Pierpaolo Piccioli’s (PP) announced exit from Balenciaga last Thursday is the culmination of what I've been saying in private chats and on public member forums: talent is nought if it isn’t the right fit.
In what can only be described as a fundamental incompatibility of sensibilities, he's left the spot vacant after less than 16 months.
Yet, this new round of musical chairs is exactly what many overzealous CEOs and excessively ambitious designers fail to realise. Success in today’s luxury landscape requires three things—and usually all at once: a clear grasp of a House’s essence—or raison d’être; an acute understanding of modern associative appetites; and a willingness to be wrong, i.e. taking risks and/or having a singular POV.
It’s not simply about being able to rehash a House’s supposed visual codes.
While I loved PP’s Valentino, I candidly doubted he was the right man to helm Balenciaga. Those doubts were confirmed once I saw those tepid Instagram teasers and that very sleepy first campaign. Both showed how misaligned his romantic sensibility was with the modern, provocative, and global behemoth Balenciaga had become.
It’s the same way Louise Trotter has so far been the wrong choice for Bottega Veneta, as have the Proenza boys (Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez) at Loewe. While they seem capable of riffing on their forebears' textures, shapes, campaigns and other visual language, their overly studied landings—overwrought at Bottega and underdeveloped at Loewe—lack the languid singularity and naïveté that made Mathieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson fierce—and justly so—rivals of their respective era.
And yet, maybe there's a fourth requirement: one that’s less about creative chemistry and more about a shared kinship or cultural connectedness to a House. That is, who best understands the subtleties of a brand's cultural ancestry to exploit it successfully?
To wit, Anderson’s quirky and irreverent British sensibility, which served him so well at Loewe, seems at odds with the polite and patrician Dior—as was the much-too-militant Dior proffered by the Italian Maria Grazia Chiuri (MGC) before him. Conversely, MGC's Fendi is much more successful and coherent. Perhaps it's because she's Italian and she started at that House, or because the Fendi we know today owes its forcefulness to women—in the form of the Fendi sisters. Blazy’s Chanel has also been winning praise. His Belgian-French heritage seems to provide the right mix of alchemy and second degré quotidianness that Chanel needs in 2026.
Karl Lagerfeld, perhaps the greatest modern custodian of a fashion House—due in part to his polymathic mind and, as he said, never keeping his old sketches or being nostalgic about what he'd done before—showed that it wasn't enough to be a caretaker of the past. One must continue to create for the archetype for whom the House was created and bring her into the future. Who is she? What does she do? And who does she want to become?
Unfortunately for PP, Cristóbal’s Balenciaga, awakened and made modern by Demna, Nicolas Ghesquière and even Alexander Wang before him, was not interested in rebecoming a comatose beauty.
07/11/2026
Talking Fashion is a monthly series that attempts to dissect the inner workings of fashion from an outlier - yet culturally astute - lens.