Lessons from a fashion CEO who threw in the towel
An interview with Simon Whitehouse, who, after years of working in senior leadership roles at companies like JW Anderson and Art Partner, became disillusioned with the industry.
By Jorinde Croese
Simon Whitehouse has spent more than three decades moving through fashion’s most influential rooms – from executive roles at Donna Karan, Diesel and Matthew Williamson to CEO positions at JW Anderson, Art Partner, Eco-Age and Reference Studios. In 2014, he became JW Anderson’s first CEO, shortly after LVMH acquired a minority stake in the brand; later, he led Art Partner and Eco-Age, and founded EBIT™ – Enjoy Being in Transition – a purpose-driven project using fashion, music and art to open conversations around mental health. In recent years, Whitehouse has been reconsidering what leadership in fashion should look like when separated from status, extraction and endless growth. In this conversation, he speaks candidly about burnout, the myth of the glamorous designer brand, the limits of the CEO/creative director binary, luxury’s crisis of value, and why young designers may need less fantasy – and more structural honesty – than the industry is willing to give them.
“We all worked as if this was going to happen, yes or yes. We would have done anything. And that’s a drug.”
You’ve moved across so many different pockets of the industry – brands, stores, agencies, sustainability. Was that a conscious choice, or did opportunities come up and feel right?
You don’t find many people in the industry with those angles, with that prism. It creates different dimensions of how to look at the industry, from all different angles. In the early part of me setting out to work… I should be honest with you. When I was up North, I was deeply involved in the ecstasy scene, and not many people know this. Back then, I never imagined that any kind of life outside of bouncing around nightclubs and warehouses was achievable. Stoke-on-Trent is small, but it’s also a very powerful place culturally. A lot of the ecstasy scene and the rave scene was either born there or stemmed from there. A lot of the teenage lads I grew up with went on to found amazing things, like Renaissance nightclub for instance, and some were deep in the Haçienda in Manchester. A lot of my peer group from when I was a teenager are either dead, on heroin, in prison, or they’ve got £40 million stuffed under the forest somewhere. It’s mental. So I never imagined having a career at all. Then one night, we got chased by an unmarked police car. If we’d got caught, I was probably going to jail for about 15 years. I woke up the next day and thought, “This is not me. I cannot. I’m not ready for this.” Exactly 10 weeks later – 70 days later – I moved to London. I didn’t know anybody there.
Were you 19, 20?
I was 21. My mate in Stoke had opened a shop selling Camper, Paul Smith, Katharine Hamnett, Vivienne Westwood. Trendy things for the clubbers, football gear for the hooligans. He opened it when he was 15. He’s been one of my best mates since we were four years old. I ended up working with him for a year while I was finishing university. So when I decided to move to London, I was going to get any job – literally any job – just to get away. Martin called the guys at Camper, and said, “Listen, our Simon’s moving to London. He needs a job, just a weekend or whatever.” I interviewed with them, and they made me a manager.
Wow, that’s pretty quick to become a manager.
It was a little shoe shop in Bluewater Shopping Centre that had just opened. It wasn’t a major thing. But within 12 months, I was the area manager for all the stores in London and going to Majorca to do the buying. Then the wife of the managing director of Camper was the director at Donna Karan. We had dinner one night, and she asked me to go there. I started out working in wholesale, and that was when I began to think, maybe this could be a career. Otherwise, I was just having a laugh, really. But I was always working hard, and it was all very natural. I’ve never asked for anything in my life. I’ve never asked for a pay rise, a promotion, a business title, nothing. It’s always been people asking me to do things, and I’ve considered it. Sometimes I flipped a coin, and sometimes I said yes. I moved to New York for the first time on the flip of a coin. It all happened very fast. Then my dad got sick, and I moved back from New York. That was exactly 20 years ago, and it was one of the most traumatic times in my life, because he passed away after a couple of months. My brother had a mental breakdown when we were teenagers – he was 20, I was 17 – so it all felt very raw. I felt I needed to be in the UK, so I stayed.
Eventually, one of the old CEOs of Donna Karan, who was an investor in Matthew Williamson, said to Joseph and Matthew, “You should meet Simon. He’s in London, he’s a good guy, and you need help commercially.” So I started working with Matthew Williamson. I loved working with Matthew, but it was a very small business, and I was used to something much more dynamic. Then Diesel called about moving to Italy. I had no real aspiration to move to Diesel, but after a very rough period in London – my dad dying, depression, a strange divorce – going to a different country felt like oxygen.
Like a fresh start.
Exactly. Clear blue skies, clear oxygen. I’d been through therapy, I’d survived a suicide attempt, and London was grey, and half the time I was in a pub. Milan felt interesting. I’d been there many times and always felt maybe one day I’d like to live there. So I did.
That meant working closely with Mr Rosso and Andrea Baldo, who is the CEO of Mulberry now. Andrea and I had three really deep years together. It was a great professional experience, but also a really good life experience. Then, by surprise, I got a call from LVMH to go back to the group and meet Jonathan. That’s how it worked out with Jonathan and JW Anderson.