In-house designers discuss ageing in fashion
Age is anything but a number in the industry. We spoke with designers at LV, Chanel, Bottega, Prada, and many more to understand the unique challenges this creates inside the big houses.
Behind-the-scenes content is increasingly popular in fashion, communicating the PR-approved musings of this week’s creative director (gone the next). But what we really need is honest information about the inner workings of the top brands and conglomerates. We decided it was time to ask the experts who are never asked.
1 Granary has interviewed in-house designers at the height of their careers – the stalwarts who have been researching, conceptualising, designing, and producing every collection for the past three decades. Over the next few weeks, we will release a series of newsletters devoted to a different thematic area that emerged from our conversations: money, power dynamics, motherhood, equality, ageism and much more.
Following our conversations about salaries, power dynamics, and internal politics, in this edition we’ll be discussing the power dynamics inside the often old-fashioned, hierarchical luxury brands of Paris, Milan, London and New York.
To go back to creative directors getting younger and younger, in the past decade, we had a lot of industry names becoming creative directors – they were around 35 to 45. It worked out, but they weren’t as easy to control from a collection direction department, or from a merchandising and business department.
The reason these young designers are coming in is because people want to be excited by a young face on the cover of a magazine, but these young designers are also easier to mould. The company will be more design-driven under a more experienced creative director. Brands are able to build a very controlled world around a young person. Someone with experience will push back against commercial demands and know what they want.
If you build a very tight framework, you can easily place a young person within it and just ask them to tick the boxes.
████████, Head of Design at ████
The companies carry responsibility here. They can’t just hire a 25-year-old to be a creative director and expect them to be able to handle it. Companies have so much power to change things. The industry is too fast – they could make it slower, but that would mean making less money. Same goes for the people they hire. If you want to invest in quality, you cannot put a 25-year-old in that position. It’s not just about making a collection. You need to understand the whole process, you need to understand what goes on commercially. You need to learn what you can give up and what you need to fight for. How can you know this without experience?
██████, Creative Director Womenswear at ████