It is very difficult to follow and understand the slightest variations that sometimes characterize the high fashion market: in a scenario of losses, growth and stagnation, it is not always possible to outline the strengths and style drops that have involved the success or failure of a specific strategy; was it marketing? The proposed collection? One comment too many on social media?
In the incredible machine of modern industries it is therefore impossible to really establish who is really “behind the wheel”, and if we talk about high fashion, the perception of the public is even more staggered. Many, in fact, think that they are the creative directors, the designers, the stylists to lead the biggest fashion houses in the world, a sort of "Fashion-crazia" in which it is the artist himself who defines every single aspect regarding his creations.
However, a recent analysis just ended Milan Fashion Week highlights something quite different: it was not an edition appreciated by critics, who described it as "commercial" and "predictable" and the culprits of these poor choices would not be the designers, the more the CEO, the executives of the big fashion houses.
"They are the ones making the real decisions today", he writes in fact Angelo Flaccavento su Business of Fashion, "And the plans they devise are very predictable: attract young consumers and create products that become commercial hits."
Create, consume, sell, start over.
A production cycle that has thesaving and earnings as a primary interest, and which as a main consequence, according to Flaccavento, has an absence of substantial spontaneity in the high fashion industry. To feed this philosophy, also the different interests that directly concern designers and CEOs: if in fact a stylist craves and fears criticism from the public and critics, a CEO dreams of incredible sales and continuous growth of their profit margins.
A role of extreme importance, therefore, but also equally ephemeral.
Secondo Vogue Business, in fact, on average a CEO represents a brand for only five years, then being replaced by another manager. There are exceptions to this rule, as is the case with Gucci (creative director and CEO, in fact, have found an incredibly successful artistic and economic balance), concrete proof of how essential these two roles are for the proper functioning of the brand and of a company.
The vision of the tormented creative, forced by the economic needs of a despotic and authoritarian company, has now faded: success in haute couture reaches heights never seen before if the creative world and the strategic world support each other in a relationship of conscious and refined symbiosis.
