PARIS: Christian Dior, the luxury house that is part of the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton group, has lost one of the brightest bulbs in its couture chandelier.
The Paris house announced Thursday that a new menswear designer would take over from Hedi Slimane, 38, after Dior and Slimane failed during drawn-out negotiations to agree on a way to support a new label under his own name.
Slimane, the creator who gave a jolt of youth and cool to the bourgeois men's line and lifted sales to about 10 percent of the company, was swiftly replaced by Kris Van Assche, 30, a Belgian designer who formerly worked with Slimane before setting up his own line.
The news is far more significant to the luxury industry than this latest round of designer musical chairs suggests. With the big brand conglomerates needing deep talent to plump up the bottom lines of publicly quoted companies and with aging designers about to reach the end of their illustrious careers, the 30-something talents are at a premium.
Slimane, with his strong design personality and powerful aesthetic, had galvanized and modernized the image of Dior Homme, using his connections to the world of rock, like making a fashion icon out of bad boy Pete Doherty, and translating his passion for photography and for the techno world into striking advertising campaigns and into accessories for carrying cyberspace gizmos.
Far from being dropped by Dior, as rumors had suggested, the designer himself decided to walk away, rather than sell his name in order to set up his own label, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who declined to named, citing the confidentiality of the discussions.
The designer had previously said that he wanted to create a women's line to fit with his skinny, androgynous male tailoring and that had been his objective since he signed with Dior in 2001.
The sticking point of the Dior negotiations was apparently over the ownership of any eponymous line, said the person familiar with the discussions. In the case of John Galliano, Dior's women's designer and of Marc Jacobs, creative director of Louis Vuitton, LVMH has complete ownership of both names and therefore control of development and strategy of their personal labels.
Sidney Toledano, the president and chief executive of Dior, while refusing to discuss the tension between Slimane and his former parent company, admitted that it was not easy to make appropriate choices of designers who were mature enough to give creative input to product, image, branding and various ready-to-wear collections.
The departure of Slimane is being compared with the ousting of Tom Ford from Gucci Group three years ago. Ford will next month open a self-financed menswear store on Madison Avenue in New York and has signed licensing deals with Marcolin Group for sunglasses as well as fragrance and skin care with the Estée Lauder group. Meanwhile, the Gucci brand, which Ford made a fashion leader in the 1990s, has had two subsequent designers, but has continued to flourish financially.
Other top designers have left their own labels, raising questions at the time about how the departure of a big name would hit the company's bottom line. Jil Sander, for example, voluntarily left the company she had sold to the Prada group, later mending fences before walking out a second time. In that case, the company suffered financially until the arrival of Belgian designer Raf Simons who is now repairing the brand's ragged reputation. Helmut Lang also walked away from his own label, then part of Prada, in 2005.
Is Slimane's departure likely to hurt Dior's bottom line, as the company aims to reach its sales target of €1 billion, or $1.3 billion?
Antoine Colonna, a financial analyst with Merrill Lynch, said that would depend on how Dior's growth and position in the industry is viewed.
"With Jil Sander, its business was driven by style, but it depends if a company is driven by accessories, like Gucci, or whether it is a fashion company," Colonna said. "The key question is whether Dior is more timeless and I would say that it is a company in transition."
Colonna said Gucci and Dior shared the fact that in their companies menswear accounted for far less than women's wear.
On the more general question of how companies could manage the departure or retirement of signature designers, Colonna said that it all depended on the preparation and "how they pass on the baton," citing the choice facing a company such as Armani about whether to "drive the process" or leave others to fill the vacuum.
The future of Slimane will depend on his ability to find funding for his own label and for that, Colonna said, any investor would need patience.
"No one today can do anything like Armani in the 1980's," Colonna said. "It will be very interesting to see who puts money in and takes the long-term stance."
