PARIS — For months, Celine designer Hedi Slimane has been engaged in a thorny contract negotiation with proprietor LVMH that would result in the designer’s departure from the model, sources accustomed to the matter say.
Since LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault put in Slimane six years in the past, the star designer has reworked Celine, launching menswear (leaning into his trademark skinny silhouette), fragrance and, most just lately, magnificence, along with reconnecting its womenswear picture to the home’s historic identification as a purveyor of leather-based items that incarnate Parisian bourgeois model.
At first, gross sales dropped as Slimane pivoted sharply away from predecessor Phoebe Philo’s minimalist, arty look. However for the reason that pandemic, Celine’s enterprise has surged to report highs. Whereas proprietor LVMH doesn’t repeatedly disclose gross sales for particular person manufacturers, Celine’s revenues surpassed €2 billion ($2.1 billion) in 2023, the corporate advised buyers in January. The model’s full-year outcomes had been probably nearer to €2.5 billion, that means it had surpassed Fendi to turn out to be LVMH’s third-largest trend label, behind solely Louis Vuitton and Dior, in line with HSBC.
Regardless of the robust outcomes, sources say Slimane could also be on the best way out, including credence to a current by Miss Tweed saying Slimane is about to go away the model. Representatives for LVMH and Celine declined to remark.
The Two Sides of Hedi Slimane
Slimane is a uncommon expertise. Often known as the business’s greatest stylist, he has generated completely exact trend photos since his trendsetting flip at Dior Homme within the early 2000s, when he helped usher in a decade-long pattern cycle together with his skinny silhouette. His strategy to branding and merchandising invokes the methods of French trend heavyweights, with ultra-consistent, minimalist artwork path that echoes Karl Lagerfeld — particularly when taking pictures Celine’s black-and-white campaigns himself — and business collections that mix avenue model and luxurious à la Yves Saint Laurent.
“Hedi is a genius of selling, product and merchandising. He is aware of the right way to create that jacket, that shoe,” mentioned Alice Bouleau, companion at govt search agency Sterling Worldwide. “It’s not overly mental; it’s not as refined as what Phoebe was doing, however he actually grasped the essence of what this model was about.”
However Slimane’s appreciable expertise has include monetary and inventive calls for to match.
Along with commanding what’s understood to be a traditionally excessive wage for a designer, he’s additionally infamous for looking for royalties on all method of artistic output from marketing campaign photos to fragrance formulation and extra.
A real auteur regardless of his business savvy, Slimane expects full artistic management over a broad sweep of topics — not simply what goes in collections, however when and the way they’re proven, in addition to to whom, and the atmosphere wherein they’re bought.
That may result in large outcomes and quick, however solely when the funding {dollars} are flowing freely. Since Slimane joined Celine, groups have spent numerous hours, and firm funds, ferrying samples backwards and forwards to his dwelling in St. Tropez, the place he repeatedly holes up. Initiatives usually attain a sophisticated stage earlier than getting axed by the reclusive Slimane, creating frustration and excessive turnover in senior groups.
Exhibits and media can be a sticking level. The model has largely eschewed in-person runway reveals in favour of trend movies that take months and thousands and thousands of {dollars} to shoot. These are then launched on-line with out warning, limiting alternatives for editorial protection (and, in the end, visibility with customers). When Slimane does stage an in-person present, influential friends are sometimes absent. Along with favouring off-calendar shows at moments when editors and influencers should not round, since 2021 the model has outright boycotted Vogue and its sister publications at Condé Nast in protest of the corporate’s cost-cutting transfer to oust regional editors-in-chief, together with his longtime good friend and collaborator Emmanuelle Alt, previously editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris.
Slowing Market
As luxurious’s demand cools following a multi-year surge, it might be tough for LVMH to justify the funding Slimane requires at one in all its smaller manufacturers. LVMH’s trend and leather-based items progress slowed to 2 % within the first quarter, its slowest quarter since 2020.
“There’s a normalisation of progress proper now that has led LVMH to turn out to be extra cost-conscious. It could possibly be harder to justify having a small model the place [the designer] is getting no matter they need; it will possibly create tensions,” HSBC analyst Aurélie Husson-Dumoutier mentioned.
The idiosyncratic artistic rhythm at Celine received’t make it simple for groups to navigate a rocky luxurious market. The model’s newest assortment, impressed by Paris within the Sixties and the Arc de Triomphe, was dropped in a trend movie in mid-March. The slick assortment of baby-doll attire and driving hats made for an attention grabbing departure from Slimane’s regular fare at Celine, which leans extra usually into denim- and shearling-heavy references from the Seventies. However it’s unclear whether or not purchasers will take discover. Almost 150,000 folks have streamed the video on YouTube, far fewer than for the present footage of similar-sized manufacturers that staged bodily activations throughout trend week. (Loewe logged 375,000 views; Saint Laurent a couple of million.) The model hasn’t staged a bodily occasion since January final yr.
Slimane might have his personal motivations for parting methods with Celine: He might have one other, greater job lined up — inside or outdoors LVMH — or he might merely wish to do different issues together with his life. Following his tenure at Saint Laurent, Slimane took proprietor Kering to court docket to forestall the group from scrapping his prolonged non-compete, permitting him to herald a multi-million greenback wage whereas not working in trend for 3 years. The designer lived primarily in Malibu and targeted on his pictures observe.
Celine After Hedi
A novel expertise Slimane could also be, however Kering’s Saint Laurent presents a case research in how a model can proceed to thrive in his wake. Following the designer’s 2016 departure, the model regularly up to date its womenswear collections and merchandise beneath his successor, Anthony Vaccarello. However a lot of the framework that Slimane put in place, together with pared-back branding, a monochromatic retailer idea and a thin, rocker silhouette for males, remained in place as gross sales roughly doubled to €2 billion within the three years following his exit.
LVMH might take an analogous tack at Celine ought to Slimane depart the model. The template he has put in place on the label is commercially potent and broadly relatable, but nonetheless differentiated: with an equipment program that has conquered Millennial bourgeoises far past Paris. The look is extra grown-up than rival Saint Laurent, and extra city than Chloé’s. Whereas loads of modern manufacturers concentrate on Parisienne wardrobe dressing, Celine is the one one to take action convincingly within the luxurious house, and to model its wares with such a high-fashion contact.
LVMH might actually slot in a brand new designer so as to add a dose of innovation and speed up the tempo of communications whereas sticking to its core branding and business technique. Loads of patrons of Celine’s Triomphe luggage and monogrammed canvas cardholders are unlikely to know who Slimane is, in spite of everything, even when they respect the model he’s successfully made his personal.
“Hedi has set such a transparent components that another person might proceed to construct on it, even somebody who’s not as a lot of a star designer,” headhunter Bouleau mentioned. A bolder strategy to succession might additionally repay, “however could be a giant threat.”
“LVMH tends to place much less emphasis on the designer — it’s at all times the model that comes first,” HSBC’s Dumoutier mentioned. “What Hedi has put in place can survive him.”
Alternatively, a lot of Slimane’s magic is within the execution. Updating and reissuing classic items from strains like YSL Rive Gauche and its contemporaries is Slimane’s modus operandi — however they’re styled and shot with an opulent sheen. Shedding Slimane the designer additionally means dropping Slimane, the stylist and photographer. These are huge sneakers to fill.
Luxurious Turf Warfare
Whether or not Hedi in the end strikes on or stays, it received’t have been a straightforward negotiation for LVMH and its chairman Bernard Arnault, who’s looking for to stability a long-term imaginative and prescient for elevating his manufacturers with cost-cutting efforts to guard the corporate’s backside line in a slowing market.
After many years of snapping up luxurious homes and actual property to broaden his edge on rivals, 75-year-old Arnault and his kids have turn out to be more and more targeted on retaining their entry to artistic expertise, as nicely. The place star designers used to cycle out and in of LVMH and rival teams, in recent times the corporate has more and more sought to maneuver designers round inside its ranks (as within the case of Kim Jones, who led Louis Vuitton menswear earlier than taking over Dior Homme, then finally including Fendi womenswear to his duties).
LVMH might really feel much more strain to maintain Slimane after talks with one other uncommon expertise — Alessandro Michele — fell aside, in line with sources, main the previous Gucci designer to take up a task at Mayhoola’s Valentino. In the meantime, LVMH’s Givenchy label has but to call a designer since parting methods with artistic director Matthew Williams in January.
Disclosure: LVMH is a part of a gaggle of buyers who, collectively, maintain a minority curiosity in The Enterprise of Vogue. All buyers have signed shareholders’ documentation guaranteeing BoF’s full editorial independence.
