Can Fashion’s Changing of the Guard Revive an Ailing Industry?
Not since the 1990s have luxury brands gone to such lengths to turn around their fortunes.
Modeling Dior’s ready-to-wear spring-summer 2026 collection, Jonathan Anderson’s first for the French house, which showed in Paris in October.
Photographer: Julien De Rosa/AFPNew York socialite Nan Kempner had been a Dior couture client for some 50 years when the iconic French fashion house replaced its lead designer with a splashy new talent in 1997. That year, as she watched daring new looks parade by, she commented wryly that her stately fellow audience members French first lady Bernadette Chirac and former first lady Claude Pompidou “looked like they had been hit in the face with a cold dead fish.”
That designer was John Galliano, and that year became known in the luxury fashion industry as the Big Bang. In the 1990s, business tycoons, such as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE’s Bernard Arnault, saw the immense financial potential of luxury in the age of globalization and started snapping up old fashion and leather-goods companies. They then hired a cohort of young designers, with a mandate to reinvigorate—and rejuvenate—the creative side.