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 the season of 15 designer debuts finished in October, the industry (and this journalist) breathed a small sigh of relief. After months of gossip, breaking news, and high-pressure (and oversubscribed) shows, fashion’s major creative reset had seemingly peaked. Yes, there are a few more debuts on the horizon in February: Demna’s big Gucci show, Maria Grazia Chiuri at Fendi, Meryll Rogge at Marni, but largely, the house of cards was rebuilt, the musical chairs had wound down, and we seemed to unanimously agree that we were going to give the new creative directors time to settle in.
Then November came. Balmain announced the exit of Olivier Rousteing after 14 years, with Atlein’s Antonin Tron to replace him. A month later, Dario Vitale exited Versace after just one season, sending shockwaves through the industry after his strong Spring/Summer 2026 debut. Vitale’s successor will likely leave a vacancy at another major house, which will then poach a creative director from another major house, and so the reset continues.
Perhaps this is the new normal for a luxury industry in flux, transformed by economic headwinds, a quickening innovation cycle, and a young generation of consumers disillusioned with the status quo. But we have to ask, will the creative reset ever end?
When will the luxury market recover?
To understand this intense period of change, we need to take it back to the start. In April 2022, Gucci’s star creative director Alessandro Michele exited the house after seven years at the helm. Revenue at Gucci almost tripled during his tenure, from €3.9 billion in 2015 to €9.7 billion in 2021. But after a period of exponential gains, Gucci’s growth began to normalize during the pandemic. Kering tried to get ahead of the normalization by parting ways with Michele, tapping unknown designer Sabato De Sarno from the Valentino design team to lead the house’s creative teams. It didn’t necessarily go to plan. As the luxury slowdown hit in 2024, Gucci’s annual revenue fell by 23% to around €7.7 billion.
This move seemingly kicked off a chain reaction across the upper echelons of luxury brands. Spooked by slowing sales, executives and creative directors across the industry sought new directions and a domino effect ensued, until almost every major house, including Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Balenciaga, Givenchy, Loewe, Alexander McQueen, Valentino, Bottega Veneta, Maison Margiela, Fendi and Marni had a changing of the guard.
“What has caused the significant creative reset is the fact that many soft luxury brands have simultaneously suffered setbacks, as Chinese consumers have moved to the back foot and western consumers have sobered up from the post-Covid euphoria,” says Bernstein analyst Luca Solca. “An improving global luxury demand environment shall eventually normalize creative churn.” By this logic, perhaps the reset will end when luxury market sales improve, he suggests. “When does a company cease to change CEOs? When it finally works. Ditto with creative directors.”
If that’s true, we could be in for a stabilization in the near term. According to forecasts from Bain Company, the luxury slowdown is set to end in 2026, as the industry returns to growth, which could spell an end to the reset. Over the next 10 years, the personal luxury goods market is likely to grow by 4-6% per year, reaching between €525 billion and €625 billion, while overall luxury spending could span €2.2 trillion to €2.7 trillion.
It’s a compelling argument. But others feel this period of intense scrutiny on creative directors has irreversibly raised the pressure stakes too high, resulting in designers playing it safe and diminishing the creativity needed to stoke demand for fashion. While perhaps the financial situation and the creative reset are inextricably linked, insiders agree that there are other factors at play too.
“A modest market recovery may ease pressure on luxury brands, but it is unlikely to slow or stop the creative reset underway across the sector. Our outlook has consistently stressed that growth alone will not restore desirability,” says Federica Levato, senior partner at Bain Company. “Brands need to reignite creativity and reestablish quality and purpose as non-negotiable pillars to fuel long-term appetite. That is a multi-year agenda, not a cycle that ends once demand improves. Put simply, a market recovery can buy time, but it does not remove the strategic need to reassert distinctiveness and cultural relevance.”
Applying too much pressure
The role of the designer has evolved considerably over the last decade, as creative directors take on new responsibilities outside of the design studio, and are made responsible for the brand image and immediate sales performance.
“Money is definitely part of it, but the creative reset has also come about because of how complicated the role of a designer has become,” says brand strategist and consultant Richard Gray. “They’re expected to be creative, commercial, communicative and strategic all at once, which makes alignment with CEOs harder than ever. Now there’s pressure to rethink creative direction quickly because creativity is being asked to fix deeper business problems,” he says.
In an exclusive survey of 300 anonymous fashion designers and over 30 on-record interviews with renowned designers and prominent industry figures, Vogue Business found that the dominance of so-called ‘star designers’, and the pressure placed upon them, may be problematic for the long-term health of the fashion industry — as well as the designers themselves.
“You’re only ever as good as your last trick, and everyone always wants to know what’s next,” KidSuper founder Colm Dillane, who was selected by Louis Vuitton to co-create its first menswear collection after Virgil Abloh’s passing, told Vogue Business as part of the survey. “You can’t be a one-hit wonder in fashion. People are really quick to forget and move on. You don’t get a ton of credit for what you’ve done.” If we continue to place so much emphasis on the singular creative director, we are setting them up to fail and will perpetuate the cycle of hiring and firing we’ve seen since 2024.
This heavy pressure on individuals (and, in turn, other talent at the company, which remains underdeveloped) ultimately affects designers’ ability to do their job. And while the buzz of a debut can attract eyeballs, and sometimes even a sales uplift, ultimately, once the buzz fades, designers today feel unable to be truly innovative and take the kind of creative risks that prompt long-term brand growth.
“It’s not surprising that we find ourselves in a moment when a button-down collar shirt and a moccasin shoe are the most interesting things in the stores at the moment,” says designer Edward Buchanan, who was Bottega Veneta’s first-ever design director. Designers are playing it safe because “the first one that gets the blame is the designer when things go south,” he adds.
Brands would do well to stabilize and lock in with their current creative setup, says fashion critic and broadcaster Osama Chabbi. “It already confuses me as a critic, let alone if I were a loyal client,” he says. “It also seems like nothing is ever done quietly. First, you’re publicly announced, then you’re publicly acclaimed or criticized, and the next minute, you’re publicly out. It doesn’t feel like it humanizes the so-called creativity we all strive to protect,” Chabbi says.
The democratization of fashion has changed the game
Vitale’s departure from Versace sparked outrage among the fashion community, with scores of critics and journalists taking to Instagram to express their surprise and disappointment at the news. His debut collection was lauded by critics as modern and fresh. However, if Instagram comments are anything to go by, many members of the public did not like Vitale’s collection. This disparity in opinion between fashion insiders and the broader consumer underscores that we can’t underestimate the power of gossip and public opinion in perpetuating the creative reset.
Since fashion’s drastic democratization over recent years, public discourse carries a lot of weight, meaning even critically acclaimed designers can face sales challenges or prompt pressure from executives, if they don’t please the thousands, if not millions of netizens who now see fashion as a spectator sport, experts agree.
Public opinion can even incite poor performance. “What’s especially nuts today, though, is that people inside the companies are seeing all these posts and reading all these stories — they read everything — and whether it’s conscious or not, they are affected by the sentiment of the consumers of this information,” one anonymous senior executive at a Paris-based luxury house told my colleague Luke Leitch earlier this year.
This means brands and executives are listening to the noise, rather than their customers. And it’s leading to hasty decisions and intense pressure on creative teams. “[Designers] have to cater to two different eco chambers now, clients versus the internet. There’s a true obsession with retaining a ‘cool capital’ online, but cool doesn’t always translate into sales,” Chabbi says. “Luxury is one thing, cool is another. It’s creating a lot of confusion for everyone. Brands are torn between seeming ‘cool’ [to young people on the internet] and catering to their actual consumers, who for the most part have a different take.”
And that public is hard to please. Gen Z in particular is more critical and less loyal, assessing brands “through the lens of cultural relevance rather than long-term affinity”, Bain’s Levato says. “At the same time, engagement uplifts from creative changes are often visible and measurable, which can encourage boards and CEOs to view creative turnover as a repeatable growth hack. In this context, the democratization effect — characterized by more public feedback loops, faster trend cycles, and greater consumer choice — can plausibly contribute to shorter creative tenures, as brands feel compelled to react quickly when cultural resonance begins to slip.”
Is this even a reset?
One of the key reasons brands keep chopping and changing is because of a lack of creativity. To truly put an end to the reset, we need an injection of fresh talent, experts agree. As we’ve reported frequently at Vogue Business, creative director appointments over-index on white men. And further than that, they over-index on white men who have already held a major creative director position at a different house, bringing with them codes we have already seen.
“I am not so surprised by the changing of the guards at luxury houses as much as I am disheartened by the same names that continue to be jumbled about from house to house,” Buchanan says. “An industry-wide effort has to be made to invest in emerging creatives with fresh ideas, new modes of working, and an alternative perspective. How can we continue to pretend that we work in an industry that encourages innovation and newness when all of the young talent are the first ones to be thrown under the bus anytime they do something that doesn’t immediately receive rave reviews?”
The current luxury “reset” is unlikely to end; it will more likely shift in form, Levato says. “Structural shifts on the demand side — a shrinking aspirational base, more critical and less loyal Gen Z consumers, rising expectations for value and novelty, and intense competition — mean creative leadership remains a central lever of differentiation. The reset may pass as a headline, but continuous creative renewal will become a permanent requirement in a more volatile, democratized, and value-sensitive luxury market.”
