Much has been said about this year’s play of musical chairs among creative directors at fashion houses. It is clear that designers have lost significant influence within key areas of the fashion industry. The acceleration of the retail calendar, the primacy of the brand and the complicated product structure that goes with it – designers will enumerate the reasons for their increasingly fungible and untenable positions.
They forget their own role in the demise of their influence. By conflating their work with that of artists whose search for the original idea trumps all other concerns of the business, designers have narrowed the meaning of innovation and their ability to contribute to the fashion firm. Given our current reality of a disruptive retail landscape, the perpetuation of new ways of customer engagement and vastly complex supply chains, the most creative work in fashion are increasingly done by marketers who understand that the fundamental role of any firm is to deliver customer satisfaction beyond the artistic whims of a designer.
To regain their seat at the table, designers must confront our industry’s current reality and the deficiencies of limiting their creativity to the purely artistic. They cannot rely purely on merchants and operations types to dictate cost structures and assortment because in doing so, they lose their ability to engage directly with the customer. Designers must learn also to be marketers.
We should not forget that one of the greatest design icons, Coco Chanel, was a far cannier and inspired marketer than she was a designer. She might have lacked the technical rigor of Vionnet or the artistic flair of Schiaparelli, but Chanel knew her customer well. And she sought to please her.