In-house designers discuss the power dynamics at big brands
What's it like trying to climb the ladder at a company like Louis Vuitton, The Row or Fendi?
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, this week we’ll be discussing the power dynamics inside the often old-fashioned, hierarchical luxury brands of Paris, Milan, London and New York.
I was at a wedding this summer and one of the executives at ████████ asked me what I thought of the label.
I told him, “Not only have you lost the entire identity of your brand trying to be relevant, I’ve also heard horrible things about the creative director. You’ve made the executive decision to hire a white man who is mean – how are you contributing to the change you’re professing to make?”
He said, “He may not be the easiest person to work with, but he really is a creative genius.” This is exactly the type of bullshit that keeps this animosity in place in workplaces and design studios.
██████, Design Director at ████████
As an almost 40-year-old design director, I prefer to work for an extremely strong creative director who knows exactly what they want, rather than being behind the scenes controlling a very young person, which sounds like a nightmare.
There’s nothing worse than standing in front of a creative director with multiple options and having them reject everything. And when you ask: “Tell me what you need,” they say: “I don’t know.” That is where things go wrong.
This is when the most famous downfalls of creative directors in the past ten years have happened.
████████, Head of Design at ████
A good creative director listens, and has the curiosity to get feedback from his creative team. That makes an incredible leader. The problem, of course, is that these profiles are overloaded with work. They don’t just work on the collection, they also need to work on communication, on strategy, on ad campaigns, on social media. It’s a lot of work, and it’s what justifies the high paychecks. In fashion, you get paid a lot of money because you need to do a lot of work. You basically work twice as much as a CEO, with the creative burden on top, which is something that is intangible. There are no guidelines, there is no format for creative work. It’s a very tough position to be in.
██████, Head of Design Pre-Collection at ████