Fashion’s great game of musical chairs at Europe’s big luxury houses is fueling an obsession with creative directors on social media, rife with memes about who’s getting hired and fired — or should be.
Now high-street chains, retailers and specialty fashion brands are getting swept up in the fray, with many recently naming their first creative director in a bid to burnish their style credentials, ramp up storytelling and forge a stronger vision of the brand image and communications.
Among those that have taken the plunge are Iro, Ray-Ban, Eddie Bauer, Etam, ThreadBeast, Mithridate, La Martina, Begg x Co, Harvey Nichols, EBIT and Russell & Bromley.
“You can sum it up under marketing: There’s a big elevation trend in the industry — to become a bit buzzier, a bit more relevant,” said Achim Berg, founder of Frankfurt-based FashionSights, an independent corporate think tank. “People love to present themselves in a bigger way and this is reflected in the role of a creative director.”
Headhunters and other experts agree there’s plenty of upside when mid-tier or premium brands name a creative director, especially amid a slowdown in luxury due partly to widespread price increases that HSBC has dubbed “greedflation.”
“These brands have a real opportunity, when luxury starts softening, to create a real point of view,” said Karen Harvey, founder and chief executive officer of an eponymous consulting and search firm in New York. “What comes with that is the need to really refine DNA, refine their creative point of view, and make a strong connection with the audience.”
Looks from La Martina’s fall 2025 collection.
Courtesy of La Martina
Berg, a former management consultant at McKinsey & Co., noted that most fashion brands of any scale already have designers, merchants and product chiefs leading the creative charge.
However, today brands must do constant storytelling to engage consumers, hence “it is not un-clever to personalize this and put someone at the forefront,” he said.
Harvey agreed, noting most fashion companies shelter strong heads of design.
“A creative director brings something else — training in brand codes and DNA and connecting the dots between the brand and the product, the brand and the audience and bringing an elevated perspective,” she said in an interview. “I think a brand is going to hit its ceiling when the focus has been purely on clothes.”
In most cases, brands tapped senior fashion designers for their first creative director — Iro nabbing someone who designed for houses including Lanvin, Rabanne and Dior, La Martina tapping a chief brand strategist from Tod’s — though Ray-Ban went for American rapper A$AP Rocky.
There are potential pitfalls, observers agreed.
First, hiring a creative director introduces a new hierarchy into an organization that may have been more democratic in the product creation perspective, Harvey said. Power held by retail, merchandising and marketing executives may diminish, or at least must be shared with the new creative leader.
In addition, there is always the risk of poor casting.
“A year after somebody’s come in and started putting their hand on things, if it doesn’t check in the first two or three collections, it’s hard to wind back,” Harvey said. “If they take the collection too far away from what the consumer is used to, they could be unintentionally walking the consumer away from the brand, so I think they have to be careful.”
Mathias Ohrel, founder of m-O, a Paris-based recruitment firm in the luxury sector, said elevating the product and the content is what drives brands to recruit their first creative director.
Last October, John Skelton, a British retail executive perhaps best known as founder of London retailer LN-CC, was named cultural and creative director of EBIT, a clothing brand that aims to spark conversations about mental health.
The EBIT fall 2025 collection
Courtesy of EBIT
“It’s very unusual, and his title is cultural and creative director, plus the discussion on mental health that he’s going to drive is very original,” Ohrel commented. “But it illustrates this idea that you need to be more singular on the market.…Now, it’s all about editorialization of everything. The objective is to enhance communication, image, positioning and the editorialization of content.”
In Ohrel’s view, “when you hire a creative director, you don’t replace the designers who create the product, but you create a new layer of coherence.”
He concurred that introducing a creative director can be a “shock” for an organization.
“It is difficult for the existing teams. Some of them may have been working in the company for 20 years, and all the sudden, they are more remote from the vision than they used to be,” Ohrel said. “So it’s very much a management challenge for a creative director to be able to rally the company around his or her vision.”
A pyramidical structure, wherein ideas trickle down from haute couture or runway collections, is typical in the luxury sector, but unfamiliar in high-street chains or mid-tier brands. “The power in these companies was always more into merchandising and buying than the creative vision,” Ohrel said.
So when does a fashion chain, retailer or mid-price brand need to hire a creative director?
According to Harvey, it’s a matter of ambition, and wishing to stand out from the crowd.
“For brands to really get engagement, they need something more than clothes,” she said. “You have a few options: collaborations, bringing on a creative director or launching subbrands to address certain markets.
“Typically, a CEO alone, a merchant alone or a CMO alone without a very focused vision, can’t execute the kind of engagement,” Harvey said, noting that the strategy must be comprehensive, stretching from social media to the retail experience.
FirstSights’ Berg also mentioned celebrity affiliations as another possible path to elevation. But bringing on a creative director “signals a new beginning. It provides a new story, hopefully generating some interest from fashion people.”
The mechanism is similar to what Europe’s big heritage houses have done in recent decades: bringing in a strong visionary to give the brand meaning, a look and a silhouette, Berg said.
Mary Gallagher, senior consultant at Find executive consulting, noted that collaborations between marquee designers and the high street — Karl Lagerfeld and H&M were the pioneers in 2004 — have yielded to fast-fashion giants hiring luxury veterans as full-time creative directors: Clare Waight Keller for Uniqlo C and Christophe Lemaire for Uniqlo U; Zac Posen for Gap; Vanessa Seward for Begg x Co. and, most recently, & Other Stories, which said its newly appointed chief creative officer Jonathan Saunders would be “shaping how the brand evolves and expresses itself across all touchpoints.”
A look from Vanessa Seward’s first capsule collection for Begg x Co.
Courtesy of Begg x Co
“So far, consumers of these brands are excited and engaged. If the brand is playing the long game, it could be a win-win,” Gallagher said in an interview.
In her view, the optimal set-up for success is “for the creative director to have excellent ancillary support and to keep close to the business side, but for the business side to stay in its lane creatively — not commercially — and allow time for things to develop.”
Gallagher also gave a thumbs-up to fashion chains or retailers bringing on a creative director, who can “enhance the tone, vision and design aesthetic, mixing archives, if they exist, trends and innovation.
“Bringing in a creative director signals the brand wants to distinguish itself from the competition or it may want to reposition itself, its house codes and DNA,” she said. “Beyond actual design, so much of what any creative director does is make choices. Even if they’re not designing for the avant-garde or luxury, a creative director of a high-street brand is steering and curating the quality of the offer.”
Asked if consumers are aware and interested in the creative personalities behind the fashions they buy, Gallagher noted that the “press, content creators, social media and others are keeping a scorecard of these changes, so for the general public there’s a trickle-down effect of interest if there’s an actual ‘name’ designing clothes for the high street.”
To be sure, a designer’s fame tends to multiply quickly once named to a big brand. Argentinian designer Adrian Appiolaza, who worked in the studios of Loewe and Chloé, had 15,000 followers on Instagram before he joined Moschino as creative director in January 2024, and nearly 70,000 today, for example.
ListenFirst, the social analytics company, detected an 18 percent increase in fashion creative director conversations in 2024 versus 2023.
According to fashion historian and writer Tony Glenville, the term creative director emerged around the late ’70s, at the same time as creative consultants and fashion forecasting.
“It was the boom time for fashion and huge quantities of product,” he said. “As brands became huge and global, they needed roles to keep everyone on message.”
Today, creative director and artistic director are sometimes used interchangeably, though the latter title is more common in watches and jewelry.
— With contributions from Lily Templeton
The Iro store in Los Angeles.
Courtesy of Iro
