Five Questions
Former Gap and Chanel leader talks fashion’s future.
Is fashion still relevant? With every week bringing news of retailers closing, downsizing and cycling through CEOs, it’s worth asking. But veteran fashion executive Maureen Chiquet isn’t worried. “We love encountering beautiful things and interesting people. What I think might change is the role of retail stores,” she says. From her days as a young product manager at L’Oreal Paris to helping launch Old Navy in 1994 and leading Chanel as its first-ever global CEO (from 2007 through 2016), she has charted her own course. Now she’s expanding her own horizons — and others’ — with “Beyond the Label: Women, Leadership, and Success on Our Own Terms” (HarperBusiness, 265 pages), a memoir that explores the nuances of her career. Fittingly, Chiquet, who spent 14 years at Gap Inc. during its golden years under CEO Mickey Drexler, was in San Francisco recently as part of her book tour. She took time out to talk leadership, luxury and the all-important Millennial customer with The Chronicle. (This interview has been edited and condensed.) Q: What has the process of writing the book and going on a book tour been like? A: It’s been FANTASTIC. I’m finding that I’m connecting with women and men alike. Part of the reason I wrote the book is that I wanted to be in a new conversation about leadership — how we think about leadership, and moving beyond the labels of things like what it means to be a “good mother,” what it means to be “CEO” and opening that so, in that definition, we ourselves can redefine those things as women. Q: Why is defining women’s leadership important? A: I haven’t termed these qualities feminine but many sociologists and researchers have. These are qualities that are intrinsic to women, but men and women share them. We’ve seen massive change with globalization, especially in the industry that I was in, where there is now one global customer. And then this little generation that everybody calls Millennials have completely different values. They really care about the social and ethical policies of a company. If you’re living in this disrupted (time), where uncertainty is at your doorstep nearly every day, change is faster than it’s ever been; you need to adapt certain qualities to be able to navigate that successfully. We’re in a place in the world where we need to expand that to include empathy and flexibility and co-creation and collaboration. If we continue to cultivate those qualities in equal measure, those are the leaders that can help transform companies, and help transform societies. Q: You spoke at Google today. How did that go? A: They see the intersections in the creative world of fashion and beauty and their worlds of technology, so it’s been really cool to connect and hear commonalities in the way that we look at beauty and imagery, and the way that we think about leadership (and) how you think about generating new ideas. (At Microsoft), one of the things they were asking me was how do you continue to generate creativity when you have to focus on the numbers, and I always say, you know, If you don’t focus on the numbers, you get the numbers. You focus on a beautiful product, service, the things that you do best — the numbers come naturally. Q: Are there too many brands out there? A: We all have a lot of stuff in our closets. The Internet opened up the possibility for anyone to create a brand online. It’s also been challenging then for brands to survive. All of the sudden the consumer has infinitely more choices. We’re just overwhelmed. Things start looking alike. It’s making it increasingly challenging to stay unique, to connect to customers in new ways. My sense is that brands that will continue to do well have a sense of purpose. They care deeply about something, and their products, their marketing; everything they do is oriented and centered around what they care most about. Look at companies like REI. Opt Outside Friday tells me what they care about, and also encourages me to do something good, which is get outside. When I think about that, I think
about companies that truly have a purpose. Another luxury brand that I’ve been watching a lot is Tesla. You’ve got a beautiful car ... and oh, by the way, you feel good about yourself driving a Tesla. I have a sense that this is the thing that’s going to make or break the ways brands develop and exist in the future.
Q: Do you still feel like Mickey Drexler’s advice — “Buy it like you love it?” — holds true?
A: As consumers, and as human beings, we’re emotional. And with the fashion business, it’s rare that you make a decision on a fashion item with a whole ton of logic. You might say, “I’m going to wear this jacket for XYZ occasion,” but generally speaking, it’s an emotional purchase. You say, “I like that, I have to have it,” or “I want it.” So, on the other end, for those merchants — I was a merchant — it still feels really relevant to tap into emotion as a way to figure out what to buy. I can’t imagine how we could start running fashion brands with Uniqlo spreadsheets. Because it wouldn’t be in alignment with the way consumers shop. It was a great lesson to me. It’s funny, I learned that so early in my career, and yet I feel like it was something that was calling to me from when I studied deconstructionism at Yale. It’s sort of seeing how there’s an act of co-creation between the viewer and the actual image. There’s almost an emotional field that creates the narrative. In the same way, I really feel that happens with consumers in some way — you look and create your own sense of whether you love it and what draws you to it. That’s not going to go away.