The cult of the creative director is so prevalent that many houses would genuinely have you believe that one person designs every single outfit in a collection, that the whole brand is resting on the shoulders of a single brain. This is very obviously not true, there are design directors, directors for menswear, directors for womenswear, heads of knitwear and accessories and couture. And this is where most of our new creative directors come from: these internal teams. But, to save ourselves some embarrassment at the next brand party, let’s take a look at Rider, Klausner and Leoni, as they are arguably the three biggest moves of the year.
All that is really known about Michael Rider so far are the beats of his résumé. He graduated from Brown University in 2002, after which he joined Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière as a senior designer. Then, in 2008, he had his first stint at Celine under Phoebe Philo, where he acted as design director, staying at the brand for ten years. In 2018, Polo Ralph Lauren scooped him up to be the creative director of their womenswear line.
Rider’s online footprint is so sparse that you’d almost believe him to be in witness protection. At the time of writing, several months after the announcement of his artistic directorship, the same two images of him accompany every article. Only in late October of 2024 was he granted a Wikipedia entry. For the best insight into Rider, we have to go back to the year 2000 and to the hallowed pages of the April 28th issue of the Brown Daily Herald. Taking part in the issue’s ‘Spring Fashion Special’, Rider is photographed wearing a rugby shirt, aviators and, inexplicably, rollerblades. A short bio tells us that he is studying Latin-American Studies and Education, that his hometown is Washington D.C. and that he “spent three years honestly believing that [he] would someday be a backup dancer for Janet Jackson.” To date, this is one of the few quotes Rider has ever given to the press.
“The cult of the creative director is so prevalent that many houses would genuinely have you believe that one person designs every single outfit in a collection, that the whole brand is resting on the shoulders of a single brain.”
Becoming artistic director of Celine is a huge jump for Rider. As the press release announcing Rider’s ascendancy stated, he will have “the entire creative responsibility of all Celine collections, from womenswear, menswear, leather goods and accessories to couture.” He is also, of course, following in the Chelsea-booted footsteps of Hedi Slimane. It’s genuinely hard to predict how this will go, but could anything truly be as face-crackingly different as the transition from Philo to Slimane?
The news that Dries Van Noten was stepping down as creative director of his brand in March 2024 sideswiped just about everyone. Founding Dries Van Noten, the brand, in 1986, Van Noten acted as creative director for 38 years, one of the longest tenures in the history of modern fashion. Stepping into his shoes would have been intimidating for any designer, no matter how experienced, but the job was eventually assigned to Julian Klausner, a 33-year-old designer who had been working in-house at Dries.
Having graduated from La Cambre in Brussels in 2016, completing both a BA and MA in fashion design, Klausner briefly worked as a junior designer at Maison Margiela before joining Dries Van Noten in 2018. His CV begins and ends there. In many ways, he’s the perfect choice for a creative director. His entire design career has essentially been at Dries. One also imagines that Dries himself must have been spending some time behind the scenes mentoring Klausner in order for him to be his successor.
There is a contrast between Rider and Klausner. Klausner’s anonymous status as a designer makes sense for a brand like Dries Van Noten because it’s one of those brands where the profile of the designer isn’t really central to the business. Dries has always been a low-key figure who often says that his greatest passion in life is not fashion but gardening. Klausner feels like a very natural successor. On the flipside, an unknown like Rider coming in to assume the mantle of Hedi Slimane, who moulded Celine entirely in his own image, has no natural sense of continuation at all. It’s all a bit Monty Python – “and now for something completely different.” How are we meant to feel positive and secure when it feels like a shot in the dark?
“One could suggest that houses should do better to actively promote their internal teams. Would it really be so bad if we knew who the in-house designers were?”
When Raf Simons departed from Calvin Klein Collection (a.k.a. 205W39NYC) in 2019, the brand wound up all operations and shuttered, seemingly, for good. That is until May 2024 when it was announced that Calvin Klein Collection would be rising from the ashes with the Italian designer Veronica Leoni in the top role. Leoni started her career at Jil Sander in the early 2010s where she worked her way up to becoming the head designer of knitwear, working under Sander herself. She then joined Phoebe Philo’s Céline where she acted as head of pre-collection for four years (side note: it’s interesting how both Leoni and Michael Rider held senior positions at Philo’s Céline at the same time, you have to presume they know each other quite well). After Céline, she took up the position of womenswear designer for Moncler’s 2 Moncler 1952 line and, subsequently, became the design director of The Row. In 2020, Leoni started her own brand, Quira, which was a finalist for the 2023 LVMH Prize.
Leoni has been a very popular name within the fashion industry but not so much outside of it. Even the LVMH Prize didn’t do much in making Leoni a more well-known name outside of Italy. It all just makes you wonder if fame as a fashion designer is purely down to who the PR agencies decide should be famous, rather than becoming famous from your own work. That being said, it is a lot harder to achieve a level of fame if you don’t start out with your own brand. Rider, Klasner and Leoni all graduated from their degrees and immediately went to work in-house, relegating themselves to the internal corporate ladder, rather than presenting designs under their own names.
One could suggest that houses should do better to actively promote their internal teams. Would it really be so bad if we knew who the in-house designers were? If anything, it would bring a genuine humanity to these monolithic houses, envisioning them as the collectives that most of them function as anyway. It would also take a lot of pressure away from fashion students who must look at the disparity between those who choose the in-house route and the creative director route as something akin to two roads diverged in a wood, leading to very different career paths. Then again, this would entirely kill the myth and the legend of the creative director, which many houses hold onto very dearly.
Read: The white-man musical chairs of 2024. Subscribe to 1 Granary’s newsletter here.