Analysis

From Gucci to Chanel, never so many brands in the crushing and necessary machine of change

The current fashion weeks are the stage for eagerly awaited designer debuts: will they be able to re-energise the industry? Let's start by giving them time

25 September 2025

Uno dei look del debutto di Simone Bellotti alla guida di Jil Sander

4' min read

An unprecedented season has opened for fashion. After the appointments and separations that, with not a little sensationalism and just as much brutality, have occupied headlines and pages for months, the change is finally effective, and nothing will ever be the same again. Or at least, that is the general wish, of those who comment and those who gain.

Between Milan and Paris, the amount of brands, large and small, simultaneously interested in renovation is astonishing: Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Balenciaga, Versace, Bottega Veneta, Jil Sander, Maison Margiela, Loewe, Jean Paul Gaultier, Carven. In detail: Jonathan Anderson arrives from Dior, the first among Monsieur Dior's heirs to bring all the branches of the maison together in one function, leaving Loewe to Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, formerly Proenza Schouler; Demna is the new plenipotentiary of Gucci after ten glorious years at Balenciaga, where Pierpaolo Piccioli takes over; Louise Trotter, formerly at Carven where Mark Thomas replaces her, takes over the reins of Bottega Veneta from Matthieu Blazy, who finally makes his debut at Chanel. A ponderous task, given the confrontation with the titan Lagerfeld. Equally in a tussle with a mythological being, Dario Vitale at Versace replaces none other than Donatella, but he does not parade. After four shining seasons at Bally, Simone Bellotti is at Jil Sander, while Glenn Martens takes over from John Galliano at Maison Margiela, and Duran Lantink, finally, is entrusted with the task of reviving Jean-Paul Gaultier.

It is a reset across the board, occurring at a particularly delicate time for the industry, suffering from contraction and slowdown. There is nothing fashion loves more than change, apotropaically resisting obsolescence. And there is nothing fashion hopes for more than change to lift the fortunes of business, in the belief that new visions always find new customers, or provoke mass conversions and thus planetary, ravenous, spendthrift followings.

It is a legitimate and understandable mindset, but something in the current temperament seems to have crossed the line, taking on grotesque contours, amplified by the hypermedia that merchandises everything. Katie Grand, founder of The Perfect Magazine, writes with great acumen about this in an instagram post on 20 August: "Lately, you can't scroll through your feed without yet another creative director being announced, analysed and ceremoniously replaced. Fashion has turned these changes into its favourite gladiatorial sport - somewhere between coronation and execution - with social media becoming the Coliseum and the digital crowd screaming blood. Fashion houses stage executions that look like musicals: critics gloat, investors applaud and the poor designers... The show is addictive, yes, but it is also ruthless. Behind the memes and headlines are creatives whose lives and work are dismembered in real time'.

Indeed, in the crushing machine of change, creatives seem to be interchangeable pawns, the result of not perfectly clear choices made by omnipotent CEOs who are often more interested in clickbait than vision. The cohort of designers who are gaining the limelight - mostly in their forties, with a few exceptions - is made up of authors of great value, but what is their real room for manoeuvre? Are they joined by rampant cmo's and merchandisers? Will the message be conveyed with clarity and intent? Will it still and only be storytelling - fake and pernicious - or will there finally be a return to making clothes of value, which is what really matters? After all, the success of vintage in the Nineties and early 2000s speaks precisely of this: special clothes are always popular; high concepts for selling inanity, on the other hand, have their hours counted. More and more, fashion is a choral work and the protagonism is now shared instead of verticality, but the trippy egos should all be at the service of vision and product, not mere profit or personal exposure, otherwise plans become fragile paper castles.

With the Gucci fashion show, we have finally and concretely begun to understand many things, whereas until now - with the exception of the Dior man and the Maison Margiela couture - it has only been conjecture and stolid deductions. Louise Trotter has already dressed Julianne Moore in Cannes, Dario Vitale Julia Roberts and Amanda Seyfried - identical looks! - in Venice and Jonathan Anderson Alba Rohrwacher, Mia Goth and many others, but to draw conclusions from celebrity dressing is an almost baseless gamble. That Trotter retains a purist label and that Anderson explores with conceptual verve the paniers and the eighteenth century so dear to Monsieur Dior - and his predecessor Raf Simons - seems legitimate, but the narrative of a show, and what it implies for brand design, is something else.

Yet exegesis and homages to Emperor's New Clothes have been wasted. More interesting appears to be Simone Bellotti's choice to produce a vinyl EP and video clip as a visual-auditive manifesto, released in the summer and set in Hamburg, the brand's birthplace, with a story of wanderlust echoing the Wim Wenders of The American Friend. Now, for everyone, it comes down to facts, with the inevitable split of the public into two factions: blind enthusiasts of the new and nostalgics of the old guard. Debuts, however, are possibilities, and it is rare - as happened to Alessandro Michele with Gucci and Demna with Balenciaga - that the first collection is fully convincing. It is usually from the subsequent ones that one understands the true contours of a path, hoping that each of the new ones is given time, and that the immediate result is not sought, with further bloodshed. Sounds like the Colosseum.