News of Elbaz’s departure from the label, a red-carpet favourite of Natalie Portman, Kate Moss and Nicole Kidman, comes less than a week after Raf Simons revealed he would leave Dior after a three-and-a-half-year tenure. Neither Lanvin or Elbaz have made official statements yet, but WWD reports an announcement will be made within the next few days. Many have complained about the accelerated pace of fashion and fashion shows and the loss of creativity because of it. Fashion shows (now held in many capitals around the world) qualify as entertainment with the focus on who is in the front row instead of the clothing on the catwalk.
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After 14 years at Lanvin, Israeli creative director Alber Elbaz is reportedly leaving the company. I asked my friends before I came here – many of whom are architects and artists – how do they start designing? “Then we became creative directors, so we have to create, but mostly direct. And now we have to become image-makers, making sure it looks good in the pictures”, Elbaz said at the FGI event. According to rumors flying around it could be Alber Elbaz” discontent with today’s fashion industry especially “fast fashion’ or it could be due to recent disagreements between Lanvin’s owner and CEO, Shaw-Lan Wang and himself. But her intuition for what young cool women want now, her already huge credibility and her unique youth-romance vision sets her apart. “By loving the actresses and respecting them, it makes it all the more easy”.
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It is very hard to keep a calm voice in the midst of a drama, but how is it that Alber Elbaz-one of the most loved, most prolifically creative, most hardworking and loyally long-serving designers-has actually been dismissed? Whether he will be asked to sell his stake as part of his exit package (in the same way that Nicholas Ghesquière received $42.3 million for the sale of his 10 percent stake in Balenciaga) or be allowed to keep it is still unknown. “That’s the rule. And loudness is the new thing”. For instance, at Lanvin Elbaz was one of the first designers to show his pre-collections to the press – indeed, when I met with the designer earlier this month, just after his Lanvin show, he bemoaned that he felt partially responsible for the current speed of the fashion cycle given the visibility he placed on those collections, and the effort he expounded. But, he said, “I prefer whispering”.
