LONDON — With the appointment of Martine Rose at Balenciaga, Kering gave the clearest indication yet of the direction it plans to take regarding the creative direction at its brands.
It appears Kering‘s focus is on appealing to a younger generation, and on tapping seasoned female creative directors in a sphere long dominated by men.
These women, some of whom have already worked in the brands’ design studios, will be tasked with serving up collections that are commercial but still “avant-garde,” using Kering chief executive officer Luca de Meo‘s phrase of the month.
Why else would Kering have picked Rose, who worked alongside Demna on Balenciaga menswear in the early phase of his long tenure at the house?
She is widely regarded as having been a major influence on the brand’s oversize, distressed and vintage-flecked men’s silhouettes.
Her laid-back, urban cool and the streetwise, gender-fluid looks she created for her eponymous brand, which she has now paused following her new appointment, have won Rose high-profile fans, including Drake, Naomi Campbell, DJ Goldie, Kendrick Lamar and Timothée Chalamet. In 2025, Chalamet famously rolled up to the London premiere of “A Complete Unknown” on a Lime bike, dressed head-to-toe in Rose’s designs.
He wore a slim suit based on Rose’s “Bowie” silhouette, while his silky shirt, in blue, black and green nodded to the one Bob Dylan wore on a visit to London in 1965 with American folk musician Joan Baez. Chalamet even wore Martine Rose mules on the night, which the designer said was a “high-risk strategy” given his mode of transport.
Timothée Chalamet at the London premiere of “A Complete Unknown” wearing Martine Rose.
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images for
It was a zeitgeist-y moment — one clearly not lost on Team Kering.
Revealing Rose’s appointment on Friday, de Meo described Balenciaga as a “house of radical creativity, challenging conventions and redefining the boundaries of fashion.”
He added that Rose “embodies this spirit with a fresh, fearless and deeply contemporary vision. Her connection to the new generation, and her instinctive understanding of culture, bring a new dimension to the house. Her appointment reflects our ambition to keep Balenciaga at the forefront of innovation, creativity and culture.”
That vision couldn’t be more at odds with the aesthetic of Balenciaga’s outgoing creative director, Pierpaolo Piccioli. For his debut couture collection in July, Piccioli sent out feathery, topiary-like gowns and dressed Gigi Hadid in a dramatic, face-framing, body-engulfing hood of jutting rooster feathers.
Thought-provoking, but not so modern.
Bernstein’s Luca Solca told WWD that Rose’s “streetwear experience and aesthetic sensibility is closer to what Balenciaga had become in consumers’ minds under Demna’s leadership. I see it as a step in the right direction.”
It looks as if a similar story will play out at Saint Laurent, where Anthony Vaccarello is leaving after a successful decade on the runway. He is widely expected to be succeeded by Chemena Kamali, currently Chloé’s creative director.
Kamali is no stranger to Saint Laurent, having served as women’s ready-to-wear design director under Vaccarello from 2016 until 2023, when she landed the top job at Chloé.
In a report on Kering published last month, Barclays said the new Saint Laurent designer’s focus will be on “currently underrepresented product categories, such as women’s daywear and menswear, on high-end leather goods, and less penetrated regions such as China/Asia.”
Chemena Kamali, creative director of Chloé.
WWD via Getty Images
The final piece of Kering’s creative puzzle will be McQueen, which had a female designer for 13 years in the talented Sarah Burton. After they parted ways, she moved to Kering’s rival LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton as creative director of Givenchy.
Burton was succeeded by Seán McGirr, who’s also been shown the door amid a major restructuring, layoffs and the downsizing of the retail network.
As reported, de Meo wants to establish “a bold new direction for the house, building on its unique heritage of exceptional tailoring, uncompromising creativity and rebellion, to reaffirm its position as one of the most innovative and culturally relevant voices in luxury.”
It’s a tall order, and the pressure will be on McGirr’s successor, whose appointment should be announced in the next weeks.
As reported, de Meo is banking on creative director renewal to rev up demand in a cold climate for soft luxury. But it’s clear that investors are worried that all the creative churn will prove more of a challenge than an opportunity.
Kering released its third-quarter results last month. They showed that Demna’s fresh take on Gucci, the group’s star brand and main profit engine, struggled to gain speed amid a sector-wide slump in demand in China.
A look from Gucci’s 2026 holiday campaign.
The French luxury group said revenues for the three months ended Sept. 30 remained flat at reported exchange rates, totaling 3.35 billion euros. This represented a decrease of 1 percent in comparable terms, above a consensus forecast for a 1.3 percent organic sales drop.
Gucci missed expectations, posting a 6 percent drop in sales at constant exchange rates, worse than the 5.4 percent decrease expected by analysts.
During a call with analysts, management argued that the creative shake-up would eventually bear fruit.
“Each brand is on a specific trajectory, and each situation is very different,” said chief financial officer Armelle Poulou.
She emphasized that Kering was putting in place a “more efficient operating model” around designers to ensure their vision is backed up by the product development, marketing and merchandising teams.
In an exclusive interview with WWD last month, de Meo said his ambition was to “reengineer” the creative process.
Kuba Dabrowski/WWD
“A creative director for me is like a captain, the playmaker of a team. He’s the one that has more talent, that kind of technical ability to solve the game in an unexpected way,” the former Renault Group boss said.
“But without a [support] system around, I believe that we cannot run multibillion, multicategory, multigeography businesses and ask them to do everything from store layout to marketing.
“So I will try to change the way the studio interacts with the rest of the organization in the spirit of finding a more collaborative way of handling the complexity,” he said.
