A dizzying round of designer musical chairs in the fashion industry has picked up pace with the announcement that Jonathan Anderson is exiting Loewe.
The 40-year-old designer from Magherafelt, Northern Ireland, transformed Loewe during his 11-year tenure from a sleepy Spanish handbag house into the hottest ticket of Paris fashion week.
The news follows last week’s surprise appointment of Demna, whose time at Balenciaga has been marked by controversy and catwalk stunts, at Gucci, Italy’s temple to elegant loafers, Jackie Kennedy handbags and jet-set glamour.
Fashion’s unpredictable mood is reflecting a cultural moment. The jittery global economic climate and the chaotic tone of public discourse that have followed Donald Trump’s return to the White House are being echoed in a bone-shaking upheaval in fashion’s corridors of power. Boardrooms are panicking as tariffs threaten to deepen the luxury slowdown, while the Maga-led shift towards a move-fast-and-break-things culture is putting maverick designers, rather than safe pairs of hands, in the frame for high-profile jobs.
The previous Gucci designer, Sabato de Sarno, was hastily shown the door only weeks before he was due to show in Milan last month, and his “quiet luxury” aesthetic replaced by its polar opposite in Demna, who likes to poke fun at fashion’s obsession with status. As well as Demna’s debut at Gucci, this year there will be new designers at Chanel, Givenchy, Tom Ford, Calvin Klein and Dries van Noten.
Anderson is widely rumoured to be poised for promotion within LVMH, the owner of Loewe, to the much bigger house of Dior. The official announcement of his departure was effusive in its praise, seeming to confirm that Anderson is moving upwards in the ranks.
“I have had the pleasure of working with some of the great artistic directors of recent times, and I consider Jonathan Anderson to be amongst the very best,” said the veteran LVMH executive Sidney Toledano. “What he has contributed to Loewe goes beyond creativity.”
Anderson thanked his Loewe team for “the imagination, the skills, the tenacity and the resourcefulness to find a way to say ‘yes’ to all my wildly ambitious ideas.” However, there has been no announcement at Dior, where designer Maria Grazia Chiuri remains in situ.
The appointment of Demna represents a radical shift in aesthetic in Milan. Under Sabato de Sarno, Gucci took a bet on becoming Italy’s answer to Hermes, selling timeless classics as recognisable markers of affluence. But Demna, who dropped the surname Gvasalia from his public identity, likes to challenge and provoke consumers rather than cater to established tastes.
He has dressed Kim Kardashian in yellow duct tape, and flooded a darkened sports stadium for an apocalyptic Paris fashion week show where baggy jeans dragged along the catwalk sodden with murky water. He directly referenced the Russian invasion of Ukraine a week after the beginning of war in 2022 with a show staged in a bleak snowstorm, which revisited his own experience as a child refugee who fled civil war in his native Georgia with his family, escaping on foot after their car broke down. He dedicated that Balenciaga show, at which Ukrainian flags were placed on every seat, “to fearlessness, to resistance, and to the victory of love and peace”.
Gucci is four times the size of Balenciaga, and the role will test whether Demna’s leftfield fashion point of view can appeal to a mass audience. His appointment is a remarkable vote of confidence by Kering, owner of both houses, two years after the designer’s career appeared to have been derailed by a controversial advertising campaign featuring teddy bears in bondage gear, for which Balenciaga was forced to apologise.
