When the Isabel Marant show comes to a close tomorrow night, there’s one person you won’t be seeing on the runway: Isabel Marant herself. For the first time in 30 years, ever since Marant founded her label in 1995, she won’t be taking a bow—though she will be backstage, supporting and cheering on the team. Perhaps most of all, she will be rooting for the person who will be stepping onto the runway from the wings: Kim Bekker, now the label’s creative director and Marant’s foil, mirror, and sparring partner for the past four years (though her work for the brand goes back much longer). The Isabel Marant Spring 2026 show is, in other words, a moment of succession. The only sensible question to ask, then, is: Why now?
Which is why Marant and Bekker are on a Zoom call one recent morning to chat about the passing of the baton. (Or, given this is Isabel Marant that we’re talking about, the passing of the baton in the form of a fabulous, pointy, triangle-heeled, madly fringed boot.) “I’ve been working with Kim for a while,” Marant tells me, “and I always knew that I didn’t want to live my whole life to the crazy rhythm of fashion; that at a certain point I’d want to step back, still have some overview in what’s going on, but not the role I have now. Kim took over the design completely last season, yet I was still on the catwalk [at the end of the show], pushing her forward to say, ‘This is her work.’ But now I won’t come out.”
In that characteristically generous way of Marant’s, she has wanted Bekker there with her at the end of a show, sharing the applause and the limelight, for a few seasons now—an acknowledgement of all of her hard work for the brand. In fact, last season, when I went to preview the Isabel Marant collection for my runway review and was about to ask Marant about it, she simply laughed and told me to speak to Bekker instead, as she (Marant) had been on a retreat in India for quite a while, and it was really Bekker’s collection to speak about.
Still, after so many years, I say to Marant, this stepping back must be unimaginably emotional—even if you’re happily and contentedly working behind the scenes. “It’s not to say that the switch wasn’t difficult, because I love fashion, I love my company, and I am not retiring,” Marant says, letting out one of those throaty laughs of hers which always seems like it comes from deep within her. “Not being involved in the day-to-day creation was a bit frightening for me, having worked for so much of my life,” she continues, “and it’s not like when you have your hands full with work you can say, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ Yet it was time. Last winter, we were all kind of burnt out, and that was the moment I said to myself, ‘OK, I need to have a rest, and for another energy to take the brand onwards.”
This is one of the reasons I count myself as rather a Marant fan. It’s not just the free-spirited vibe of her and her work, or the riotous, up-for-it shows she throws to present it, or that she created a female-led, female-centric, female-focused label. It’s because there’s a kind of sincere, unflinching honesty about who she is and what she does. Let other designers commune with the clothes on some intellectual plane—Marant is too busy thinking about whether you can live your best life in what she makes. And Bekker, for her part, gets the importance of that.
“I am very honored that Isabel called me to work with her, and that she believes in me as this not-French person doing this fucking amazing Parisian brand,” Bekker says, laughing. “It’s a little scary to follow in the footsteps of someone who incarnates this brand from head to toe, and because of that, what we create is really authentic. With Isabel, what you see is what you get: When we work, it’s we love it, we don’t love it, and she has given me the tools to create that. Whenever I’m working, it’s Isabel who’s in my head. I want our customers to feel that this is still Isabel Marant—it’s why it was important for this change to not be too much of an event, because in the end it is about the brand, not the face behind it.” (That’s something Marant had said, too: “Kim and I prepared for it together—we don’t want this to be a huge deal, because it is something that is entirely natural and organic.”)
Of course, they’re both right: It’s been done without a lot of fanfare or drum-rolling, which seems very Marant: Just do it and get on with it because, well, the brand is still going to rock onwards. At the same time, it is a pretty big deal, because how often do we see a founder of her or his own label step back to make way for new artistic leadership while still taking a behind-the-scenes role? Dries Van Noten is the most recent example who springs to mind, but it’s rare. And in a season of change after change after change with so many of the big marquee names, this one hits a little differently: This isn’t the revolving door of one creative director handing over to another at a conglomerate-owned house, but someone who built her own label from the ground up, for four decades.
“I’ve known for the last ten years that it would happen,” Marant, who’s 58, says, “and I would tell Kim that. I’ve always thought that you belong to your era, and even though I’m not old, I have a different energy from all the great young women around me. I still understand the world that I am in, but there has been a real shift that I can’t exactly put into words, but… I always love the same things. It’s good for us to have a different perspective.”
Marant and Bekker met roughly twenty years ago. It was 2006, and Bekker, who hails from Nistelrode, a small village in the south of Holland, applied for a job with Marant, but her French wasn’t, she says, good enough, though she recalls she and Marant “had a good conversation, and she liked my work.” Two years later, after she had gone to work with Phoebe Philo at Chloe, Bekker reached out again (“Fuck it, I thought, just go for it” was how she put it), and one day picked up the phone to find Marant at the end of the line. By now, Bekker’s French had improved, so they began to chat.
Bekker already had a job offer elsewhere, but on that very call Marant offered her a short term contract starting that fall. When Bekker first visited the Marant studios in July just to check in before the traditional French vacances, she remembers that Marant appeared from the depths of the brand’s vintage archive that lives in the basement “with two plaits in her hair and wearing Birkenstocks and with a cigarette in her mouth.” She told Bekker, “I have a good feeling about this—see you after the holidays.” Marant recalls that Bekker impressed her because, “she wasn’t this shy little girl; she was very clear, very direct—and we liked the same things.” Aside for a couple of years from 2019 to 2021, when she decamped to Saint Laurent, Bekker has been at Marant ever since.
When she started, Bekker remembers, she’d be in fittings, listening to Marant’s abbreviated comments and committing them to memory, so she could later have her French boyfriend explain them. (“I’d go home at night and ask him,” Bekker recalls, “‘What does that word mean? And what does she mean when she says that?’”) Ironically, given how much her aptitude in (not) speaking French factored into Bekker coming to the company, the truth is that it’s another way of speaking—body language—which she says ended up being the real way she learned about Isabel Marant, both the designer and the brand.
“Isabel is a woman with so much talent, and she knows what she wants, but it’s there in her head,” Bekker says. “I had to understand what she was thinking by observing her, and that’s how I got so connected to whatever she was thinking, because she was expressing it by speaking with her body, not with words.” Marant let out another glorious laugh. “Yeah, it’s true,” she says. “One of Kim’s strengths is that she’s good at communicating with the team. I’m more impatient; I’ll often just do something so it’s done the way I want the first time round!”
The plan is that Marant will come into the office three days a week. “I want to help Kim as much as I can,” Marant says, “as she has ten collections a year to design. I’ll do some research on shapes that we might want to redo, and now that I have more time I want to go into our stores and work more on the end experience of the clothes, as well as how we communicate through the website. There’s so much to be taken care of, and that’s what I’ll be involved in, rather than the collections.”
As for Bekker, she says that “it’s a big job, but it has become so much part of me now. I want to continue working with Isabel’s values—and to go with the time, the moment, that we’re in, to keep it sharp and relevant for the woman, or the man, who wears the brand. I’d like us to be stronger in how we present the collections, because we have a lot of beautiful things that people don’t see and don’t know about. We recently connected with a younger generation through our wedge sneakers, and they’re now like, Gosh, you do this and you do that—they had no idea! It makes us almost a bit of an underground brand, and it’s important we keep that—we don’t want to try and be like all of the luxury brands. It’s charming to not go that way. I mean, Isabel built this brand,” she continued, “and it’s still relevant, and I want it to still be relevant five years from now, ten years from now… for it always to be relevant.”
