‘Influential’ fashion designers are in hot demand – WWD

Virgil Abloh broke the mold in terms of the skills a creative director can – and should – possess.

The late designer, the mastermind behind the Off-White brand and the explosive Louis Vuitton menswear business, has become a leading role model for fashion students with his multidisciplinary, inclusive and community-minded approach to fashion, according to Valérie Berdah-Levy , director of the Paris School of the Istituto Marangoni.

Equally popular is Japanese streetwear pioneer Nigo, now the creative director of Kenzo. Berdah-Levy explained that he is a multihyphenate with tentacles that span music production, industrial or graphic design and DJing, as did Abloh.

“Students love multicreative minds and talents who are not just designers, but have many passions,” she said.

Ditto for recruitment specialists: Headhunters say fashion houses are increasingly looking for creative leaders who have internet attention, an enviable creative network and the ability to inspire a community.

They point out that great design chops and industry buzz remain important attributes for landing the best jobs in fashion. And they note that second-in-command designers often have the inside track, as evidenced by the recent appointment of Matthieu Blazy to succeed Daniel Lee at Bottega Veneta.

But there is no doubt that cultural influence and connections are increasingly important attributes in fashion.

Consider, for example, artist Daniel Arsham, who recently launched his clothing and accessories brand Objects IV Life, following several collaborations with Kim Jones at Dior. He boasts 1.3 million followers on Instagram.

According to Floriane de Saint Pierre, founder and director of Floriane de Saint Pierre & Associés, brands today need to be influential on social media to lead the game.

“With social networks and the acceleration of their use due to COVID[-19] Blockages and travel restrictions, we are living more than ever in the attention economy, where attention has become a scarce commodity, therefore it has a value,” she explained in an interview. “Without attention, brands cannot create any desire , and therefore sell neither dreams nor products.”

De Saint Pierre noted that creative directors today can possess a number of different skills to engage consumers.

According to her, they can come from a more classical fashion background and education – like Phoebe Philo, Demna at Balenciaga, or Maximilian Davis, recently appointed at Salvatore Ferragamo – or they can come from other creative fields.

Examples of largely self-taught fashion entrepreneurs include Nigo, a record producer and DJ who created the brands A Bathing Ape and Human Made before joining Kenzo; Teddy Santis, who channeled his love of the 90s hip-hop scene and New York basketball culture into the fast-growing Aimé Leon Dore brand, and Tremaine Emory, who is credited for his storytelling and traversed several industries before founding Denim Tears and taking a creative role at Supreme.

De Saint Pierre calls them all “catalysts of an aspirational society” and inspiring brand leaders whose customers “feel part of a community of values ​​they want to belong to.”

“Needless to say, the product has to stand for such values ​​and the moment it becomes too obvious or too banal, the influential community moves on to other brands,” she added.

Of course, many well-known and famous fashion designers over the past 50 years have been largely self-taught, including Karl Lagerfeld, Miuccia Prada, Vivienne Westwood and Manolo Blahnik, or have come from other fields such as architecture, studied by people like . Pierre Cardin and Gianfranco Ferré.

But the advent of social media changed the dynamics of the industry, allowing creative people to interact directly with their audience, rather than through gatekeepers like editors and retailers. At the same time, the purpose, values ​​and messages behind brands have become important qualities alongside aesthetics and design.

Abloh also famously trained as an architect, and Off-White chose Ibrahim Kamara, a designer and editor, as his de facto successor.

The editor-in-chief of Dazed magazine, Kamara was part of the Off-White family for years, styling the brand’s shows. Before taking the top job at Dazed, he produced editorials for magazines such as iD, System, Vogue Italia and Another, gaining attention for rich visual stories that weave high fashion with diverse cultural references and questions of gender and identity.

Kamara has 246,000 followers on Instagram.

Celebrity attendants can’t be discounted either.

Nigo’s debut show for Kenzo last January helped the brand earn $6.6 million in media influence value and crack the three most influential shows during Paris Fashion Week, behind Louis Vuitton in first place and Dior in second. according to charts from Launchmetrics. “The show’s star-studded first line-up generated huge media buzz, with hip-hop artists as diverse as Kanye West, Pharrell Williams and Tyler the Creator being mentioned in more than 50 percent of the brand’s placements,” the firm said. data and knowledge. pointed out.

Emma Davidson, managing director of London research firm Denza Limited, said her clients have been looking to influencers – or even influencers – for creative research.

“I had this specifically from a big Italian luxury house: ‘We want someone like Olivier Rousteing. Not his job, but his profile — on Instagram, pictures of all the hot girls, always loud, at the right parties. We want noise. That was about eight years ago,” Davidson shared, referring to the Balmain creative director, who boasts 8.3 million followers on Instagram and 737,000 on TikTok. “Since then it has only escalated with the proliferation of different apps that have become the bridge between the brand and the audience.”

Davidson cited a number of ancillary considerations that have made creative recruitment increasingly complicated.

“There are so many things – minority representations in the industry, sustainability, brand/DNA of the designer, background of the designer, including any bad press issues, available budget, ‘does the story work’, what are the celebrity friendships , fashion- politics of the group,” she counted.

She noted that candidates with a “strong creative network ripe for collaboration” are also attractive.

Davidson also made a case for in-house promotion, applauding Blazy’s at Bottega Veneta as an example. Virginie Viard’s rise to Chanel after Karl Lagerfeld’s death in 2019 would be another notable case, as would Alessandro Michele’s rise to fame from Gucci’s design studios.

“This is called sustainable recruitment. There has to be more to business planning,” she said. “Companies invest so much time and money in people. Payroll is a huge expense and should be treated like gold. These people have specialized knowledge, the understanding of a DNA. They need to be hired wisely, trained within a company, built into retention planning,” she said. “I’m very, very much in favor of investing in people.”

De Saint Pierre argued that there is no single recipe for success in fashion today.

“To become – or remain – influential, we are probably witnessing two parallel models. On the one hand, there are consistent, long-term fans with customers who are extremely loyal to the brand and the product itself,” she said, citing Hermès and The Row as two examples. “And on the other hand, there are brands that need to be repositioned as influencers. In such a case, creative directors – whether known or unknown – are the catalyst and voice of today’s society… Their role is to visually express the brand at the heart of today’s society and its values.”

Fashion schools have evolved the curriculum to reflect the changing profile of creative directors, with influence and keen communication skills among young elements. For example, at the Istituto Marangoni in Paris, second-year students are tasked with creating and creating a professional profile on Instagram.

“They need to learn how to present and communicate their concept and creation and how to attract attention with their collection,” explained Berdah-Levy. “They can experiment with the communication potential of metaverses, games – and we try to get them to work with students from other programmes, such as business and fashion styling, so that they develop additional skills.

“We push these interdisciplinary projects so that they’re not just design-focused,” she added.

Berdah-Levy emphasized that design skills remain paramount and clothes must be “exciting and desirable” enough to excite celebrities and influencers, while also remaining “customer-oriented.”

However, today’s creative directors cannot operate in an ivory tower. “The designer must be visible, present, accessible, have a global vision and knowledge of all the factors a collection needs to succeed. But the designer is also an influencer,” she said.

To understand: Istituto Marangoni has invited people like Louise Parent; Géraldine Boublil aka Erin Off-Duty; Loulou De Saison and Léna Mahfouf, better known as Léna Situations, to explain how they built a following and a business in the field of fashion. “I like that they tell the students early on that it’s a real job, that they work hard to get this level of recognition and authority,” Berdah-Levy said.

Apart from Abloh and Nigo, Marine Serre, Balmain’s Rousteing and Simon Porte Jacquemus – the latter with 4.9 million Instagram followers – are also well-loved by students, with Rick Owens a dark-horse favorite seen as an outsider with a strong fashion identity.

“They like the idea that a designer can have different passions and be creative in areas other than fashion,” she said. “And they like to project themselves onto these kinds of personalities and people.”