Are the industry’s best designers leaving fashion for good?

The past few years have seen some of fashion’s brightest talents leaving an industry they helped shape. LAUREN COCHRANE asks: Why?

WHEN PHOEBE PHILO TOOK HER FINAL bow at Céline in 2018, few could understand why. The British designer was at the peak of her career, driving every major trend to hit catwalks and the high street (fluid tailoring, the camel coat, women everywhere ditching heels for trainers) and loved by the press and customers alike. She was even name-dropped by Kanye. At the time, there was arguably no designer more influential or admired. Then, just like that, the then 44-year-old designer walked away from it all.

With a number of high-profile departures in recent years at all levels—from Burberry’s Christopher Bailey to Jean Paul Gaultier to

Designers are forced to become marketing machines.

J.Crew’s Jenna Lyons—it raises the question: Has life in the fashion industry become untenable for the creatives who helped shape it? In the past decade alone, the industry has lost not only Philo, Bailey and Gaultier but also Jonathan Saunders, Calvin Klein’s Francisco Costa, Bottega Veneta’s Tomas Maier and Lanvin’s Alber Elbaz. (Elbaz has since made tentative moves back, but they have been slow and considered.)

As creative roles become more corporate— there are now growth targets to hit, social-media conversion rates to follow (that’s the rate of likes to sales), digital campaigns to help conceive and an ever-growing list of collections and collaborations required to keep brands culturally relevant—designers are forced to become marketing machines. So what happens when you choose to step off the machine in which you are the chief cog?

French designer Nicole Farhi was once the woman behind an eponymous luxury readyto-wear brand that was making more than $18 million a year and had over 4,000 employees and shops everywhere from Tokyo to New York. She now works as a sculptor. It’s an art she has been committed to practising full-time since leaving her label in 2012 after 30 years there. Farhi enjoyed the majority of her time in fashion, working with her former partner Stephen Marks to build the brand into an international powerhouse. But when Marks sold the business to a private equity firm in 2010, things changed.

“Stephen took away the burden of the company,” says Farhi. “He never bothered me with turnover and what people want. When people were doing miniskirts and I didn’t like them, I didn’t have to do them.” But under a new team, the comfort of focusing on creativity while others handled commerce was gone. “The people who bought the company [came in] with demands: ‘We have to do [this] many dresses, [this] many coats.’ It was like being in a corset,” she says. “Over the years, fashion became stressful. You had to show not two but four collections a year, and then you had to do a second line because the first one was too expensive. It was endless, endless work.” Farhi sculpted as a hobby for years and soon felt that art was a more appropriate outlet for her creativity. “Now, I wake up and I’m happy because I know the studio is going to pull me [in],” she says. “I am enjoying life much more because I am my own master; I don’t have to do anything that I don’t want to do.”

British designer Saunders also sought a clean break from the fashion industry, stepping away from his own brand after 12 years in 2015 at the height of its success. His signature sheer slips were

beloved by celebrities, including Diane Kruger and Thandie Newton, and his collections were clamoured for online. His workload quickly intensified as he relocated to New York to take the creative reins at Diane von Furstenberg—a brand with an estimated turnover of $500 million, nearly 150 stores in more than 50 countries and 1,500 points of sale on top of that. He was tasked with overseeing everything from shop fixtures to a new logo, so designing—the part of his job that he enjoyed the most—fell by the wayside. He quit after just 18 months. “I became more detached from design,” he says. “You have more of an overseeing role, focused on certain elements of the business that are so vital but consuming. That didn’t sit well with me.”

Saunders has found an outlet in a creative endeavour less predicated on sales targets and analytics. In February, after a two-year break, he launched a furniture line. His trademark unusual colour combinations and graphic elements now appear on chairs and tables rather than dresses and coats. The slower pace of homeware design allows him to prioritize the part of his practice he values most. “I love to develop an idea and find things out,” he says. Saunders doesn’t rule out designing clothes again, but, he says: “I will certainly never become part of this traditional cycle. For me, it doesn’t work.”

A nuanced understanding of commerce and creativity, hand in hand rather than siloed, has always been key to success in the fashion industry. However, that burden wasn’t always placed on the designer. Look at Yves Saint Laurent, who credited his success to the support of business partner Pierre Bergé, or Valentino Garavani and his partner Giancarlo Giammetti. Today, arguably the most forward-thinking, creatively innovative and trend-making designers are those with trusted business people by their side: Miuccia Prada with husband Patrizio Bertelli, Marc Jacobs with Robert Duffy and Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia with brother Guram.

Luxury fashion headhunter Floriane de Saint Pierre, who is called upon to place designers at major fashion houses (most notably in recent years Alessandro Michele at Gucci), says fashion’s relationship with creativity has changed and designers are now expected to understand more than just how to design clothes. “Creative content makes the difference now,” says de Saint Pierre, referring to the increasing emphasis on marketing. “Brands have become massive content factories that stage brand values and products and entertain an audience; hence fashion is now open to talent from other creative fields in sync with today’s society. It

So what happens when you choose to step off the machine in which you are the chief cog?