A prefabricated timber house stood on a lawn inside a temporary pavilion beside the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Models walked through it wearing houndstooth, herringbone and check cut in technical yarns. That was Pharrell Williams presenting a men’s collection, and it was one show in a season that has rearranged almost every studio in Paris and Milan. The luxury menswear creative directors working today inherited their houses mid-sentence. Knowing who they are, what each one actually controls, and which house codes they have kept is the quickest way to read what men will be wearing next.
What a Creative Director Actually Does at a Luxury Fashion House
A creative director sets the design language of a house across collections, campaigns, casting and often store design. A studio or design director works inside that language rather than setting it.
The title is not standardised, and the wording tells you more than it looks like it does. Demna holds the title of artistic director at Gucci, which in that house carries authority over the whole brand image. Pieter Mulier arrived at Versace as chief creative officer, a phrasing that usually signals control of accessories, communication and retail as well as clothing.
Remits also differ by category. Pharrell Williams directs menswear only at Louis Vuitton. Grace Wales Bonner has been appointed to men’s ready-to-wear at Hermès alone. Jonathan Anderson runs menswear, womenswear and haute couture at Dior.
That difference matters on the rail. A designer with a menswear-only remit can move quickly on tailoring. A designer holding an entire house usually resets bags, campaigns and shop interiors first, because that is where a change registers fastest.
The rule of thumb is simple. A new chief creative officer changes the image first and the cut of a jacket last.
Who Leads Menswear at Each Major Luxury House Right Now
Twelve houses currently have a named designer directing menswear, and one of the largest, Giorgio Armani, has no creative director at all.
Here is the full picture before the details on each one.
- Dior, Jonathan Anderson, with menswear, womenswear, and haute couture.
- Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams, menswear only.
- Gucci, Demna, the whole house, as artistic director.
- Prada, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, jointly credited on every collection.
- Zegna, Alessandro Sartori, artistic director across all Zegna brands.
- Hermès, Grace Wales Bonner, men’s ready-to-wear, with her first show still to come.
- Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello, menswear and womenswear.
- Celine, Michael Rider, the whole house.
- Maison Margiela, Glenn Martens, the whole house, alongside Diesel.
- Loewe, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the whole house, jointly.
- Burberry, Daniel Lee, the whole house, as chief creative officer.
- Versace, Pieter Mulier, the whole house, as chief creative officer.
- Giorgio Armani, no named successor, with menswear designed by Leo Dell’Orco.
Several of those appointments are less than a year old, which is why a number of these houses are still readable as works in progress.
Why So Many Luxury Menswear Creative Directors Changed at Once
Most of Europe’s largest houses replaced their creative leadership inside roughly eighteen months, a churn the industry nicknamed the mercato after the football transfer window.
Kering moved Demna from Balenciaga to Gucci and installed Pierpaolo Piccioli, formerly of Valentino, at Balenciaga. LVMH gave Dior to Jonathan Anderson and handed Loewe to Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the pair who founded Proenza Schouler.
Chanel took Matthieu Blazy from Bottega Veneta, and Louise Trotter took Bottega Veneta from him. Fendi has since united its departments under a single chief creative officer in Maria Grazia Chiuri, starting with womenswear and reaching menswear afterwards.
The commercial reasoning was consistent. Quiet luxury had run its course as a selling idea, spending had slowed, and boards concluded that a named designer was the fastest way to make a house legible again.
For menswear, the effect has been uneven, because several Italian houses now show men and women together. Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Fendi were all absent from the Milan men’s schedule. That has left the week leaner and put more weight on Prada, Zegna, Giorgio Armani and Dolce and Gabbana.
Jonathan Anderson Is the Creative Director of Dior
Jonathan Anderson is the first designer since Christian Dior himself to lead menswear, womenswear and haute couture at the house at the same time.
He arrived from eleven years at Loewe, where he built a reputation for taking one ordinary garment and distorting a single element of it until the whole thing reads differently.
His opening menswear show in Paris was the most watched event of the week, with Pierpaolo Piccioli, Donatella Versace, Pharrell Williams, Silvia Venturini Fendi and Stefano Pilati in the room. Anderson has described approaching the collection by researching the founder as a person and asking why he made the decisions he made.
For menswear, the signal is in proportion rather than print. He has reworked house pieces such as the Bar jacket into looser silhouettes, and his Dior tailoring leans on English references, with schoolwear and Savile Row shapes cut close to the body.
Follow the shoulder line across his first three men’s seasons. The accessories move faster and settle later.
Pharrell Williams Is the Men’s Creative Director of Louis Vuitton
Pharrell Williams has directed menswear at Louis Vuitton since succeeding Virgil Abloh, and he treats the show itself as part of the design work.
His autumn men’s show was built around Drophaus, a prefabricated timber home developed with the Japanese studio Not a Hotel and positioned on a grass mound in the centre of the runway. The collection read as retro-futuristic dandyism.
He also produces the music in-house at the Louis Vuitton headquarters in Paris. Four unreleased tracks premiered at that show, which tells you how much of the role is image rather than garment.
The more useful collection for a wardrobe is the separate formal men’s range, divided into timeless business, modern tailoring and evening, with leather goods and footwear rebuilt alongside it.
Treat the runway as the house’s image and the formal line as the product. That is where Louis Vuitton tailoring is currently most legible.
Demna Is the Artistic Director of Gucci
Demna joined Gucci as artistic director after a decade at Balenciaga, and he has anchored the house in its Tom Ford period rather than the romantic maximalism of Alessandro Michele.
His first work for the house was not a runway show. It was a lookbook of thirty-eight looks called La Famiglia, released with a short film, The Tiger, directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn. The runway debut followed in Milan.
He has named Tom Ford, Martin Margiela and Lee McQueen as his reference points. The pre-fall lookbook he photographed himself replicated the spotlight lighting of Gucci’s mid-nineties shows.
The research is unusually literal. Demna went back to the original manufacturer of an archival trouser and found that three decades of changed technology now produce a fabric with a different, more lived-in behaviour.
For men, the visible consequence is body-close tailoring, restored Web stripes and monogram luggage, opening with a trunk that points back to Guccio Gucci as a luggage maker.
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons Are the Creative Directors of Prada
Prada is run as a genuine joint creative directorship, with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons credited together on every menswear collection rather than alternating seasons.
Their recent menswear has moved deliberately away from corporate power dressing. Simons has described taking the businessman’s shirt and transforming it in a few steps, turning the stripes horizontal, adding a T-shirt neckline, ageing the cloth, so the garment keeps its authority without the connotation.
Miuccia Prada framed one collection as a change of tone from powerful to calm. A recent summer collection was positioned as an antidote to complication, built on clean colour and clever fabrication instead of embellishment.
That restraint has made Prada the most reliable reference for men who want the plain garment executed precisely rather than the statement piece.
Start with the nylon outerwear and the knitwear. Those are the categories the pair have kept consistent throughout.
Alessandro Sartori Is the Artistic Director of Zegna
Alessandro Sartori oversees every brand and creative function in the Zegna product line, and he is the longest-serving of the major menswear designers.
Born in Trivero to a seamstress mother, he began at Zegna as a menswear designer, created and ran Z Zegna, then spent five years as artistic director of Berluti in Paris before returning.
His project has been the steady dissolution of the formal suit into what the house calls luxury leisurewear. Structure gives way to knitted jersey, unlined shoulders and drawstring waists, while the cloth quality from the mill side of the business stays where it was.
Zegna also treats traceability as a design constraint rather than a marketing line, through programmes such as its traceable cashmere. Sartori recently gave up the house’s customary opening slot at Milan to show a summer collection on Malibu Pier.
This is the house to study for unstructured tailoring that still holds a line.
Grace Wales Bonner Is the New Menswear Designer at Hermès
Grace Wales Bonner has been appointed creative director of men’s ready-to-wear at Hermès, succeeding Véronique Nichanian after a tenure of thirty-seven years.
Nichanian was the longest-serving creative director in fashion and showed her final men’s collection in Paris in January.
Wales Bonner is British Jamaican, a graduate of Central Saint Martins and an early winner of the LVMH Young Designer Prize. Her own label is built on reimagined classical tailoring, textured embellishment and cross-cultural reference, with an intellectual seriousness that is rare in menswear.
This is the appointment to watch most closely, partly because Hermès has given her an unusually long run-up before a first show. Nothing in the house’s men’s product needs rescuing, so the question is register rather than reinvention.
Anyone buying Hermès menswear for longevity can keep buying the blouson and the knitwear without waiting for the debut.
Anthony Vaccarello Is the Creative Director of Saint Laurent
Anthony Vaccarello has led Saint Laurent for a decade and has held one menswear silhouette throughout: a sharp shoulder over a narrow waist, cut long and lean.
He has made travelling men’s shows a signature, skipping the Paris men’s calendar for Paradise Cove in Malibu, the Agafay Desert in Morocco and a Venetian island with a set commissioned from the artist Doug Aitken.
A recent summer men’s collection was staged in the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, where the sound artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot filled a reflective pool with drifting porcelain bowls while models circled in glittering suits.
Under him the house has extended well past clothing, into art programming at Rive Droite and into film through Saint Laurent Productions.
Saint Laurent remains the clearest reference for evening tailoring. Buy the suit rather than the seasonal leather.
Michael Rider Is the Creative Director of Celine
Michael Rider leads Celine following Hedi Slimane, and he returns to a house where he had already spent around a decade inside Phoebe Philo’s studio.
Slimane’s tenure expanded Celine from a womenswear house into a full menswear business with in-house fragrance, bespoke leather goods and beauty, held together by a tightly controlled retail image.
That is a large machine to inherit, and Rider’s appointment reads as a change of register rather than a change of category. He debuted during couture week before showing ready-to-wear on the Paris schedule.
Outerwear and leather goods are where a shift will show first, because those are the categories Slimane built the volume on.
Men who bought into the narrow Celine tailoring can expect the proportion to soften rather than disappear.
Glenn Martens Is the Creative Director of Maison Margiela
Glenn Martens succeeded John Galliano at Maison Margiela while continuing to lead Diesel, a double role made possible because OTB owns both houses.
Martens studied interior architecture at Sint-Lucas in Ghent before the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and he ran Y/Project for eleven years. The architectural training shows in how he treats a garment as a structure to be dismantled.
His artisanal debut for the house was theatrical, with masked models. His ready-to-wear debut then swung the other way, replacing the masks with metal mouthpieces and sending out mostly neutral suiting, bleached denim and white button-down shirts.
Jackets came wide-shouldered with the lapels sliced away and hanging ties in their place, a reference to the white lab coats of the Margiela atelier.
Margiela menswear is now a tailoring proposition as much as a conceptual one.
Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez Are the Creative Directors of Loewe
Loewe is led jointly by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, who left Proenza Schouler, the label they founded, to take over from Jonathan Anderson.
Their debut was staged in a white box built in the grounds of the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, with a single Ellsworth Kelly canvas hung at the entrance as the only clue to what followed.
The collection translated Kelly’s hard-edge colour into leather and craft, with architectural shapes and running stripes. Their first menswear pushed further into the absurd, including an inflating leather parka.
Loewe remains a leather house first, and that is the steadying fact underneath the change.
Buy the bags and the outerwear with confidence, and give the ready-to-wear a few seasons to settle into a consistent proportion.
Daniel Lee Is the Chief Creative Officer of Burberry
Daniel Lee leads Burberry, and his menswear argument is that the house is an outerwear business before it is a fashion one.
Lee grew up in Bradford, trained at Central Saint Martins and spent three years transforming Bottega Veneta before Burberry.
His Burberry has swung between a rural, county reading of Britishness and a sharper urban one, with a recent autumn collection returning the house firmly to the city.
The consistent thread underneath those swings is technical outerwear.
The trench and the quilted jacket carry the house’s credibility and hold their place in a wardrobe, whichever direction the runway takes next.
Pieter Mulier Is the Chief Creative Officer of Versace
Pieter Mulier took over Versace under Prada Group ownership, following the short tenure of Dario Vitale.
Mulier spent years as Raf Simons’s closest collaborator across Jil Sander, Dior and Calvin Klein before leading Alaïa, where he became one of the few designers in Paris able to make couture technique look effortless.
He is a structuralist, which is an unexpected fit for a house built on surface, print and unapologetic glamour.
No collection under his direction has been released at the time of writing, so anything about a Versace menswear direction remains speculation.
The house has kept its evening tailoring and its jersey shirting through several changes of leadership. Those are the categories to watch first.
Giorgio Armani Has No Creative Director After Its Founder
Giorgio Armani has appointed no creative director since the death of its founder, and menswear continues under Leo Dell’Orco, who leads the men’s style office.
The first collection designed without direct input from the founder was shown in Milan. The house has since broken with its own habit of showing in the purpose-built basement space, staging a summer men’s collection in the courtyard of Palazzo Orsini, the historic headquarters and the founder’s former residence.
Titled Mediterranean Market, it covered the space in rattan matting and drew on louche tailoring, safari jackets, gilets and open-weave knits in earthy desert tones and sea blues. Silvana Armani presented a cruise womenswear collection alongside it.
This is the one major house where continuity is the declared strategy rather than a holding position.
The unstructured Armani jacket is unlikely to change shape soon, which makes it the steadiest tailoring purchase of every house named here.
How to Tell Whether a New Creative Director Is Working
A debut collection tells you the direction. The second collection tells you what buyers actually responded to.
The industry treats the sophomore season as the more revealing one. A debut is a statement of intent made under enormous pressure. A second collection is made with commercial feedback in hand, so a sharp departure between the two usually signals either a loss of nerve or a decision to move faster.
Three things are worth watching in any first men’s show.
- Which archive period is being revived, because that choice reveals the customer the house is chasing. Demna choosing the Tom Ford era over the Michele era at Gucci is a commercial decision as much as an aesthetic one.
- Whether the shoulder changes. Shoulder construction is the most demanding thing to alter in a tailoring factory, so a new shoulder line means the house has committed serious resource to the new direction.
- What happens to the signature bag or the signature outerwear piece, since accessories are what sustain everything else on the runway
Read those three together and a debut stops being a spectacle and becomes readable as a business plan.
What a Change of Creative Director Means for What You Buy
Leadership changes rarely alter a house’s core product. The pieces worth owning are usually the ones that survive every handover intact.
The Hermès blouson, the Zegna jacket, the Burberry trench, the Prada nylon and the Armani shoulder have all outlived multiple changes of creative leadership, and they will outlive the current ones.
Buy into that continuity and treat the seasonal runway as image rather than instruction. The exception worth noting is an outgoing tenure, where a designer’s final deliveries often become the most collectable pieces of their period once the studio has moved on.
The map of who supplies this talent is also widening. Saudi Arabia’s Fashion Commission now pushes local labels into Paris and Milan showrooms through its Saudi 100 Brands programme, Riyadh Fashion Week has reached its third edition, and Mohammed Ashi of Ashi Studio was the first designer from the Gulf invited onto the official Paris couture calendar. No Gulf designer yet holds a menswear studio at a European house of this scale, though the pipeline feeding those studios is no longer exclusively European.
Reading the Season Through the People Who Design It
Menswear has always been slower to change than womenswear, which is precisely why a change of creative director matters more here. A house can rewrite a dress in a season. Rewriting a shoulder, a lapel, and a customer’s idea of what a jacket should feel like takes three or four years and a factory willing to retool.
That is the useful frame for the current reshuffle. The names above will produce a great deal of noise over the next few seasons, and most of it will never reach the rail. What reaches the rail is the quiet part, the proportion, the cloth, the construction. That is where the men who dress well will be looking while everyone else watches the show.
