Calvin Klein is closing down its luxury collection business, closing its offices in Milan and making staff redundant in New York, according to a source. Michelle Kessler-Sanders, the president of the 205W39NYC ready-to-wear business, will leave the company in June 2019. Overall, about 100 people, or 1 percent of PVH's global workforce, will be affected.

After Calvin Klein parted ways with chief creative officer Raf Simons at the end of 2018, they said it was rethinking its approach to the luxury market, on a strategy that would “[offer] an unexpected mix of influences and moving at an accelerated pace."

In January, it was announced that the brand would close its 654 Madison Avenue flagship store, which Simons renovated in 2017, in addition to other changes, some of which came to fruition very soon.

The brand’s sales come from their underwear and denim lines, much of which is produced by third-party licensing partners. But chief executive Steve Shiffman still plans to develop what the source called "aspirational" products. The search for a new design director to lead that effort continues, but it's presumed that the designer won’t be as high profile as Simons.

‍

Gucci is introducing a series of global, pop-up stores, designed to create even more reasons for customers to shop across the year. This is especially in regions where luxury brand may not already have a physical outpost. Target destinations over the next year include Chengdu, Sao Paulo, Taipei, Bangkok, Moscow, Mexico City, Dubai and many more across Europe, Latin America, the US, Middle East and Asia Pacific regions.

The Pop-Ups are called “Gucci Pin” and will each be open an average of five weeks. In some cases, shops will open and close over the course of a year in the same city or location, dependent on different occasions. Digital content will play a major role in keeping the customers hooked.

The first shop opened on November 5 in Hong Kong, and will be followed by Fukuoka, Seongnam, Paris and Denver in the first wave of openings throughout the month.

Gucci Chief Executive Marco Bizzarri said that the Gucci Pin stores will allow the brand to reach different consumer segments than it can with its brick and mortar stores. “We are therefore looking at Gucci Pin as a new map for new territories, combining an immersive digital activation to further enhance the physical experience,” he said.

The idea is simple, pop-up shops will feed the growing demand for constant newness, especially among younger consumers buying entry-level price point items plus with Limited edition runs creating a sense of urgency.

This strategy is especially important because Gucci’s sales growth have slowed down this year. The brand saw revenue increase 11 percent on a comparable basis in the third quarter of 2019, compared to 35 percent in the same period the prior year. But Gucci is still on track to reach its goal of €10 billion in annual revenue in the coming years.

The first wave is all about gifts for the holiday season. The second, opening in early 2020, will celebrate the Chinese New Year, later in the year, there will be a “psychedelic” theme, with products designed to reflect the concepts.

Asia is Gucci’s largest and fastest-growing region, so it’s no surprise that many of the first stores to open are in the region.

Looking forward to whats in store for Dubai and the rest of the Middle East.

‍

Fashion week is NO MORE! thats according to Gucci.

In a virtual press conference, the label’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, announced that Gucci was slashing the number of fashion shows it holds each year from five to two. Declaring the fashion week calendar obsolete, Michele said he was no longer adhering to a rota staked out by spring/summer, autumn/winter, cruise and pre-fall shows. “I think these are stale and underfed words … clothes should have a longer life than that which these words attribute to them,” he said. Instead, the brand will show “seasonless” collections twice a year. There are no plans for a show in September, when the Gucci collection would normally be staged as a key part of Milan fashion week.

All fashion shows have stopped in its tracks due to Covid-19, with mens-wear and haute couture shows scheduled for June and July cancelled, and the September fashion weeks in doubt. A question mark hangs over not just when – but whether – any of the events will ever come back.

“Above all, we understand we went way too far,” Michele writes on Instagram. “Our reckless actions have burned the house we live in. We conceived of ourselves as separated from nature, we felt cunning and almighty.”

Michele, who has a passion for flowery maximalism that encompasses his prose as well as his clothes, added: “We usurped nature, we dominated and wounded it. We incited Prometheus, and buried Pan."

“So much haughtiness made us lose our sisterhood with the butterflies, the flowers, the trees and the roots. So much outrageous greed made us lose the harmony and the care, the connection and the belonging.”

As the mightiest brand to come out in support of a move to a leaner, less wasteful fashion system, this announcement is significant.

Discussions on the topic of sustainability has been ongoing in the industry for the past month, but the big brands have until now been mostly silent.

The biggest labels, which have profited the most from the system as it stands and have the necessary financial cushion to ride out the incoming economic crisis, have been less motivated to radical change than smaller brands. By throwing their weight behind the forces of change, Gucci has the ability to shift the balance of power in this conversation.

Last month, Saint Laurent announced it would sit out Paris fashion week this September and set its own schedule going forward, a decision made in amid “waves of radical change”.

The brand will “lead its own rhythm … [and] take ownership of its calendar”. Saint Laurent’s opt-out was notable because its catwalk shows, held on the Friday evening of each Paris fashion week on a huge open-air catwalk directly beneath the Eiffel Tower, have become a red-letter date in the French fashion calendar, drawing a supermodel cast, a celebrity front row and large crowds who watch from behind barriers. The absence of a marquee name central to the notion of Parisian chic is a blow to Paris fashion week’s status as the heart of French fashion.

Gucci’s revenue for 2019 was €9.6bn (£8.6bn), dwarfing its Kering stablemate Saint Laurent, which recorded revenue of €2bn for the same period. As the largest and most profitable brand in the Kering luxury group, which also owns Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta, Gucci exerts influence across the industry.

Gucci’s influence is not merely economic. Since taking over five years ago, Michele has positioned himself at the progressive edge of fashion’s engagement with culture.

On the catwalk, his male models wear pussy-bow silk blouses and babydoll dresses. He has dressed the pop star Harry Styles in pearl earrings on stage and the actor Jared Leto in a floor-length evening gown on the Met Gala red carpet.

His embrace of gender fluidity has revolutionised the traditional codes of menswear embedded in Italian fashion, and shifted the mainstream away from what he has called “an aesthetic of toxic masculinity”.

Overhaul of the fashion week system and its heavy carbon footprint has been mooted for years, but in 2020 change is becoming an economic necessity. Kering and LVMH, the two largest luxury groups, recorded a drop in revenue of about 15% for the first three months of this year.

Jean-Marc Duplaix, Kering’s chief financial officer, told Womenswear Daily last month that the group was planning “drastic” cost reductions at brand level as it braced for ongoing poor results.

In recent years, Gucci has staged blockbuster shows at Westminster Abbey in London and at the Capitoline Museum in Rome, in addition to events during fashion week. The latest cruise collection had been scheduled for an unveiling in San Francisco last week, until the pandemic forced cancellation.

Lanvin has let go of artistic director Olivier Lapidus, less than a year after his initial appointment. The remaining in-house design team will be responsible for the women's collection until a replacement is found. The struggling brand has announced additional leadership changes: Joann Cheng, president of Fosun Fashion Group and chairman of the Lanvin board of directors, will become the interim chief executive of the house. Nicolas Druz, who has served as Lanvin general manager since 2017, will take up the new position of managing director of Fosun Fashion Group to "support the group's current and future business expansion in Europe." Ms Cheng continued "We sincerely thank Mr Druz and Mr Lapidus for their contributions to Lanvin's glorious heritage". "In seeking candidates for the permanent positions of CEO and artistic director, we want to ensure we find people who share the spirit of Lanvin. The re-launch of Lanvin with fresh talents, while adhering to the values that the brand has maintained since 1889, is fundamental to returning the maison to its rightful position at the top table of the world's most lauded and innovative fashion houses."