques that make the quality tangible rather than relying on brand prestige alone.
• 00:13:33 — Demna’s September show for Gucci felt like a breakthrough by showing how real people could style the brand’s pieces rather than leaving interpretation to the audience, similar to Chanel’s successful approach.
• 00:16:14 — Despite Demna’s compelling vision for Gucci, the actual product—particularly bags and shoes—has not yet caught up with the conceptual direction.
• 00:18:15 — Jonathan Anderson toned down Dior’s grandiose image quickly through campaigns but struggles with complicated runway pieces that are harder for customers to envision wearing.
• 00:22:46 — Celine succeeded by keeping what worked under Hedi Slimane—French Parisian style focus—while adding looseness and playfulness that feels more contemporary.
• 00:28:40 — Balenciaga’s failed transition with Pierpaolo Piccioli happened because the brand kept Demna’s diverse product mix but abandoned his radical coolness message, creating a mismatch between products and brand values.
• 00:33:34 — Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello built the brand on a crystal-clear purist vision of glamorous evening wear, and his successor will face the difficult challenge of expanding that identity without diluting what made it successful.

In depth

Why Chanel is the exception, not just a success

Robert Williams is careful not to overclaim, but the Chanel case is the one place where he’s willing to say the creative reset has produced hard proof: reported sales up 16 percent in the first half of the year against a flat luxury market 00:00:49. His explanation is less about Mathieu Blasie’s talent in the abstract and more about a specific strategic diagnosis the brand made before he ever showed a collection. Chanel, Williams argues, looked clearly at what wasn’t working and built a 360-degree plan around it, then gave it time 00:06:54. The fix wasn’t just aesthetic — it was a repositioning away from Chanel as pure status object. He quotes fashion-division CEO Bruno Pavlovsky telling him directly that Chanel can’t only be about status symbols 00:08:09, which Williams reads as the key to Blasie’s whole approach: an easier, more youthful wardrobe of pieces that slot into ordinary life rather than occasions requiring an “official” Chanel look 00:07:51.

The second pillar, Williams says, is tangibility. Blasie paired that accessible silhouette with craft techniques customers can see and feel, so buyers aren’t simply trusting a salesperson’s word about rare cashmere — they can sense where the value went 00:08:30. That combination, he argues, is why people feel like they’re getting their money’s worth in a way they weren’t a year or two ago 00:08:54.

But Williams resists declaring victory outright. He flags a real risk: Blasie has found a reliable formula, and reliability at Chanel’s operating scale — this many shows, this many boutiques — breeds its own danger of becoming formulaic 00:09:29. The spring-summer 2027 show didn’t hit the same emotional, narrative high as the New York subway show that first signaled the turnaround; the storytelling was less memorable even as the garments themselves got more technically interesting, with new shapes and tailoring ideas 00:10:17. Williams treats that as a genuinely open question rather than a settled one — proof the system works, but no guarantee the inventiveness keeps pace with the scale.

Gucci’s breakthrough idea versus its unfinished product

The Gucci story, as Williams tells it, is really about the impossibility of following Alessandro Michele. Michele’s era was maximalist — he threw the brand’s whole archive at the wall at once, from sneakers to demi-couture, so there was no obvious unmined territory left for a successor to claim 00:12:08. Demna’s solution wasn’t to pick one untouched corner of Gucci but to work through multiple registers sequentially over a year: a fashion film riffing on archive-driven characters, then a polarizing February runway debut that leaned hard into an ironic, slightly “skanky” Miami Vice aesthetic that Williams says much of the audience didn’t fully parse 00:12:52, then a Times Square spectacle with Paris Hilton and Tom Brady as pure scale-and-spectacle statement 00:13:19.

What made the September show different, in Williams’s account, is that it finally translated Demna’s real skill — documenting how actual people dress and idealize themselves — into a legible Gucci statement, something he’d done for years at Balenciaga but hadn’t obviously known how to port into an Italian house 00:13:33. Showing the clothes styled on real bodies in a store setting collapsed the distance between runway and real life, which Williams explicitly ties to the same mechanism driving Chanel’s success 00:14:55. That’s also why he calls it “inevitable”: not a unique insight so much as the industry-wide move everyone is chasing right now, executed in a distinctly Demna register 00:14:45.

Yet Williams is candid that the idea has outrun the object. He admits he personally didn’t want to buy much, and attributes that partly to personal taste but mostly to the sense that the product hasn’t caught up to the vision 00:16:14. His test case is the bags — Gucci’s big flat bag reads as an obvious riff on the maxi-flap shape currently working for Chanel, competent but not proprietary, not the declarative statement he thinks the brand needs 00:17:13. Lower prices have made the gap easier to clear, but Williams is uneasy about that becoming the selling point rather than genuine desirability 00:16:37 — a brand shouldn’t want people buying in because it’s cheaper, only because it’s good.

Dior’s unresolved tension between concept and wearability

Jonathan Anderson’s Dior gets credit, in Williams’s telling, for solving the easiest problem fast: image. Within months he and his collaborators — stylist Bruno, photographer David Sims — stripped out the grandiosity and “fusty,” overly formal romance that had calcified around the house, refreshing the campaign imagery almost immediately 00:18:15. That’s squarely in Anderson’s wheelhouse; Williams calls him an exceptional art and image director.

The harder problem is silhouette, because Dior’s business, unlike a purely image-driven label, is rooted in clothes people actually buy and wear. Williams describes a run of asymmetrical, high-low, ruffled looks that felt overcomplicated and hard for customers to project themselves into — markedly less “easy” than what Chanel is doing right now 00:18:51. He frames this as a structural bet: Anderson may be gambling that audiences want something more directional and challenging rather than something immediately wearable, and the early signals are mixed rather than conclusive — ready-to-wear and bags reportedly picking up with stockists, menswear’s Americana-preppy proposition still struggling to find its value argument 00:19:21.

Williams sees something else going on underneath this, though: a structural tension Anderson never had to manage at Loewe, where he could run concept-heavy, intellectually showy runway collections because the brand’s actual commercial engine was simply selling bags 00:20:01. At Dior, concept and commerce have to live in the same collection, and Williams thought the most recent show handled that tension better than before — more pared back, more coherent, benefiting from repetition of ideas introduced over the previous year so a recognizable “his Dior” universe is starting to cohere 00:20:22. Tellingly, he reports a split reaction among his own peers: some found it simply pretty rather than exciting, lacking the striking, editorial-friendly images they expect from an Anderson show, but also not pure, easy clothing either 00:20:45. Williams’s own verdict is cautiously optimistic — promising, but still in-between, still unresolved 00:21:23.

When succession plans work by subtraction, not disruption

Williams draws a sharp contrast between brands that tried to reinvent themselves and ones that succeeded by figuring out precisely what to preserve. Celine and Loewe both inherited houses whose outgoing designers — Hedi Slimane and Anderson himself — had become almost synonymous with the brand’s identity, which Williams frames as a harder kind of succession than reviving a dormant house. At Celine, Michael Rider kept the core Parisian, style-driven identity Slimane had built but deliberately loosened it: more variety, more play, a shift away from Slimane’s flawless, ultra-precise image-making toward something that reads to Williams as both more Gen Z-friendly and, surprisingly, appealing to older customers too 00:22:46. He also notes Rider stripped out the heavy vintage référence that had been part of Slimane’s codes, and pushed more attention toward design detail rather than pure curation 00:23:19.

At Loewe, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez faced an analogous task — following Anderson’s intellectual, craft-and-culture-driven identity — and Williams says they kept those brand pillars but shifted emphasis from cerebral novelty toward the sensory and bodily: saturated color, water-and-ice imagery, a revived Amazona bag as a showcase for the house’s leather and tannery work 00:24:40. The most recent collection was less conceptually punchy than Loewe-under-Anderson was known for, but Williams sees it as commercially sound — lots of price points, real attention paid to shoes and eyewear and jackets, the kind of groundwork that sustains momentum even without a show-stopping concept 00:25:20.

Givenchy, by contrast, is Williams’s example of succession without an obvious identity to protect. Sarah Burton inherited a brand that had cycled through four creative directors in a decade, each adding a contradictory layer — Tisci’s glory days, Waight Keller’s classic Parisian elegance, Matthew Williams’s hard-edged streetwear pivot — leaving what Williams calls real confusion in the brand’s image 00:26:16. Her approach, he says, was essentially to treat that confusion as license: wipe the slate clean and rebuild around what she’s demonstrably good at — precise, clean silhouette rooted in a direct relationship to women’s bodies 00:27:03. It’s a different kind of bet than Chanel’s or Celine’s, because there’s no strong prior identity to preserve by subtraction; there’s only Burton’s own authorial clarity to impose on a brand that had none.

The cautionary cases: Balenciaga’s mismatch and the risk ahead at Saint Laurent

If Chanel is Williams’s proof that a reset can work, Balenciaga under Pierpaolo Piccioli is his clearest case of one going wrong — and multiple reports now suggest the house could part ways with him within weeks, barely a year after his debut 00:27:57. Williams’s diagnosis is specific: the brands succeeding right now succeeded by identifying which elements of brand identity to keep stable (the underlying values, the reason people shop there) and which to disrupt. At Balenciaga, he argues, that logic ran backward 00:28:19. The house kept Demna’s entire product architecture — demi-couture sculptural pieces, streetwear, athletic wear, sneakers — but swapped out the message underneath it, replacing Demna’s cynical, tribal, radically cool worldview with Piccioli’s humanist, individual-glorifying sensibility 00:28:58.

The result, in Williams’s account, is incoherence: merchandise that had derived its appeal from Demna’s authorial point of view suddenly detached from that point of view, worn by a different visual philosophy that doesn’t fit it 00:29:28. His image for this — clothes and message clashing like an unwanted flavor combination — captures his skepticism that the brand ever committed fully enough to Piccioli’s vision to let it stand on its own 00:30:09. He floats a genuine counterfactual: a complete, uncompromising Piccioli Balenciaga might have been more interesting to watch than this halfway transitional version, even if its commercial prospects were uncertain 00:31:44. That’s a notably open-ended hedge — Williams isn’t sure the full pivot would have worked either, only that the attempted middle path demonstrably didn’t.

The forward-looking risk case is Saint Laurent, where Anthony Vaccarello’s decade-long, laser-focused purist vision — glamorous, eveningwear-centric, deliberately refusing bags or sneakers on the runway — is reportedly ending 00:33:10. Williams frames the succession challenge there as almost the opposite of Balenciaga’s problem: Vaccarello leaves behind a brand with an unusually clear, consistent identity, built by relentlessly mining Saint Laurent’s late-’70s/’80s archive and stripping away anything kitschy 00:33:39. The opportunity, he says, lies in the breadth of Yves Saint Laurent’s own history — as a pioneer of ready-to-wear, of womenswear tuxedos, of fashion colliding with everyday life — material a successor could use to build a more varied, lifestyle-oriented identity 00:34:53. But the explicit danger, which Williams flags without resolving, is that any move toward variety risks diluting the very crystalline purity that made Vaccarello’s Saint Laurent legible and desirable in the first place — building on the identity without upsetting it is, in his words, going to be genuinely risky as well as the most interesting succession story in fashion to watch 00:35:20.

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