Patience with luxury is wearing thin

Patience with luxury is wearing thin. Three (or maybe four) creative directors are on their way out, online critics hand down verdicts within days, and shoppers would rather buy vintage than pay full price for something new. LVMH reported a 5 percent fall in fashion sales in the third quarter, a reminder that the downturn is far from over. Louis Vuitton sits at the centre of that division. Luxury CEOs, especially at Kering, have their work cut out for them, and more changes among designers and other executives look likely.

The clearest sign comes from shoppers. Spending a couple of months’ salary on a new bag is a hard sell for many people. The RealReal’s 2026 resale report says demand for vintage on its platform is up 432 percent since 2020. It also says resale is growing two to three times faster than new luxury, and that 47 percent of shoppers check a piece’s resale value before buying new. The RealReal sells secondhand, so those figures come from a company with a stake in the trend. They still show shoppers weighing what an item might be worth later, not only what it costs now.

Then there are the exits. Kering confirmed on October 9 that Anthony Vaccarello is leaving Saint Laurent after ten years. Not long after, Calvin Klein confirmed that Veronica Leoni will leave Calvin Klein Collection when her contract ends. Kering also announced that Seán McGirr is leaving McQueen after three years. None of the three houses has named a successor.

Balenciaga's Pierpaolo Piccioli conundrum

Balenciaga could be next, if the rumblings are true. De Meo reportedly singled out the brand’s falling menswear sales after Demna moved to Gucci, a comment that Piccioli reportedly felt was directed at him. Martine Rose is widely tipped to replace Piccioli. The appointment has not been confirmed, but the industry is already talking. Let’s wait and see what happens at Kering’s houses, although none of this will come as a surprise.

These exits are not all part of the same story. Calvin Klein is not part of Kering, and Leoni had held the role only since May 2024. Puck reports that McGirr’s contract was up, and that Kering CEO Luca de Meo is taking an unsparing approach to cutting the group down to size, with almost every brand underperforming.

Kering falls short of ambitions

The financial backdrop is hard to ignore. Kering shares are down 28 percent since the start of the year. At Saint Laurent, sales topped 3 billion euros at their peak but fell to 2.64 billion euros in 2025. It is worth remembering how ambitious the plan was. At its June 2022 Capital Markets Day, Kering said it aimed to double Saint Laurent’s sales to 5 billion euros in the medium term, by 2026. That didn’t happen.

Francesca Bellettini, who ran the house at the time, had said that at 2 billion euros, thinking of 3 billion was too easy. Analysts interpreted “medium term” as a four-to-five-year horizon. Then the market slowed sharply, and the house shifted its focus from volume targets to tightening its retail network and raising its exclusivity. That period of transition also brought leadership changes, capped by Vaccarello’s exit. Bellettini is now at Gucci.

At McQueen, Bernstein estimates the house made less than 200 million euros in 2025, down sharply from a peak of 850 million euros in 2022–23. That is an analyst estimate, since Kering doesn’t break out sales for individual houses apart from Gucci. The picture is not entirely one-sided. It was widely reported that McGirr’s contract was up and would not be fully renewed. W Magazine noted that the business had become overly reliant on one very popular sneaker line. Virginia Burlina has been widely tipped as McGirr’s successor.

The mood around designers has changed

Anonymous accounts now move fast and are often early. BoringNotCom, a once-anonymous London account, first noted Jonathan Anderson’s departure from Loewe months before it was official, and was one of the first to report Piccioli’s move to Balenciaga. After McGirr’s exit, the account said McQueen had lost the public’s trust and would need serious damage control to win it back. That is an opinion, not a finding, and the sales figures above paint a more mixed picture. It still shows how quickly online verdicts now arrive. Brands and investors read these accounts, and designers get a few seasons to show results, not years.

The weekend ends with more unrest in the French capital. Last week about 550,000 people protested across France over the weekend, including 110,000 in Paris. The protests were about living costs and other grievances, and looters hit shops ranging from a high-end brand to a bakery. Police said the looters arrived late in the day with the sole aim of stealing. A day earlier, Italian students, including those in Milan, took to the streets in support of French pupils, although those marches were largely calm. The unrest does not explain the designer exits. It does fit the wider consumer mood and shows how sensitive prices are right now, just as luxury houses try to win customers back.

Kering published its third-quarter earnings last Friday, with sales down 1 percent. The group closed more than 100 stores and is set to shutter a total of 126 boutiques by the end of the year. Investors were listening for any word on McQueen and Balenciaga. After that comes the harder question: who gets the open jobs, and whether their clothes will sell at today’s prices.

Chloé’s Chemena Kamali is widely reported as the frontrunner for Saint Laurent. The appointments are not yet official, but the names are already circulating. The wait for news and the high turnover of creative directors are part of the black cloud hanging over the luxury industry. Because what all the quarterly reports tell us is that success is only measured by an increase in sales.