Fashion Spent Two Years Changing Every Designer It Had. Now Comes the Part That Counts.
Jonathan Saunders starts at Kate Spade today, near the end of the largest reshuffle of creative leadership the industry has run. Fifteen debuts landed in a single season. Almost nobody is asking whether it worked.
Wednesday, August 26, 2026/4 min read
Jonathan Saunders takes up the role of executive creative director at Kate Spade New York today, an appointment announced in July. He arrives from & Other Stories, where he was chief creative director, after two decades that took in Diane von Furstenberg, Calvin Klein, Tiffany & Co., Pucci and Alexander McQueen, and reports to the brand's president and chief executive Eva Erdmann.
He is joining at the end of something rather than the start of it. The past two years have produced the largest reshuffle of creative leadership the industry has run, and the interesting question now is not who is next. It is whether any of it did what it was supposed to.
How large was the reshuffle?
Large enough that a single season could not absorb it.
Across the spring and summer 2026 shows there were fifteen designer debuts, most of them concentrated in Paris in early October. The 2025 run of appointments and exits was described in the trade press as one for the history books, and it culminated in a September fashion month in which house after house showed a new designer's first collection: Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, and a long list behind them.
Some of the changes still have not landed. Grace Wales Bonner's first Hermes menswear collection is expected in January 2027. She succeeds Veronique Nichanian, who held the role for 37 years, which is a useful number to hold in mind while reading anything about the current pace of change.
Why did it happen all at once?
Because the same pressure hit every house in the same eighteen months.
Luxury stopped growing. When volumes fall, the board reaches for the lever that is fastest to pull and easiest to explain to shareholders, and creative direction is that lever. Changing a designer signals action, generates coverage without a marketing budget, and postpones the harder conversation about pricing and product for eighteen months while everyone waits for the first collection.
That is a rational response to a bad quarter and it is not a strategy. We set out the scale of the underlying problem in the sixty million customers luxury has lost since 2022, and the arithmetic there is not a creative problem. People left because things cost more and did not get better.
Does changing the designer fix that?
It can, and the honest answer is that it usually takes longer than the people who ordered it have.
A creative director's effect on a house is real but slow. The first collection is assembled partly from work already in train. The second is the first one that is genuinely theirs. By the third the supply chain has adapted and the stores know how to sell it, and only then does the sales data mean anything. That is roughly two and a half years from appointment.
Meanwhile the appointment is being judged on the show, which is a two thousand person event covering perhaps a tenth of what the house will actually make and almost none of what it will actually sell. A house's economics run on handbags, small leather goods and fragrance. Very little of the commentary about a debut is about any of those.
This is why the trade view that the music has stopped is more significant than another appointment. A house that has stopped changing designers is a house that has to start answering the harder question.
What would count as evidence it worked?
Three things, none of which is a review.
Full price sell through. Whether the new work sells without discount is the only measure that separates a collection people admired from a collection people bought.
Whether the codes survived. A new director who erases a house's recognisable elements buys attention and spends equity. The ones who last tend to reinterpret rather than replace, which is exactly the language used around Saunders at Kate Spade: honouring thirty years of brand codes while defining the next era. That is the correct ambition and it is also what everybody says.
Whether the customer came back. Not a new customer, chasing novelty. The one who stopped buying in 2023 because the price went up twice and the quality did not.
For the person actually buying
Almost none of this should change what you do.
A change of creative director tells you the house has a plan. It tells you nothing about whether this season's coat is well made, and the gap between those two facts is where a great deal of money gets spent badly. The things worth checking are unglamorous and unchanged, and we set them out in how to judge a garment in sixty seconds and in the cost per wear arithmetic.
The designer's name is on the label. It is very rarely on the seam.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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