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This article first appeared on Vogue Business.
On Thursday, Mark Thomas will take a bow for the first time as Carven’s design director. The 49-year-old British designer was promoted to the top job in March after his boss, Louise Trotter, left for Bottega Veneta.
Among the dozen designer debuts this season, Thomas is the only one to have come from within the brand’s existing team. Trotter’s exit was announced last December, and Thomas has since overseen Fall/Winter 2025 and pre-fall, which were presented in March and June, respectively, as lookbooks. For SS26, Thomas was “thinking of our woman in summer in Paris, in that kind of balmy, warm period and thinking about what she would wear”, he says, speaking from his office on Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, where Marie-Louise Carven established her Parisian fashion house in 1945. The collection is “a little bit more sensual than we’ve been up until now. There’ll be more skin visible than we’ve had previously, but still in a very tasteful way.”
Reviving Carven is a significant endeavor. In early 2018, the brand filed for bankruptcy and was later acquired by China’s Icicle Group, which has since rebranded as Icicle Carven China France, or ICCF Group. There has been creative volatility: Guillaume Henry was creative director between 2009 and 2014. Following Henry’s departure, Carven appointed a duo of creative directors, Alexis Martial and Adrien Caillaudaud, who exited in 2016. The last official holder of the position before Trotter was Serge Ruffieux, who left in 2018 after three seasons.
Trotter joined in 2023, and also stayed for just three seasons. But during that time, she and Thomas began developing an interesting design language: sophisticated, minimalist and wearable. Thomas has no intention of deviating from this path, given the early reception has been positive: “We are really happy with where we’ve arrived. Collections have only been in-store for about a year and a half, so there’s no need to break what’s starting to work. We just need to build on top of that,” Thomas says. The brand counts two boutiques in Paris and two in Shanghai, with plans to expand in the Chinese market, as well as 50 wholesale stockists including Harrods in London, Printemps in New York and Antonia in Milan (the company declines to disclose its turnover).
Being under the umbrella of Chinese ready-to-wear company Icicle is a plus, he notes. “With Icicle behind us, which is a profitable brand with its own factories, it means that we are able to produce smaller numbers in factories that probably, when you are a smaller designer, you would really get stuck.”
Its positioning is quite strategic at a time when customers are pushing back on luxury’s eye-watering prices. The Carmen bag sits at €1,690, a turtleneck cardigan goes for €790, a sheer wrap skirt also for €790, and a belted coat costs €1,990. “We’re in an interesting position in terms of price point because there are a lot of people way above us. It’s an honest price for the level of fabric, for the level of technicality. We spend a lot of time in fittings, to perfect things,” Thomas says.
Joyful spirit
Thomas grew up in South East London in a working-class family, and considered, at some point, going into finance. “ I was thinking of how I could get myself out of this background and have something more stable,” he explains. But his art teacher encouraged him to go into fashion. During his BA at Ravensbourne University in London, a tutor steered him towards applying for Central Saint Martins. He got accepted and did his MA there under the supervision of legendary professor Louise Wilson.
“She [Wilson] tests you until you get to the point where you stand up for yourself. She’s like: ‘OK, great, now we’re getting somewhere; now you believe in something you are presenting.’ She was hardcore but brilliant at the same time,” he recalls. Kim Jones, former Dior men’s artistic director, was part of the same cohort at Central Saint Martins.
Soon after graduating, Thomas was offered a job at British designer Neil Barrett’s eponymous label, based in Milan, where he stayed for nine years. He had a stint at Givenchy before going to work for Joseph, where he was head of menswear under the creative stewardship of Trotter. He joined Helmut Lang as creative director from 2017 to 2019, but then reunited with Trotter at Lacoste, where he headed up the men’s division and the collaborations (including with Tyler, The Creator, Polaroid and APC). “ I loved working with Louise,” Thomas says. “She’s like my big sister.”
At Carven, Thomas is inspired by the “joyful spirit” of the house’s founder, who passed away in 2015 at the age of 105. “If you live to 105, you’ve got to be doing something right,” he says. “She had kangaroos in her back garden and was a big collector of ceramic birds. There’s something a bit off about her. I love that she liked her costume jewellery. She looked like fun.”
Thomas found the starting point of the SS26 collection in a book on the house titled Carven (first published by Gründ in 1995). The book recounts that, working with a botanist named Marcel Lecoufle, Madame Carven created a white orchid that had a green centre. “I’m not someone that’s so into florals, but when I thought about [that] orchid, I loved the sensuality. It has a toughness. Then it has fragility. We started to play around with the orchid reference. I knew that I wanted to do it in an abstract way, in the structure of the garments. So it’s very subtle. We have trousers with the waistband falling down, a skirt looking like a petal.”
Part one of the collection is all white and écrus. “I like the idea that we start this new chapter with lots of whites, creams and écrus — almost as a palate cleanser for what’s to come,” he says. As a nod to the founder’s French background, he used ‘Made in France’ fabrics, including a skirt in silk and moiré pieces.
The show will be held on the ground floor of the maison’s HQ, in the entrance, courtyard and store, creating a circle that the models will walk in. Thomas worked for the first time with stylist Emilie Kareh, while a cinema reviewer is behind the show notes. For the soundtrack, he reached out to a DJ from London-based music platform NTS, who has never before done a fashion show soundtrack.
How to stand out in such a noisy season? “The idea is that you’re coming into our home,” Thomas says. “It will be a moment of calm, of coming out of the chaos of everything else that’s happening with the big brands. It will smell great. It will feel comfortable — the lighting, the seating, we want it to be a kind of beautiful pause in everything else that’s going on. And then after that, we’re going to throw you back out.”
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