ARE DESIGNERS STILL IMPORTANT FOR A MENS WEAR BRAND?

Since when have brands swapped menswear designers, l ike changing underwear? Or, to put it more gracefully, how did it happen that the drama of moving around creatives and innovators took over t he masculine, a s wel l a s t he feminine, f ashion world?

When Hedi Slimane announced that he would f it a male wardrobe into his new appointment at Céline, this powerful, innovative designer underscored dramatic changes i n t he male i ndustry. While the low-key designer Véronique Nichanian at Hermès has just reached 30 years at the same house, the ‘musical chairs’ game in other luxury companies is dramatic and speedy.

Introducing Virgil Abloh, founder of the Off-White brand, as artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear is an example of something that would have been impossible to imagine even f ive years ago. But this move is not an isolated idea. Kim Jones has finished seven years as Louis Vuitton’s menswear style director to take over at Dior Homme while current designer Kris Van Assche has moved to Berluti. The male designers’ game of musical chairs seems more like a never-ending game of thrones.

Those reshuf f les also include Riccardo Tisci, formerly with Givenchy, taking over at Burberry. That is a fascinating collaboration between a designer who has an equal sense of the classic and the dramatic - and will bring nuances of Italian culture and Parisian experience to a brand with deep British roots.

This stor y of subt le and then dynamic c hange s pans my own 21 y ears repor t i ng on menswear. It i s a stor y about men looking at fashion and accept i ng it s quirks and it s demand for newness i n a way that was seeded only at the beginning of the new mi l lennium. For me, t here a re s everal movements at the same t ime. First was a pent-up demand from a young generation not to dress like their dads. While i n the distant past young men might have yearned for a smar t suit as a signal of adulthood, today they are wedded to casualwear. And t hat enthusiasm for anything easy, from sweatshirts to sneakers, has spread upward too, so that a middle-aged man is now fol lowing a younger way of d ressing.

Cultural change, especial l y t he opening up of consumers in Asia, also plays a part. I remember Gildo Zegna tel l i ng me, more than a decade ago, that smart casualwear was the essence of ‘dressing up’ for young Asian men. The suit therefore stil l exists, but modernized and brought closer to activewear with its more athletic cuts and semistretch f abrics.

I believe that the fusion of male and female dressing, a factor in Chinese and Japanese male wardrobes, has also made a mark on f ashion for both sexes.

The attitude of Alessandro Michele at Gucci that “more is never enough” has spread to his own vision of menswear – but also to other designers and to male consumers who are accepting the concept of decoration in a way that had apparently ended with royal courts far back i n history.

Change is good at retail. But is it a certainty that men - or, indeed women - wil l continue to desire newness? Wil l there be a s lowing down of the s peedy changes that are currently at the heart of the f ashion i ndustry?

I think men have been smart, after so many years of women setting the fashion pace, in embracing speed and change. And, of course, women, who once fought to have the right to wear trousers rather than skirts, are keeping up the pace for streamlined, modern design.