2024 in fashion

Simone Rocha's guest-designed Jean Paul Gaultier couture collection in January extended the house's collaborative model with unusual assurance. The exercise could easily have felt procedural by now; instead it retained a sense of occasion.

John Galliano's Maison Margiela Artisanal 2024 show arrived in January with the force of a culminating statement. It came to stand as a late-period landmark at the house: not simply another couture outing, but the sort of collection that reorders the conversation around a designer's tenure.

Moschino moved quickly in January, naming Adrian Appiolaza after a period of abrupt instability. The speed of the decision gave the house something it badly needed: not certainty exactly, but at least an immediate new centre of gravity.

Gap Inc. appointed Zac Posen to a newly created creative director role, making one of the year's clearest American corporate-fashion statements. The significance lay in the breadth of the remit: not one label, but an entire retail group seeking a more visible design voice.

Adrian Appiolaza's first Moschino collection arrived almost immediately after his appointment, giving the house a visible line of continuity after upheaval. The debut mattered less as polish than as proof that the brand could return to the runway with a new hand in place.

Peter Hawkings presented Tom Ford’s Fall 2024 collection on 22 February, and it would stand as his only runway outing for the house before his departure on 22 July. The brief tenure had been cast as a continuity play after Tom Ford himself, but the exit made clear that the bridge was not going to hold.

Claude Montana died on 23 February. His name remains inseparable from the hard-shouldered glamour and sculpted authority of 1980s fashion, and his death returned that singular silhouette to the foreground of fashion memory.

Matteo Tamburini's first Tod's collection gave the Milan house a clear opening statement for its next phase. It was a sober sort of debut, which in this instance was hardly a flaw.

Walter Chiapponi's first Blumarine collection arrived on 23 February, marking the house's first major runway reset after Nicola Brognano. The debut mattered not simply because it was new, but because it set out a different proposition altogether, moving the label away from its recent Y2K-coded image towards something more adult and romantic.

Alessandro Vigilante presented his first Rochas runway collection on 28 February, bringing the house back into the Paris conversation in visible fashion. For a label more closely associated in recent years with fragrance than with runway relevance, the debut marked a credible attempt to reactivate its position within fashion proper.

Chemena Kamali's first Chloé collection reset the house around a softer, more bohemian reading of its heritage. The debut was notable not for noise but for clarity: a recognisable proposition delivered without hesitation.

Givenchy presented its Fall 2024 collection through the studio team on 29 February, making the house's vacancy visible on the runway rather than only in organisational terms. In a year dense with creative transitions, it was an early and unusually explicit sign of a major house between leads.

Iris Apfel died on 1 March at the age of 102. Her maximalist dress and irreducibly personal eye had long made her a rare figure in fashion culture: both instantly recognisable and quite impossible to standardise.

Seán McGirr's first Alexander McQueen collection provided the house's first runway test after Sarah Burton. That alone made it a closely observed moment, with the debut functioning less as a simple seasonal show than as an early reading of succession under pressure.

Pierpaolo Piccioli presented Valentino's Fall 2024 ready-to-wear collection on 3 March, and it would stand as his final runway for the house before his departure later that month. Seen in retrospect, the show reads as the closing statement of one of the era's defining luxury-house tenures, lending the broader March reset a much clearer before-and-after shape.

Pelagia Kolotouros's first Lacoste fashion show paired a house reset with the brand's runway return to Paris. That combination gave the March presentation a structural importance beyond the clothes themselves: it marked where, and under whom, Lacoste now wished to appear.

Pierpaolo Piccioli left Valentino on 22 March, bringing one of the decade's most distinctive luxury-house tenures to a close. The departure altered the mood around the house at once, replacing continuity with a rare sort of open question.

Valentino's decision not to stage its June menswear or haute couture shows left an unusually visible gap in the Paris calendar after Pierpaolo Piccioli's exit. Cancellation, in this case, was not absence in the ordinary sense; it was evidence of a house between chapters.

Valentino named Alessandro Michele on 28 March, turning the post-Piccioli interval into a sharply defined new era. Few appointments in 2024 carried quite the same charge, partly because the house had been so legible under its previous author.

Bulgari appointed Mary Katrantzou to a newly created creative director role for leather goods and accessories in April. The creation of the post itself was the point: a Roman jewellery house giving clearer institutional shape to its fashion ambitions.

Roberto Cavalli died on 12 April. Few Italian designers left behind a signature as immediately legible as his, and his death marked the loss of a figure who treated excess not as embarrassment but as fluent house style.

Virginie Viard presented Chanel's Cruise 2025 collection in Marseille on 2 May. After her June departure, the show came to stand as her final completed collection for the house.

The inaugural Red Sea Fashion Week opened on 16 May, launching a new Saudi platform with explicit international ambitions. Whatever its longer trajectory, the debut was notable as a formal addition to the geography of contemporary fashion events.

Photo credit: @redseafw

Calvin Klein appointed Veronica Leoni on 30 May as part of a broader revival of the brand's top creative function. The move carried more weight than a routine staffing notice, not least because it reopened serious conversation around Calvin Klein Collection and the runway.

Givenchy released its Resort 2025 collection through the design studios on 3 June, extending the house's interim phase beyond the February runway show. A second studio-designed outing suggested that the vacancy was no mere holding pattern, and by that point Givenchy's suspended state had begun to look structural rather than temporary.

Virginie Viard's departure from Chanel on 5 June created the most prestigious open vacancy of the year. Once the news broke, the house's next move ceased to be ordinary succession gossip and became one of fashion's defining unresolved questions.

Alessandro Michele's first Valentino collection arrived in June not on the runway but as the surprise co-ed 'Avant les Débuts' lookbook. The format made the gesture more deliberate, not less: an introduction staged on his own terms before the full runway unveiling.

Dries Van Noten's final runway show on 22 June brought a long founder-led chapter to its close with unusual composure. In a period obsessed with abrupt switches, this was a rarer thing: a farewell that actually felt authored as such.

Chanel’s Fall 2024 couture collection, shown on 25 June at the Palais Garnier, was presented by the Fashion Creation Studio after Virginie Viard’s departure earlier that month. That shifted the meaning of the show: not a routine couture outing, but the first public sign that one of fashion’s biggest houses had entered an interim phase.

Nicolas Di Felice's June couture outing for Jean Paul Gaultier continued the house's guest-designer structure, though not in a perfunctory way. Each new intervention tests the elasticity of the format, and this one kept the proposition alive.

Lanvin named Peter Copping in June, an appointment that read as an attempt to steady one of fashion's oldest couture houses without theatrical overstatement. In a season of constant churn, the move had a distinctly restorative tone.

Blumarine brought in David Koma after Walter Chiapponi, extending the brisk turnover that marked so many Italian houses in 2024. The appointment carried the air of another reset, but not an especially patient one.

Copenhagen Fashion Week's Spring/Summer 2025 edition opened in August under its mandatory 18 sustainability standards. That gave 2024 one of its clearest institutional markers: not a single designer's move, but a framework asserting itself as part of fashion's operating conditions.

Tom Ford installed Haider Ackermann in September after Peter Hawkings's brief tenure, giving the post-founder house a more decisive new lead. The change suggested that the interim phase had run its course and that the brand was ready to be read under a different hand.

Uniqlo's appointment of Clare Waight Keller brought an established designer into one of the world's largest fashion businesses. That combination of global scale and recognisable authorship made the September announcement difficult to dismiss as mere corporate housekeeping.

Givenchy's choice of Sarah Burton turned a conspicuous vacancy into one of the season's most scrutinised appointments. For a historic couture name that had been sitting in suspension, the announcement restored definition and sharpened attention around what would come next.

Alberta Ferretti's Spring 2025 show, later confirmed as her final collection for the house, gave September a note of quiet conclusion. Founder farewells have a different weight from ordinary exits; this one carried the sense of a name stepping back from itself.

Kim Jones presented Fendi's Spring 2025 womenswear collection on 17 September, and it became his final collection for the house ahead of his October departure. Once that exit followed, the show took on a more retrospective cast, turning an already closely watched season into the closing statement of his Fendi chapter.

When Dries Van Noten's design studio presented the Spring 2025 women's collection in September, the house entered public life after its founder's farewell without yet naming a successor. The show therefore read as more than seasonal maintenance; it was the first test of how the label would stand in interim form.

Alessandro Michele's first Valentino runway collection on 29 September made the house's new visual direction unmistakable. By the time it appeared, the appointment had already carried its own drama; the show supplied the first fully dressed argument.

Chanel's Spring 2025 ready-to-wear show was presented by the Fashion Creation Studio, turning the post-Virginie Viard vacancy into a runway fact. The absence of a named creative director was no longer background noise but part of the show's meaning.

Celine's appointment of Michael Rider on 2 October closed the Hedi Slimane chapter and opened a different proposition for the house. Because Rider had prior history there, the change suggested not simply replacement but a recalibrated line of inheritance.

Hedi Slimane exited Celine on 2 October, ending a chapter that had been both commercially defining and aesthetically unmistakable. Even before a successor had properly settled in, the departure read as one of the year's major changes in authorship.

Missoni's appointment of Alberto Caliri formalised a transition that had been unfolding within the company. In a year crowded with louder names, it registered as a quieter but still telling act of internal recalibration.

Kim Jones left Fendi womenswear and couture on 11 October, opening yet another senior vacancy in an already crowded luxury reshuffle. By that point in the season, departures had begun to form a pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents.

At Alberta Ferretti, Lorenzo Serafini's appointment gave formal shape to a succession that might otherwise have lingered as sentiment. A founder-led Italian house moved, with unusual neatness, from valediction to named continuation within the same year.

A US federal judge blocked Tapestry's proposed acquisition of Capri Holdings on 24 October, effectively ending the year's largest American fashion merger attempt. The decision gave 2024 a distinctly corporate jolt, reminding the industry that strategic ambition still answers to harder external limits.

Dries Van Noten closed its founder-succession story by appointing Julian Klausner in December. An internal successor made the handover read less as rupture than as careful custodianship, which was perhaps the more Dries outcome anyway.

Chanel named Matthieu Blazy on 12 December, bringing the longest and most closely watched vacancy of 2024 to an end. After months of suspended anticipation, the house finally moved from speculation to settlement, and late-year fashion news acquired a proper full stop.

Bottega Veneta turned immediately to Louise Trotter as Matthieu Blazy's successor, announcing the appointment on the same December day. The swiftness gave the move an unusual crispness, as one house's conclusion fed directly into another's next arrangement.