The Creative Director Is Dead, Long Live the Creative Director

Yesterday, FashionUnited reported that creative director Seán McGirr was leaving Alexander McQueen while his counterpart Veronica Leoni was leaving Calvin Klein.¹ The exits follow Anthony Vaccarello’s departure from Saint Laurent last week, and the fashion-industry news platform noted that »fashion’s exit season has arrived«.

»The creative director has become a peculiar kind of institutional asset: the person expected on the one hand to make a fashion house distinctive, on the other to be replaceable without destroying that distinction in the process«

The coincidence seems remarkable, and marks a sharp break with fashion’s tradition of creative longevity. Yves Saint Laurent led his eponymous house for four decades.² Valentino Garavani spent nearly half a century building his.³ Karl Lagerfeld remained at Chanel for 36 years, until his death in 2019.⁴ The shelf life of today’s creative leaders in fashion, meanwhile, has been estimated at around five years.⁵ The creative director has become a peculiar kind of institutional asset: the person expected on the one hand to make a fashion house distinctive, on the other to be replaceable without destroying that distinction in the process.

A fashion house isn’t just a name. Its heritage includes silhouettes, materials, colours, techniques, references, an archive, a clientele, and a set of expectations about what its next collection should be. The creative director’s job is to keep this inheritance alive, evolving, and relevant. Too much continuity becomes repetition; too much change threatens recognition. It’s a bit like renovating a building that must remain occupied throughout the work.

Architecture has long debated what such fidelity entails. In the mid-19th century, the English architectural theorist John Ruskin regarded the marks of age and history as integral to a building, and restoration that replaced them with conjecture as a form of falsification.⁶ His contemporary, the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, took the opposite position: restoration could recover a building’s underlying idea, even if the building had never realised it.⁷ The first approach risks preserving a work until it loses its life; the second, improving it into something it never was.

A creative director in fashion faces a version of this dilemma with every collection. Is the archive a constraint to be respected, or a set of materials from which to construct a new interpretation? Who decides when reinterpretation becomes betrayal? The answer can’t just be that the designer gets to choose, because the house must outlast the designer. But it also can’t be to just go back to the archive, because an archive can’t decide what to do next.

In effect, the house has acquired a second body: an identity that persists beyond any one person who occupies it. The old royal proclamation has found a new application: the creative director is dead, long live the creative director.

But maybe we’re looking at this backwards. The rapid turnover of creative directors is often treated as evidence of an industry in crisis, impatient with talent and incapable of sustaining a vision. Sometimes, that’s probably true. But the instability might also express something fundamental about fashion itself.

In Fashion: A Philosophy, the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen describes fashion as a system built around the tension between belonging and distinction.⁸ We use shared signs to express our individuality: we want to belong, but we also want to stand apart. The difficulty is that, as a look spreads, it loses some of its power to distinguish us. What was distinctive becomes familiar; what was new becomes ordinary. Which is why fashion must keep producing difference, and then keep replacing that difference.

The same mechanism operates at the level of the fashion house. A successful creative director makes it feel both familiar and newly discovered. But what makes a house recognisable can also make it predictable. Eventually, that predictability becomes a problem. The person who made the house relevant may now be the person it needs to replace.

An industry that sells perpetual renewal has begun to apply that logic to the people designing its collections. Creative directors are no longer merely the agents of change. They have become subject to the very cycle they are hired to sustain.

So where does a fashion house’s identity actually reside? In its archive, its customers, its commercial machinery, its name, or the succession of people who have interpreted it? Perhaps it resides in the productive tension between them. The house must remain itself, but nobody gets to decide alone what that means. Not even the person whose job it is to make that decision.

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