The Tamesis
In the months following Spring/Summer 2026, we’ve seen major brands welcome a slew of new hires to their communications, marketing and design departments. Our new series, Fashion’s Real Reset Starts Now, looks at all of these changes and how they will redefine the fashion industry in the coming years.
2025 marks a major creative reset, with more than a dozen fashion houses welcoming new creative directors, most of them millennials with a collaborative spirit. Their appointments carry great expectations.
As the industry emerges from a two-year slowdown, designers are seen more than ever as key drivers of brand transformation. “Maintaining the artistic direction of a brand – or choosing to change it – is one of the most important governance issues for a CEO, board of directors or shareholders,” said Floriane de Saint Pierre, founder of large luxury brand consultancy Floriane de Saint Pierre & Associés, whose expertise includes organizational and talent strategy and artistic director headhunting.
Determining the scope of the role is also an important governance decision for the CEO or business owner. “You need to fully understand the stakes of social media communications, including the entire celebrity component. You need to know what will sell, how to sell it, and be able to work effectively with the commercial, merchandising, marketing and image teams, and have a vision for set design, retail and customer experience. You also have to navigate relationships with the CEO and executive committee,” says Alice Bouleau, founder of The Arrow, an agency that represents designers including Hillary of Collina Strada Taymour, Serge Rufi and Louis-Gabriel Noone.
She continues: “Although most creative directors come from fairly traditional design backgrounds, the role becomes almost that of a managing director. However, even with such a broad scope, in larger organizations your level of autonomy is more limited due to the multitude of stakeholders.”
As the era of “star designers” ends, creative directors are also changing their roles. Many brands are starting to feel overly reliant on individual designers, prompting the pendulum to swing in the other direction: now the house comes first. Recent bookings and customer demand also indicate that the product is still king. “You can be a great marketer, but at the end of the rainbow, there has to be a great product,” said Siddhartha Shukla, deputy CEO of Lanvin. “For designers, it’s important to be able to create products of great quality and meaningful design.
But creatives can’t just hunker down on product—in a celebrity-driven era, it’s important that they leverage existing relationships and forge new ones with culturally influential actors, directors, musicians, and athletes while keeping their own public faces in the spotlight.
“Today, the industry is looking for designers who feel more approachable, rather than the distant superstars of the past,” says Bouleau.
They are asked to perform a balancing act: pursue celebrity without displacing the brand, dabble in everything but focus on product, be highly innovative and creative but enjoy less autonomy; and if there are no results, they are held accountable. Only exceptionally smart, flexible, and talented people can overcome these conflicting expectations.
prudence and integrity
Macroeconomic challenges and geopolitical uncertainty have led to a reality check for the fashion industry. Whether times and markets have changed, or they’ve seen some of their predecessors’ wings burnt and become a cautionary tale, designers need to appear more down to earth—even when posting to millions of followers.
