Word: talented
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ONCE UPON A TIME, FASHION WAS A BUSINESS defined solely by creative talent. A bubble skirt, a padlocked handbag or any other commercial success was attributed to the "artiste" who sketched out his or her dreams and somehow, with just a hemline or a dangly tchotchke, was able to seize the zeitgeist and magically send millions of cash registers ringing. Every six months, newspapers and fashion journals would feature quaint headlines announcing the dictates of those creative types?PARIS SAYS PANTS! Nobody paid much attention to the anxious number crunchers in the back offices studiously poring over sales estimates...
...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 of his company and his role within it to a nuclear power plant: the brand is the sun, the source of raw energy, the designer supplies the radium to set off fusion, and those highly...
...took over the Roman-based brand in 2004. With a mandate from LVMH boss Bernard Arnault to turn the company around, Burke had to find a way to keep designer Karl Lagerfeld in the fold and also massage a better relationship between the designer and Silvia Venturini Fendi, the talent behind Fendi's handbag business. That required yet another kind of nuclear power plant, one that Burke promptly set about creating in the form of Fendi's historic palazzo in the center of Rome, which he renovated in order to relocate scattered design studios and management offices under one roof...
...Witness the way Renzo Rosso, once a lowly production manager at Diesel, eventually bought the company and propelled it into a $1.4 billion brand. Similarly, and against the odds, Max Azria transformed California-casual style into the $1 billion business BCBG. At the heart of any fashion deal is talent, and managing creative talent is a business skill all its own. Perhaps one of the most successful examples of that is LVMH boss Bernard Arnault, once an outsider himself. He started off in real estate in Florida. Now he manages some of the greatest talent in the luxury business, reaping...
...money and new faces are changing the playing field. Private-equity firms are shopping for brands. Outsiders like Diesel's CEO Renzo Rosso and BCBG's Max Azria are shaking up the Establishment. Professional managers are reconfiguring the way designers do business. It's no longer just about talent. It's also about numbers, location (India! China!) and risk. It's about leveraging the moment. Here, a look at how fashion's big deals are shaping...