For months, Celine designer Hedi Slimane has been engaged in a thorny contract negotiation with owner LVMH that could lead to the designer’s departure from the brand, sources familiar with the matter say.
Since LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault installed Slimane six years ago, the star designer has transformed Celine, launching menswear (leaning into his trademark skinny silhouette), perfume and, most recently, beauty, in addition to reconnecting its womenswear image to the house’s historic identity as a purveyor of leather goods that incarnate Parisian bourgeois style.
At first, sales dropped as Slimane pivoted sharply away from predecessor Phoebe Philo’s minimalist, arty look. But since the pandemic, Celine’s business has surged to record highs. While owner LVMH does not regularly disclose sales for individual brands, Celine’s revenues surpassed €2 billion ($2.1 billion) in 2023, the company told investors in January. The brand’s full-year results were likely closer to €2.5 billion, meaning it had surpassed Fendi to become LVMH’s third-largest fashion label, behind only Louis Vuitton and Dior, according to HSBC.
Despite the strong results, sources say Slimane may be on the way out, adding credence to a recent report by Miss Tweed saying Slimane is set to leave the brand. Representatives for LVMH and Celine declined to comment.
Slimane is a rare talent. Known as the industry’s best stylist, he has generated perfectly precise fashion images since his trendsetting turn at Dior Homme in the early 2000s, when he helped usher in a decade-long trend cycle with his skinny silhouette. His approach to branding and merchandising invokes the strategies of French fashion heavyweights, with ultra-consistent, minimalist art direction that echoes Karl Lagerfeld - especially when shooting Celine’s black-and-white campaigns himself - and commercial collections that blend street style and luxury à la Yves Saint Laurent.
“Hedi is a genius of marketing, product and merchandising. He knows how to create that jacket, that shoe,” said Alice Bouleau, partner at executive search firm Sterling International. “It’s not overly intellectual; it’s not as subtle as what Phoebe was doing, but he really grasped the essence of what this brand was about.”
Slimane has put in place a commercially potent template for Celine with his ultra-refined, pared-back approach to art direction and campaign photography.
Slimane has put in place a commercially potent template for Celine with his ultra-refined, pared-back approach to art direction and campaign photography. (Celine)
But Slimane’s considerable talent has come with financial and creative demands to match.
In addition to commanding what’s understood to be a historically high salary for a designer, he’s also notorious for seeking royalties on all manner of creative output from campaign images to perfume formulas and more.
A true auteur despite his commercial savvy, Slimane expects complete creative control over a broad sweep of subjects - not just what goes in collections, but when and how they are shown, as well as to whom, and the environment in which they are sold.
That can lead to big results and fast, but only when the investment dollars are flowing freely. Since Slimane joined Celine, teams have spent countless hours, and company funds, ferrying samples back and forth to his home in St. Tropez, where he regularly holes up. Projects often reach an advanced stage before getting axed by the reclusive Slimane, creating frustration and high turnover in senior teams.
Shows and media can also be a sticking point. The brand has largely eschewed in-person runway shows in favour of fashion films that take months and millions of dollars to shoot. These are then released online without warning, limiting opportunities for editorial coverage (and, ultimately, visibility with consumers). When Slimane does stage an in-person show, influential guests are often absent. In addition to favouring off-calendar presentations at moments when editors and influencers are not around, since 2021 the brand has outright boycotted Vogue and its sister publications at Condé Nast in protest of the company’s cost-cutting move to oust regional editors-in-chief, including his longtime friend and collaborator Emmanuelle Alt, formerly editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris.
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