In the months that followed the Spring/Summer 2026 season, we have seen a series of new hires in the communications, marketing and design departments of all major houses. Our new series ‘Fashion s Real Reset Starts Now’ looks at all these changes and how they will redefine the fashion industry in the years to come.
When luxury houses change creative directors, much of the noise plays out online. But the true stakes unfold far from the feed. Very important clients (VICs), who are increasingly crucial to the success of a creative director, will have to decide whether to keep spending with a brand as it transitions to a new design chief, or to move their wardrobes, and their wallets, elsewhere.
In today’s luxury market, those wallets really count. Bain estimates that VICs — just over 2% of customers — now account for around 45% of global luxury purchases, up from 35% in 2021. As the middle of the market thins out, reliance on the very top has intensified: Bain and Altagamma estimate that luxury lost roughly 50 million customers between 2022 and 2024, as aspirational shoppers pulled back under price pressure and economic uncertainty.
In that context, creative change carries heightened financial stakes. “Brands are relying on a smaller number of customers,” Bain partner Federica Levato says. “If you lose them by dramatically changing the creative direction, it can have a serious impact on the business.” The pause of even a small cohort of top clients can outweigh thousands of entry-level purchases, a dynamic that makes today’s cycle of creative exits and appointments particularly delicate.
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Still, the uncertainty of a season brimming with 15 creative director changes is already being felt on the client side. “Right now, I’m shopping more selectively, but it’s a conscious choice,” says a VIC who wishes to go by Poppy. The houses she spends most with are Chanel, Dior, Valentino, Jean Paul Gaultier and Balenciaga, all of which have undergone recent creative changes. “When a house has a new creative direction, I like to watch how it unfolds — how runway ideas translate into pieces I could actually wear. Meaningful purchases happen naturally when something truly resonates with me,” she says.
What VICs actually buy
From a distance, it can look like VICs follow designers from one house to the next the way fans follow bands. But the reality is more nuanced. “People sometimes assume clients just follow designers, but that’s not how I approach it. A runway show may spark interest, but the real decision comes when I try on a piece, feel the fabric, the cut and see if it fits my life,” says Poppy. “I loved Matthieu Blazy’s first show [for Chanel], because there were many pieces I could actually buy and wear, and they would look good on me.”
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That distinction between admiring a collection and wanting to wear it is why creative upheaval carries such risk. “A creative director change can move a significant portion of VICs away if the new direction is not aligned, especially if the style changes abruptly and the brand doesn’t maintain its pillars and DNA,” says Levato. “If Chanel suddenly became Dolce Gabbana, or Hermès became Versace, the likelihood of losing VICs would be very high.”
Product before designer
That product-first mindset is exactly why brands are pulling back from the hero designer model. “Over the past few years, we have seen the creative director become bigger than the house,” says PR consultant Alexandra Carello, who advises luxury brands and previously set up the global communications team at Net-a-Porter. “Where the chips have landed is that houses have decided to reassert control and authority. A household luxury name cannot change course every time it has a new creative director.”
The shift is increasingly visible in how creative debuts are framed. Rather than ripping everything up, designers are being asked to work within clearly defined house codes. Carello points to Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior as emblematic of this recalibration.
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Blazy’s first Chanel collection leaned into recognizable signatures: tweed, classic proportions and Parisian ease, subtly loosened rather than overturned, while Anderson’s debut at Dior explicitly framed the archive as a toolkit, revisiting and reworking the house’s heritage throughout the show and collection. “The existing customer cannot feel discarded in favor of someone new,” says Carello. “It has to be a tightrope: newness and excitement, but still your Chanel, still your Dior.”
That archive-first logic is being translated directly at retail. In a season of buzzy designer debuts, the first look at Demna’s Gucci was among the most-anticipated; unveiled through La Famiglia, an initial capsule launched ahead of his full ready-to-wear debut in February 2026. Gucci limited the rollout to just 10 locations globally, where sales associates actively narrated the transition, explaining which Gucci house codes Demna had adopted, the archetypes he was engaging with and how specific choices harked to the archive. Rather than positioning the designer as a disruptive auteur, the message was reassurance: this is still Gucci.
This approach continued in his second collection for pre-fall 2026, Generation Gucci, which revisits the house’s signature codes, especially the enduring Tom Ford era, through spotlight-style lighting inspired by the 1996 shows and archival-based looks. “Generation Gucci represents Demna’s ongoing research into archival and visual codes across different eras of the brand’s history,” read the collection’s notes.
Another VIC, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, agrees with Poppy that the rapid succession of creative shifts has been disorienting. The VIC did not purchase anything under Sabato De Sarno, feeling the work lacked a clear point of view and a sufficient evolution of the house codes she values. “I’ve been buying Gucci since the Tom Ford era, and I was pleasantly surprised by the [La Famiglia] collection. It felt recognizably Gucci, yet fresh and playful. I’ve bought a couple pieces,” she adds, proving the success of this emerging model.
For Poppy, that continuity also matters, but only if the product delivers. Her loyalty is anchored as much in fit and fabric as in narrative. “The fabric matters; the cut matters. If I don’t approve of the work, whether it’s the fabric, the cut or the craftsmanship, then I won’t buy it,” she says. “It doesn’t matter how nice the customer service is or how many events they host.”
This emphasis on substance resonates with ultra-high-net-worth East Asian consumers. Chinese art collector Cherry Xu told Vogue Business earlier this year that she chooses clothes based on a “belief in experimentation, cross-disciplinary thinking and aesthetic identities that extend beyond the garments themselves”. That philosophy draws her to Comme des Garçons, “for its intellectual rigor, structural experimentation and refusal to repeat established language”, as well as JW Anderson, “for the way [Anderson] blends craft, image-making and cultural commentary with ease”.
Clienteling in an age of creative churn
If product accounts for the bulk of a VIC’s decision, experience is where brands work to stabilize the relationship, especially during periods of creative transition. “Roughly 70% of the decision is the product,” estimates Bain’s Levato. “The remaining 30% lives in experience.” It is in that 30% that the battle for VIC loyalty intensifies.
That work is led, first and foremost, by sales associates and client teams. “They are the face of the brand for VICs,” Levato adds. “They must be trained on how to speak about the new creative director, the transition and the product. They can mitigate some client migration, but they cannot substitute the product.”
As a result, VICs are now integrated into creative transitions as deliberately as press and influencers. The proportion of top clients in front rows has grown significantly in recent years, with some designers expanding their debut show capacities to accommodate more clients. “In order for customers to come with a brand into a new creative era, they must be involved from the beginning,” Carello says.
For Renato Mosca, founder of Training Luxury, a consultancy specializing in luxury retail strategy and client experience for brands such as Prada, Gucci and Loro Piana, the designer is rarely the primary anchor. “Most of the time, what really links VICs to a brand is their relationship with their client advisor,” he says. “They’re not just salespeople; they’re lifestyle consultants. Those relationships extend far beyond fashion. Advisors are expected to understand where clients holiday, how they travel and what excites them culturally, able to discuss Gstaad and Banff as easily as they discuss hemlines.” In many cases, the relationship becomes deeply personal, built over years of continuous, attentive service. “Some are even invited to weddings and to spend holidays with clients,” Mosca adds.
When it comes to introducing new designers and collections, generic events no longer cut through. “A simple cocktail with champagne doesn’t move VICs anymore,” he continues. “You need a real reason to leave the house.” The most effective gestures are often hyper-personal: Mosca recalls a client spending around €300,000 the year his advisor arranged a private visit to a Formula One paddock to meet Lewis Hamilton. “The client already had everything,” Mosca says. “That was something money alone couldn’t buy.”
Built over time, these relationships are what allow brands to absorb creative change without losing loyalty. “If a customer is treated really well, they will stay loyal regardless of who the creative director is,” Carello says. At the highest level, bespoke and couture is “far more common” than outsiders assume, and when that relationship exists, even a collection a client doesn’t immediately connect with can be adapted. “[Brands will] create what you want within reason,” she says.
Fashion houses are also widening their definitions of who counts as a top client. Levato argues that brands must look beyond existing VIC lists to identify “the next VICs” — high-spending clients elsewhere who could be converted. “Luxury brands can be too self-referential,” she says. “They assume that if someone isn’t a VIC with their house, they’re not a VIC for anyone. That’s not true.”
Taken together, these shifts point to where the battle for VIC loyalty is heading. As creative directors come and go, the clients who matter most will be watching carefully: whether the brand still feels like itself, whether the clothes still feel like them, and whether the person on the other end of the Whatsapp chat continues to anticipate their needs.
