Luxury Fashion's Creative Director Reshuffles Show Mixed Results After a Year

Creative directors alone can’t save struggling luxury brands—success requires supporting business decisions across the entire organization, from pricing to product strategy.

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

The short version

• 00:01:59 — The luxury market remains sluggish overall, but designers have more direct control over product, image, and storytelling where progress is visible.
• 00:08:45 — Chanel’s sales grew 16% in the first half of the year in a flat market, driven by a refreshed silhouette that feels more youthful and wearable than previous collections.
• 00:09:29 — Chanel’s leadership rejected the idea that the brand should only be about status symbols, instead positioning it as something that fits into customers’ everyday lives.
• 00:09:52 — Chanel emphasizes visible craft techniques that customers can actually see and feel, making them perceive they’re getting their money’s worth rather than just trusting the brand’s reputation.
• 00:11:00 — Mathieu Blasé’s reliable formula at Chanel risks becoming too formulaic, requiring constant investment in new ideas and shapes to avoid stagnation.
• 00:12:43 — Demna’s Gucci work felt like a breakthrough by treating the brand like therapy, interrogating who Gucci is and what’s working, rather than pushing every part of the archive simultaneously like his predecessor did.
• 00:15:29 — Demna’s breakthrough September show positioned Gucci as aspirational glamour for people wanting to be bolder than their situation requires, with clear styling examples from actual people.
• 00:17:42 — At Gucci, the vision has clarified but the actual product hasn’t caught up yet—bags and shoes still need to feel proprietary and justify their price point.
• 00:21:13 — Dior’s experimental asymmetrical silhouettes feel overcomplicated and hard for customers to project themselves into, unlike Chanel’s more digestible approach.
• 00:25:07 — Celine kept the brand’s core focus on French, Parisian style while loosening the ultra-precise vision of the previous designer, adding playfulness and design focus to appeal to younger customers.
• 00:26:47 — Loewe maintained its pillars of craft and cultural curation but shifted emphasis from innovation and intellect to sensory experience with bold colors and water imagery.
• 00:30:59 — Balenciaga’s misfire came from keeping the previous designer’s complex product mix and merchandising while completely changing the brand message to humanism, creating visual confusion.
• 00:35:58 — Saint Laurent’s departing designer built an ultra-focused vision rooted in 1970s and 80s aesthetic, stripping away everything kitschy to create timeless glamour.

In depth

Why ‘designer fixes everything’ is the wrong frame

Before getting into individual houses, Robert Williams pushes back on a premise that runs through a lot of fashion coverage: that a new creative director is a silver bullet. Asked directly whether he buys Marc Jacobs’ point that too much gets pinned on the creative role, Williams agrees but sharpens it — he argues creative direction isn’t one input among many, it is the whole puzzle for brands that live or die by product and the stories told about it 00:06:35. The catch is that creative vision only works if it’s matched by competent decisions elsewhere in the organization, especially at the scale these mega-brands now operate at 00:06:48.

This matters because it reframes the entire ‘is the reset working’ question the industry has been obsessing over for a year. Williams is explicit that any headline asking whether a designer revamp can single-handedly save a struggling house should always be answered no, because fashion’s current problems — brand fatigue, overpricing, global scale outpacing fashion’s inherently cyclical, self-renewing nature — can’t be solved by one person’s runway ideas alone 00:07:29, 00:07:37. That’s the lens he applies case by case: not just ‘is the collection good,’ but whether the business machinery around the clothes (pricing, merchandising, messaging consistency) is pulling in the same direction as the creative vision.

He also resists declaring a clean verdict on the reset wave as a whole. A few weeks before this conversation he says he would have said the picture was clarifying and trending positive; by the time of Milan and Paris fashion month, after a comparatively muted season, he’s pulled back to saying much is still unsettled — a designer change can make a brand or break it, and it’s not yet obvious which fate awaits several of the houses in play 00:05:30.

Chanel as the model — and its one real risk

Chanel gets the strongest endorsement, and Williams is careful to ground it in something harder than vibes: sales reportedly rose 16% in the first half of the year in a market that’s otherwise flat 00:08:45. He credits this to Mathieu Blazy’s refreshed, more youthful silhouette, but the more interesting argument is about positioning. Chanel’s fashion CEO, Bruno Pavlovsky, told Williams directly that Chanel shouldn’t be reduced to a status symbol 00:09:29 — a notable admission from inside a house whose business model has leaned heavily on exactly that for years. The pivot Blazy is executing is toward clothes people can actually wear across contexts, not just display.

The craft argument is where Williams gets most specific. He distinguishes Chanel’s current approach from the old model of trust-the-brand-name luxury: customers can now see and feel the craftsmanship in a garment rather than being asked to take it on faith that it’s fine cashmere from Scotland 00:09:52. That tactile, legible value proposition is, in his telling, part of why customers feel they’re getting their money’s worth again — a direct response to the overpricing fatigue he says is afflicting the whole luxury sector 00:06:59.

But Williams doesn’t let Chanel off the hook. Pressed on what could derail the momentum, he identifies formula as the risk: Blazy has found a reliable template for a strong Chanel collection, and reliability at the scale Chanel operates — many collections a year, distributed to huge numbers of boutiques — is necessary, but it edges toward staleness if the house doesn’t keep investing in new shapes and ideas 00:11:00. He finds the most recent spring-summer 2027 show reassuring on exactly this point: less narratively punchy than the subway show that preceded it, but with more complex tailoring and new silhouette ideas, which he reads as evidence the house is still pushing rather than coasting 00:11:53.

Gucci: a correct diagnosis, an unfinished prescription

The Gucci story is the most layered of the episode, and Williams explicitly separates two questions that often get collapsed: has Demna found the right vision, and has the product caught up to it? On the first, he’s enthusiastic. He borrows critic Tim Blanks’ framing that Demna has essentially been conducting ‘Gucci therapy’ — interrogating the brand, the archive, and the market rather than imposing a single aesthetic the way Alessandro Michele’s maximalist everything-at-once approach did 00:12:43. Williams argues that following Michele was uniquely hard precisely because Michele had already exhausted the obvious unexploited angles on the brand, throwing the full archive at the wall at once 00:13:37.

Demna’s path there went through missteps Williams doesn’t gloss over: a February debut that read to many, including Williams, as tasteless and ironic in ways Gucci’s audience probably wasn’t equipped to decode 00:14:19, followed by a Times Square spectacle that was more about scale than clarity. The September show is what Williams calls the breakthrough — not a single sharp fashion statement meant to be reinterpreted by the audience, but an explicit, almost didactic demonstration of how real people could style the clothes, positioning Gucci as a vehicle for everyday glamour and boldness 00:15:10, 00:15:29. He frames this as ‘inevitable but also obvious’ because it mirrors the same runway-to-real-life collapsing distance that’s working for Chanel — suggesting Demna succeeded less through sheer originality than through correctly reading what’s currently working industry-wide and executing it in a recognizably Gucci register 00:16:16.

Where he pulls back is the merchandise itself. Sales are still down about 2% 00:12:23, and Williams admits he hasn’t personally wanted to buy much, attributing this partly to taste but mostly to the sense that the actual bags and shoes haven’t caught up to the clarified vision 00:17:42. His sharpest critique is of the new flagship flap bag, which he sees as a competent but unoriginal answer to the maxi-flap trend Chanel is already winning with, rather than a proprietary statement unique to Gucci 00:18:32, 00:18:51. He’s also wary of price cuts being read as the fix — adjusting prices down may be necessary, he says, but it shouldn’t be the mechanism by which the product earns its appeal 00:18:04.

Dior’s unresolved bet, and the caution tale at Balenciaga

Dior gets the most hedged assessment of the three majors. Williams credits Jonathan Anderson with quickly modernizing the brand’s image — toning down what he calls its grandiose, overwrought messaging — largely through sharp campaign work with stylist Bruno and photographer David Sims 00:20:47. But he draws a sharp distinction between image, which Anderson controls expertly, and silhouette, which is where Dior’s commercial identity actually lives. The experimental, asymmetrical, high-low shapes on the runway have been hard for customers to project themselves into, in clear contrast to Chanel’s easier, more digestible wardrobe logic 00:21:13. Williams notes conflicting signals even within categories: women’s ready-to-wear and bags reportedly picking up at stockists, while menswear’s Americana-preppy direction is a trickier value proposition to land 00:21:52.

He situates Anderson’s challenge as structurally harder than it looks, because Dior had grown so large and so fast under Maria Grazia Chiuri that it risks the same post-boom correction Gucci went through after Michele 00:22:17. At Loewe, Anderson could lean entirely into concept because the house mainly needed to sell bags; at Dior he has to negotiate concept against full ready-to-wear commercial demands, a tension Williams says isn’t yet resolved 00:22:41. Tellingly, his own reaction to the most recent show is split from his editorial peers — he found it coherent and ‘refreshingly pretty,’ while colleagues felt it lacked the usual striking, shootable ideas 00:23:13. His verdict is genuinely suspended: promising, but not proven.

The cautionary counter-case is Balenciaga, which Williams treats as the season’s clearest misfire — and reportedly close to being undone entirely, with Pierpaolo Piccioli expected to depart within weeks of his very first collection 00:30:19. His diagnosis is structural rather than aesthetic: Balenciaga kept its old product mix of demi-couture, streetwear, and sneakers but swapped Demna’s cynical, tribal ‘radical coolness’ message for Piccioli’s humanist, individual-glorifying one, and the two didn’t cohere — he compares it to pineapple on pizza 00:32:37. Unlike Chanel, Gucci, or Dior, where houses chose which brand pillars to preserve and which to evolve, Balenciaga inverted the logic by changing the message while leaving the merchandising untouched, and Williams suggests that mismatch, more than any lack of time, is why the experiment appears to be ending so fast 00:30:59.

The quieter successes, and the open question at Saint Laurent

Williams treats Celine and Loewe as proof that succeeding a beloved, singular predecessor doesn’t require reinvention — it requires discernment about what to keep. At Celine, Michael Rider inherited Hedi Slimane’s flawless, highly controlled image-making, and rather than compete on that precision, Rider preserved the house’s French, Parisian, style-forward identity while loosening it — more variety, more play, a result Williams says is resonating with both younger and older customers 00:25:16. At Loewe, following Jonathan Anderson’s departure to Dior, new designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez (formerly of Proenza Schouler) kept the pillars of craft and cultural curation but shifted the register from intellectual novelty toward sensory experience — bold color, water and light imagery — while reviving an archival product, the Amazona bag, as a vehicle for the house’s leatherwork 00:26:47, 00:27:16. In both cases Williams’s argument is the same: the brands identified their core equity precisely enough to avoid discarding it, while still visibly changing something, which he implies is the opposite of Balenciaga’s error.

Sarah Burton’s Givenchy is framed as a genuinely different problem: not a successor to one dominant predecessor but the fourth creative director in roughly a decade, inheriting a brand whose identity had ping-ponged across several incompatible visions 00:28:25. Williams credits her with resisting the temptation to add yet another layer of reinvention, instead stripping the house back toward something close to a blank slate centered on precise silhouette and a direct dialogue with how women want to feel in clothes 00:29:25 — a deliberately narrow, low-noise strategy after years of whiplash.

Saint Laurent is the thread Williams leaves most open, and he flags it as the one he’s most eager to watch. Anthony Vaccarello, reportedly on his way out after a decade in the role, built an uncommonly disciplined vision around the house’s late-1970s and 1980s glamour, deliberately swimming against an industry current that keeps collapsing the gap between runway and streetwear — Vaccarello, by Williams’s account, never put a sneaker on a womenswear runway 00:36:39. That clarity is precisely what makes a successor’s job risky: the opportunity is to explore Saint Laurent’s broader history, including Yves Saint Laurent’s own role pioneering ready-to-wear and everyday liberation dressing, but doing so means loosening a brand identity that’s become famous for its narrowness and purism, and Williams is explicit that nobody yet knows whether that expanded story can resonate without diluting what made the house distinctive in the first place 00:37:47.

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