On Tuesday, Kim Jones opened the first store of his own label at Central Yards, a new harbourfront development in Hong Kong. He had stints at Louis Vuitton, Dior and Fendi behind him. He could have chosen London or Paris for the debut. He chose neither.
That choice is the scene worth staying with. A designer of his standing picked a launch city on the strength of where he seems to want to be seen first, and it was neither London nor Paris. Vogue reported the choice, and the reading that Asia works as a launch market for luxury is our own. That reading is plausible, but the more interesting part is what he walked away from. A label bearing his name now stands on a harbour, with no house name above it.
The timing made it sharper. The next day, Fashionista reported that LVMH's fashion sales fell 5% in the third quarter, the same period in which Jones left Dior to relaunch on his own. The biggest group in luxury shrank while one of its best-known designers walked out to start over. Set side by side, the two facts suggest that an independent label can look like the more interesting creative bet when the conglomerate is contracting.
Then came Friday. McQueen parted ways with Seán McGirr after three years, and Calvin Klein lost its creative director on the same day. At McQueen the exit arrived with workforce cuts and a smaller retail footprint, which Hypebeast took to mean Kering is rethinking the brand's whole scale. The reporting made a fair point: much of what ails these houses is scale and business, and no designer fixes that alone. A hire is asked to carry a company, and two companies put one down on a single Friday.
Put Jones and McGirr together and a shift in who holds authority emerges. The house, with its name and its single anointed creative director, is being asked to do more than it can. The individual with his own name above the door is, for now, the one gaining ground. Jones does not have to explain a group's quarterly numbers. He has to make a shop in Hong Kong worth visiting.
Places are doing similar work. Louis Vuitton, under Pharrell Williams at the Men's Studio, dressed Real Madrid's football and basketball squads for a second season, unveiling the formal wear ahead of the club's first UEFA away match in Rome. Authority there is borrowed from a club and a pitch, not from a Paris runway. Alo Yoga, meanwhile, opened its first Greater China flagship at K11 Musea in Hong Kong and took HK$20 million in a week, roughly US$2.6 million, setting an opening record for the centre. The South China Morning Post's headline claimed wellness retail is doing what luxury retail cannot. Hong Kong, in other words, kept turning up as the address where the week's retail news happened.
Kering offered a variant. Its Generation Award went to India, in partnership with Reliance, and Paiwand Studio, a Noida-based startup that turns pre-consumer garment waste into handloom fabric, won €50,000 at the Embassy of France in New Delhi. We said on Wednesday's episode that this shows a rival group looking further afield at the same time as Jones.
None of this means the great houses are finished. LVMH is still the biggest group in luxury, and a 5% dip in one quarter is a dip. Jones's store is one store. But the week's news points the same way from several directions: a designer leaving the group, a group shrinking, two houses shedding creative directors, and new store openings in Hong Kong alongside a Kering award taken to New Delhi rather than staying in the traditional capitals. The old arrangement, in which a famous house confers prestige on whoever it employs, looked a little less automatic.
The smaller scale seemed to be rewarded elsewhere too. The RIBA Stirling Prize went to Lion Green Road, council-commissioned housing on a sloped former car park in Coulsdon, and the first Barragán Prize, launched with Bottega Veneta, went to Junya Ishigami at La Cuadra outside Mexico City. Modest, particular work took the honours.
In the same week that LVMH's fashion sales fell 5% and McQueen parted ways with Seán McGirr after three years, Kim Jones opened a store on a Hong Kong harbourfront. Vogue noted that he picked it over London or Paris. His own name is on it, and none of the houses he worked for.