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In the past year, Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Moschino appointed new creative directors — all white men — and the lack of diversity has called attention to a wider industry sameness. Currently, there are just eight women and four people of colour in the role of creative director at luxury’s major fashion houses. What the recent appointments also have in common is their origins: all three were relatively unknown designers who held high-up positions within the design teams of similar brands.
As the industry faces economic uncertainties, these hires follow the trend toward commercially-driven and client-centric aesthetics. The lack of diversity is built into this framework, as the talent pool senior leaders are hiring from is typically homogenous. People hire people who look like them, and, while the lower ranks of the fashion industry are more diverse, it takes privilege and connections to climb the ranks from the inside.
When creative directors of colour have been brought in to lead fashion houses, it’s been an external appointment of an already-buzzy name; often joining from their own labels. Vietnamese designer Peter Do was brought in to refresh Helmut Lang; Trinidadian-Jamaican designer Maximilian Davis is currently at the helm at Ferragamo; and Pharrell already had celebrity status before joining Louis Vuitton.
A batch of young creative directors hired to shake up longstanding labels have departed after short tenures. Is it time for fashion to rethink its hiring strategy for the top creative role?
These types of external appointments are designed to shake things up at established brands, but they are also more of a gamble. Many emerging designers who were hired to refresh longstanding labels left after short tenures, such as Rhuigi Villaseñor, who left Bally after a year and a half, and Serhat Işık and Benjamin A Huseby, who lasted two years at Trussardi. So, brands are looking within for their top creative roles, and as a result fashion’s current favoured talent pool for creative director positions is the historically homogenous senior rungs of their existing design teams. Can this pool be diversified?
The streetwear hype era gave rise to more culture-centric appointments, with brands seeking to find their own Virgil Abloh, says recruiter Karen Harvey, founder and CEO of Karen Harvey Consulting Group. “On the plus side, it created some opportunity for people of colour, but it was mostly men — there was this perception that those driving culture or making the most noise in the market are mostly men,” she says. Now, the pendulum has swung back, and there are even fewer opportunities. “CEOs want to choose people who can execute a vision versus people who are bringing their own vision and want to own all the marketing.”
In this climate, brands are taking fewer risks and looking within, where there’s less diverse talent to pull from. “The specific challenges young people of colour or women in luxury brands face are limited access to educational and networking resources, biases that affect hiring and career progression, and a lack of role models in those positions, which makes them feel they don’t belong, so they’re less likely to [put themselves forward] for opportunities,” says Milan-based talent scout Michelle Ngonmo, founder of the Afro Fashion Association Milano and co-founder of BIPOC collective We Are Made In Italy.
Some young designers from underrepresented backgrounds are fed up of waiting for a seat at the table. “They’re interested in building the table themselves,” says Edward Buchanan, founder of clothing brand Sansovino 6 and fellow co-founder of We Are Made In Italy, who served as design director at Bottega Veneta in the late 1990s. “You find yourself in a position where you’ve got the degree, knowledge, experience and desire, but the opportunity doesn’t come, so you have to become an entrepreneur.”
The strategy of promoting internally is a more corporate dynamic than fashion is used to, far from the approach of giving any talented creative a chance, says fashion commentator Osama Chabbi. The shift is partly due to the large conglomerates’ need for exponential revenue growth. “They want clothes that sell, so they need to stick to the classic business model of promoting people from the inside, and they don’t want to risk wasting time on reshuffling. I think creativity is compromised because of that,” he says.
Increasingly, large fashion companies and conglomerates place talent in-house, relying on relationships they’ve built, says recruiter Harvey. The lack of diversity at the executive level (and the lack of diversity within their networks) plays a big role in who is considered. Harvey says that there are some brands that actively seek diversity in their search, but it’s a mixed bag. As a recruiter, Harvey herself says she pushes for diversity, but the decision is ultimately up to the executives who may have their own biases that need to be unpacked.
Diversifying the design team
Positions within design teams are competitive. Access is often based on who you know, and the excess of fashion students means that the most highly desirable jobs often sway towards more privileged candidates who went to the most prestigious design schools, says Daniel Peters, founder of consultancy Fashion Minority Report.
Afro Fashion Association has a database of diverse talent, ‘The Unseen Profiles’, which talent scout Ngonmo regularly shares with fashion companies. “We tell them we have a pool of diverse talent here, and if they have any internships or positions open we’d be glad to send some resumés,” she says. She placed We Are Made In Italy graduate Claudia Gisèle Ntsama in Valentino’s design office, but that placement only lasted for a year and Ngonmo secured it through her friend, who knew the team.
“It’s all about your network, if you know someone who knows someone you can have access,” Ngonmo says. “For BIPOC people, they’re coming from nowhere and having to build themselves on their own. A lot of them don’t have access to renowned fashion schools, so they don’t have connections.” Most internships and entry-level positions are low paid and barely cover basic living expenses, which is an additional challenge for applicants with less socioeconomic privilege, she says.
More support needs to be given once diverse hires get their foot in the door, says Fashion Minority Report’s Peters. “It’s all well and good to keep bringing diverse talent into more junior positions, but are we putting the right building blocks in place for those people to be able to climb the ladder and move through at a relative pace?” That includes fair pay, mentorship, good management and opportunities to progress.
Brands need to do more to raise the profiles of diverse talent inside so they can progress to bigger roles, adds Sansovino 6’s Buchanan. “If brands aren’t inclusive on the inside, it’s impossible for [diverse talent] to rise up to be seen by the executive recruiters and headhunters that are placing talent in the creative director role.”
The ‘boy genius’ myth
In the past decade, the creative director has been elevated to a genius status, whose singular vision steers the whole brand strategy. Now, amid economic uncertainty, that’s a risky move. “Brands were chasing the [Virgil Abloh or Alessandro Michele effect] before while simultaneously being aware that it’s an ephemeral moment, because unless you decide to put all your eggs in one basket and make these creative directors the main protagonists of every aspect of the business, it’s not a story that will last,” says fashion commentator Chabbi.
“If the star creative director era is done, and creative directors are no longer elevated to this level of genius, then brands are thinking, ‘We’re not going to go headhunting, so we might as well get people that know us better who we’ve trained in-house rather than take a leap of faith.’ It’s sad because it stops emerging designers and upcoming talent getting the opportunity,” continues Chabbi.
The idea of the genius is gendered, too, recruiter Harvey says. “I can tell you that there are a number of women and women of colour who have been considered for roles and they’re not hired,” she says. “I would gamble that it’s because people might think they don’t have the personality or the marketing draw, but those things can be trained, and those people can be surrounded with talent to support that. Vision is vision, and talent is talent, so brands are missing out.”
In contrast to the individualism required to crown a designer as a genius, Sansovino 6’s Buchanan is calling for collective spaces and showrooms that demonstrate the power of community in shifting the narrative. “All creatives are looking for their star moment when they receive that phone call, we want it to be about ourselves, but we have to think much larger because we need strong voices collectively working together to change the space and move things forward.”
Diversity breeds innovation
Diversity breeds innovation — but is that what big brands want? “Collections are increasingly client-centric — there’s nothing wrong with that, but before, fashion was leading the narrative and setting trends so clients would follow, they weren’t immediately catering to the needs of client,” says fashion commentator Chabbi. Some critics suggest that brands are hiring designers who represent the majority in hopes that they will sell to the majority.
“It’s very few and far between that the objective is finding a very unusual perspective. Some of what exists in the marketplace is a reversion to the mean — what is familiar. Even the sense of change or difference is coming from that prism, so you might hire someone who’s slightly different to you rather than seeking out really different experiences,” says Damian Benders, general manager at digital media company B Code Media, which helps brands connect with Black consumers.
Industry observers have called out the sameness of luxury’s creative directors in light of recent appointments that place white men in top positions. Is fashion backsliding?
Experts say brands are missing out. Cultural diversity in design roles would allow brands to more successfully target global markets and diverse communities. “We’ve seen so many brands doing exclusive drops for the Middle East for instance, but if there was diversity on a global scale, when it comes to tackling markets that require cultural specific design, we [wouldn’t need a separate collection] because the team would already know how to make decisions that resonate with the community and avoid tensions around what is culturally appropriate,” says fashion commentator Chabbi. For female designers, the benefit is that the woman becomes the subject rather than the object of the design process. “When women design for women, they have an inherent understanding of their bodies,” says recruiter Harvey. Many of SS24’s most size-inclusive collections were designed for women.
The first steps that companies should take to tap into this talent pool is work with organisations that support underrepresented talent, reduce unconscious bias in the hiring process through training or through blind recruitment in the junior levels, and offer internship opportunities with the possibility for progression specifically for underrepresented groups, says talent scout Ngonmo.
Part of the onus is on creative directors, too, who are particularly involved in the hiring of the design teams. “What was beautiful about Virgil was that he brought people along with him,” says Harvey. “There needs to be a huge level of personal commitment [for creative directors] to open that door. There has to be a call to action where a corporate group insists the creative director interviews a certain number of female candidates or people of colour.”
Fashion Minority Report’s Peters agrees. “Nobody’s mad at [these white male creative directors], but now that they’ve taken on these positions, what will they do to change the status quo? After they leave, those brands could go down the route of hiring someone internally to replace them, so these creative directors now have the opportunity to build a diverse team and help people within the team be able to progress and move through the ranks,” he says.
“It’s an opportunity,” he adds. “That’s how you use your privilege. That’s the legacy you can leave outside of creating beautiful clothes.”
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