Word: fashion
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Global luxury has wrought billion-dollar businesses and dizzying amounts of dealmaking?which means that today's fashion stars aren't only those manufactured in schools like London's Central Saint Martins or New York City's Parsons. A whole new breed of fashion influencers are formed at hard-core business schools like Harvard, HEC, ESSEC and Bocconi where the syllabus doesn't include patternmaking but rather an altogether different kind of intangible skill set, namely the ability to manage intensely creative talent. Dior president Sidney Toledano, a graduate of the top French engineering school ECP, compares the structure...
...head plant manager: ever since he reined in John Galliano in 1998, sales have tripled and, at $825.7 million in 2005, are edging toward the $1 billion mark. Of course, back in 1997 containing and ultimately commercializing Galliano was a long shot considering the designer's past. As fashion's brilliant wild man known for exceptional creativity and pitiful financial results, he had seen backers pull the plug and had been penniless twice...
That's tough talk for a business in which designers have long considered that everything revolves around them. While fashion's new breed of management-oriented CEOs stress that they do all they can to nurture creative visionaries with, as Toledano puts it, "the ability to hear sounds we don't hear and a satellite showing things that we don't see," even those lauded in the media as geniuses are ultimately replaceable...
Gucci designer Frida Giannini says the modern way of fashion marriage works. Gucci CEO Mark Lee chose Giannini for the job, and she says "we have an excellent working relationship. Like the double G of our brand, creativity and management work hand in hand with mutual respect...
...unique skill set required to manage fashion businesses that there are headhunters dedicated to searching for the right candidates as well as the right creatives to match with them. "A CEO who says, 'Get to the point' or looks at his watch is not necessarily going to be a good leader for creative people," says Maxine Martens, who runs Martens & Heads!, which numbers LVMH, the Gap and Escada among its clients. Martens also notes that while most CEOs are top dogs in the company structure, a fashion CEO "must be willing to be the second smartest person in the room...