All eyes on Gucci as it says bye bye to Fashion Week.
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.
Publishers, Beauty of Fashion report, Sephora are organising an event for the retailer’s most dedicated customers to interact with their prized beauty brands. The event will be called Sephoria House Of Beauty, and will take place on October 21st-22nd in LA with installations from over 50 brands for consumers charged between $100 and $500 to explore and shop.
While Sephora cannot confirm which brands will participate in Sephoria, the retailer will likely draw on the many prestige brands in its portfolio, especially the LVMH-owned ones such as Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty. Sephora is joining a multitude of retailers in creating experiences for customers that go beyond shopping in a conventional store. Sephoria will feature a range of set-ups around the "house" theme, including a kitchen where consumers can “play with ingredient-based skincare,” and a laundry room that is the backdrop for cleansers. When it comes to product, Sephoria’s emphasis will be on limited-edition elements such as exclusive colours, packaging design and personalisation, rather than sales. Yeh said the company doesn’t want the event to overlap with the in-store experience.
The goal with Sephoria is to build community and give customers a fun, interactive experience — “lots of juicy experiences that she’s can snap and share and wow her social community with,” said Deborah Yeh, senior vice president of marketing and brand at Sephora. “We’ve been dreaming about something like this for awhile.
Sephora generated between $4.4 billion and $4.9 billion in sales in 2016, according to Coresight Research (LVMH does not break out Sephora's financials).
Nike Inc.’s Converse brand lost its chief marketing officer to streetwear label Supreme, Business of Fashion reports.
Julien Cahn resigned from Converse earlier this year and left the company in February for a marketing role at the up-and-coming brand. Cahn joined Converse in 2016 from parent Nike. Several executives have recently left Nike in the wake of an internal probe into misconduct, though Cahn’s departure wasn’t related, people said. Nike began an internal review of misconduct last month, after complaints from employees. A handful of executives have exited, including Trevor Edwards, who was one of the favorites to succeed Chief Executive Officer Mark Parker.
Last week, an analyst’s report said nine Nike employees at director level or higher, including Cahn, had left the company in the past 35 days amid “recent cultural turmoil.” Nike executives go from director to senior director and then vice president. The departures are seen adding additional “downside risk” to Nike’s long-term growth trajectory, Sam Poser of Susquehanna Financial Group wrote in a note to clients.
France's LVMH is helping projects by upcoming entrepreneurs in the luxury goods space, including a start-up whose software might help detect counterfeits. The owners of Louis Vuitton, aim to support the new businesses by hosting them in a mega-campus where they can collaborate with its in-house brands.
LVMH, the world's biggest luxury goods group, is following in the footsteps of French cosmetics giant L'Oréal in grabbing a corner of Station F, a vast startup incubator in Paris where it offers rent-free space to the startups.
"The idea is to animate and activate those conversations around the things that might affect the luxury industry," said Ian Rogers, who is a former Apple executive who joined LVMH in 2015 as chief digital officer.
Paris is among one of the major European cities bidding to displace London's dominance in the startup scene as BREXIT looms and President Emmanuel Macron pushes a pro-reform agenda to promote business and investment.
Station F was launched last year by French billionaire Xavier Niel, who is also the partner of Delphine Arnault, an executive at Vuitton and daughter of LVMH boss Bernard Arnault.
The first campaign video got launched on 7th Jan during the Golden Globes. We love the tag line " Everyone deserves a comeback " which is a direct play at Winona's career and the L'Oreal Paris's Elvive line of products.