Key Takeaways:
Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada’s co-creative director partnership at Prada signals a shift in how luxury houses approach designer succession.
Hiring creative designers to execute dramatic revamps has yielded underwhelming results at brands like Balenciaga and Saint Laurent.
Analysts say that the success of the Simons-Prada relationship depends on leadership.
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Is it a Hail Mary? Or an honest meeting of minds?
These are the questions posed by the fashion tribe in Paris this week in response to the news that former Jil Sander designer Raf Simons is rejoining the Prada Group, as co-creative director of the namesake brand with Miuccia Prada, which the company announced during a press conference in Milan on Sunday.
Simons’s arrival — a year after he was released from Calvin Klein in New York — comes as Prada faces sluggish retail sales, even as fashion critics still laud Prada’s runway shows. In 2018, the Prada Group, which also owns Miu Miu and Church’s shoes, reported a 3 per cent increase in revenue, to €3.14 billion, which resulted in a 17.6 per cent drop in net profits to €205 million and a loss of €864 million in market value.
Creative partnerships are not new to fashion. Most recently, Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri co-directed Valentino before she was tapped to replace Simons at Dior. And there have been behind-the-scenes co-directing over the years that have helped ageing designers carry on, if at a lesser capacity, such as Loulou de la Falaise with Yves Saint Laurent, and more recently, Virginie Viard with Karl Lagerfeld. That latter union allowed Chanel to transition seamlessly after Lagerfeld’s death last year.
The Simons-Prada tie-up, which puts two powerbroker designers side by side, signifies a potential shift in how designer houses transfer power. Dramatic revamps are giving way to more gradual successions.
“The idea of a designer who comes in and throws everything out and starts from scratch was more of an aughts approach to business,” says Robert Burke, of New York-based fashion consultancy Robert Burke Associates.
Resulting failures of the blank-slate approach litter the landscape. Hedi Slimane sliced the Yves from Saint Laurent, moved the quintessentially Parisian house to Los Angeles and designed collections that generated lukewarm sales. After four years, Slimane left for Celine, where a similar overhaul has fallen just as flat.
Alexander Wang arrived at Balenciaga in 2012, imposed a new, modern take on the classical brand, and was gone after six seasons. Simons tried to revamp Calvin Klein, infamously redecorating the much-loved neutral-toned Madison Avenue store in taxi cab yellow and designing high-fashion clothes that, while applauded by critics, skewed sharply from the house's signature purity. They sat on store racks, unsold. Less than two years into Simons’s tenure, and eight months before the end of his contract, Calvin Klein’s parent, PVH Corp, “amicably” cut ties with him.
Now, a less radical approach is what these businesses, which are much bigger than they were 10 years ago, are requiring,” Burke says. “Less disruption.” Given that Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli are both in their 70s, and helming a publicly traded company, the transition is an important consideration — one, says Burke, that “is a difficult subject in the fashion world, since brands are so dependent on the personality and identity of a designer”. Just look at 78-year-old Vivienne Westwood, 80-year-old Ralph Lauren, and 85-year-old Giorgio Armani — all three in charge, with no apparent heir. Hiring a co-director diffuses that prickly situation.
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. © Prada
Prada, which has made some costly missteps, has a lot on the line. It was “late at realising that digital is strategic”, says Luca Solca, research analyst at Bernstein in Geneva. The brand reduced the variety of handbags offered and raised retail prices substantially, “trying to emulate Chanel, rather than Gucci, which should be their comparable”, he says. Prada rolled out stores when competitors were shrinking their retail network to focus on e-commerce and made the product too available, wounding its image of exclusivity. “And the brand seems to be intent on sponsorship, like the America’s Cup and the art foundation, which Vuitton has done before, rather than what Moncler is doing — generating buzz with events, instead of catwalk shows,” Solca continues. Add to that the economic impact of coronavirus — Prada is traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange — and the numbers tell the story: Prada’s stock price has dropped from HK$36 per share in June 2018 to HK$26.50 this week.
Bringing in Simons is “a step in the right direction”, Solca says. “Revitalisations have hinged on getting creative talent on the scene. Maybe this arrangement can be a way for a new Prada to hit the market and revive consumer interest.”
It is easy to understand Miuccia Prada’s attraction to Simons. “She’s a brain, and he’s a brain, and that’s where they connect,” says the former Prada executive. Nevertheless, questions abound on how two strong-willed superstar talents will work in concert. “Sometimes changing creative directors works, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Solca says. “Coupling the right brand and creative director is a bit of art, more than science.”
It’s an open secret in luxury fashion that top creative directors spend more time managing teams of design assistants and approving designs than creating. At Prada, the most powerful of these assistants — the creative director’s “right hand” — for decades has been Fabio Zambernardi. Prada states that he will stay on. Can the delicately calibrated Prada-Zambernardi relationship survive with Simons in the mix? Simons’s longtime right-hand, Pieter Mulier, is not joining the Prada team.
And there is the question of whether Prada Group CEO Patrizio Bertelli, Miuccia Prada’s husband since 1987, will leave Prada and Simons to figure out their synchronicity on their own, or if the power distribution among the trio will be in constant flux.
Bertelli, Prada and Simons are banking on a successful partnership today, as well as under the guiding hand of a younger Bertelli in the future.
Despite the recent rumours that Prada and Bertelli have been in talks with the Big Three luxury groups — LVMH, Kering and Richemont — Solca says, “My understanding is they are not going to sell.” Instead, it appears that Prada and Bertelli’s son, 31-year-old Lorenzo, who joined the company two years ago as digital director is supposed to take over, according to Solca. “And I have received good feedback about Lorenzo.”