3 MIN READ
The slowdown in consumption in China weighs on the balance sheets of the great maisons. But behind the difficulties of luxury, prices ever more distant from the value of the product emerge, along with a management that conditions creative choices too much.
European luxury has lost about 350 billion dollars in market capitalization since the beginning of 2026. According to Reuters, the groups hit hardest include LVMH, Hermès and Kering. The most frequent explanation is the slowdown of the Chinese market, which for years has supported the growth of European maisons. A certainly important cause, but one that risks becoming a convenient alibi for not facing problems internal to the sector.
In recent years many brands have raised prices well beyond what the product seemed to justify. Bags, clothes and accessories have reached ever higher figures, without these increases necessarily being matched by improvements in materials, craftsmanship or stylistic research. In the end customers were asked to pay mainly for the name. A profitable strategy as long as purchases kept growing, much less convincing today.
But there is another question, perhaps even more important. When a maison gets into difficulty, the first to pay is almost always the creative director. Designers are replaced like coaches of football teams, forgetting that in fashion changing a stylistic direction can mean profoundly changing the identity of the brand.
A designer builds a recognizable language, made of proportions, materials, colors and interpretations of taste. A clientele forms around that language. If every few years someone arrives to change everything radically, that clientele may stop recognizing itself in the brand. And winning new consumers does not necessarily mean winning back those that were lost.
The problem is understanding how much autonomy creative directors have today. In the great luxury groups, finance, marketing and sales departments have taken on growing weight. Revenue targets are set, price increases are planned, results are demanded in ever shorter times. And inevitably these decisions end up influencing also what is designed, prototyped and produced.
Fashion, however, has rhythms that hardly coincide with those of the stock market. A collection requires work, experimentation and a precise knowledge of the audience it addresses. Even the contaminations between menswear and womenswear can offer interesting solutions, provided they have stylistic coherence. When instead experimentation becomes an end in itself, the risk is producing collections that cause more discussion than they manage to sell.
The differences between the maisons are indicative. Richemont has held up better thanks also to the strength of high jewelry. Hermès retains an extraordinary artisanal recognizability, despite the decline in its share price. Chanel, which is not listed, recorded revenue growth of 16% in the first half of 2026, while Matthieu Blazy has brought renewed interest to the collections and to the product, working on the historic codes of the house.
The results of these companies are not directly comparable, but they suggest that the crisis does not hit everyone in the same way. And above all that the problem cannot be solved simply by changing designer.
Perhaps it is time to also question who decides the strategies, the prices and the commercial targets. Because a creative director can certainly get a collection wrong. But when a brand progressively loses identity, customers and credibility, the responsibility cannot be attributed only to whoever designs the clothes.
Continuing to change designers without changing the strategies that condition their work risks leaving unresolved the very problem one would like to correct.
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Alessandro Sicuro
Brand Strategist | Photographer | Art Director | Project Manager
Alessandro Sicuro Comunication
