Who's Got the Power? - Gucci

http://www.time.com/time/style/article/0,9171,1533542,00.html

注意上面那個圖 超有趣的

它把現在幾個最有權勢的設計師 全部畫成了Q版

原文也很有趣 值得一看~

Fashion designers may get all the glory, but they don't necessarily pull the
strings anymore. In today's global luxury business, the key to success is not
only the talent but also how to manage it

By MARION HUME/LONDON

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 and marketing budgets.

That was then.

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 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
skilled managers run the plant.

"I am an engineer, after all," Toledano says. "I think in terms of energy. I
know how to optimize it and how to take risks to maximize it."

Toledano has been very successful as Dior's 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.

Fendi CEO Michael Burke faced a similar dilemma when he 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. The idea was to centralize the
talent and boost productivity. While Burke heaps praise on Fendi's designers,
he is emphatic that far from everything resting "on a designer's pencil
point, the brand is the boss."

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.

Last July Rochas designer Olivier Theyskens—viewed as a major talent by some
in the fashion press—was unceremoniously dumped by Procter & Gamble when the
brand's owner decided to discontinue the Rochas ready-to-wear business. In
January, Christian Lacroix discovered that LVMH's Arnault had sold his
namesake house to a couple of duty-free execs in Florida (for the record,
that partnership has proved successful). And designers Jil Sander and Helmut
Lang have parted ways with their eponymous brands because of "philosophical
differences" with Prada Group CEO Patrizio Bertelli. These days, with so much
money flowing through the luxury sector, the designer as diva concept is
obsolete.

"The most important personality is that of each specific brand," says Robert
Polet, who signed on as president of Gucci Group in 2003 when it was still
reeling from the acrimonious departure of Tom Ford along with former CEO
Domenico de Sole. Back then, all the brands under the Gucci umbrella—
including Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Balenciaga and Stella
McCartney—were associated with Ford's singular vision. But having come from
Unilever, a $7.8 billion business with more than 40 operating companies,
Polet has instead focused on stressing the individuality of each brand by
matching star managers with star designers.

In many cases the design talent has to be as budget conscious as the number
crunchers. Toledano points out that while Galliano's imagination might run
rampant in haute couture, overall he must stick to a budget and is not
entirely free to create whatever he wants. "Where we want to take the brand
is not John's decision; this is something I discuss with the shareholders and
I express it to John," Toledano explains. "We give John marketing
information, we define the positioning of the brand, and John needs to be
briefed on what direction to go."

Polet similarly applies a certain amount of financial discipline to his
stable of talent. "We have a concept called 'freedom within the framework,'"
he explains, noting it includes "three-year plans and budgets, within which
we guide our creativity over time." The notion of the designer having an
emotional meltdown is not one Polet entertains, saying he has not found
designers to be difficult at all. "What I have noticed is that people who are
very creative tend to have strong opinions—which is the same with business
talent. Capable people know what they want to do." But ultimately Polet
believes that designers relish such structure—even talent as famously
idiosyncratic as the highly innovative Alexander McQueen. "The true motivator
is success," says Polet. "Success motivates McQueen. Everyone wants to part
of a winning team."

Matching the right creative talent with the right business talent is key.
"It's truly like a marriage," says Polet. "It has ups and downs, and you have
disagreement, with a common purpose and within a common framework." In the
past, fashion marriages came about organically and often involved partners in
life. Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge met at a society dinner party in
Paris in 1958. Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti met at a cafe in Rome in
1960, sold in 1998 the company they forged together and still vacation
together. It is expected they will step down together whenever Valentino, who
turns 75 next summer, chooses to retire. Patrizio Bertelli and Miuccia Prada
are married.

Today marriages of business and talent tend to be arranged and can be
brokered in a boardroom and followed by a blind date. Sidney Toledano first
scouted out Galliano in a rundown studio in a rough part of Paris. Toledano
was so impressed, he requested an invitation to sit in the back row,
unobserved, at Galliano's next show. It was arranged that Toledano would
first meet Dior menswear designer Hedi Slimane in a cafe (they talked for
four hours).

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."

The master is the brand, and the manager must do what it takes to serve it,
including, in the case of Yves Carcelle at Louis Vuitton, nurturing a
designer with some personal baggage. Marc Jacobs has two levels of business
support: his long-term business partner, Robert Duffy, and Carcelle, who is
credited with having helped Jacobs both personally and professionally,
allowing him to expand his creative powers, which in turn contributes to
astonishingly robust revenues at Louis Vuitton.

Indeed, part of the job of managing such big, creative personalities,
ultimately, is listening and staying in the background. Or, as Chloe
president Ralph Toledano (no blood relation to Sidney, although they grew up
together in Casablanca) puts it, you become master and servant to the design
talent. "I spend my life listening to people to see what I can do to help
without expecting any kind of return," he says. But Chloe's Toledano also
makes sure nobody ever loses sight of the pecking order. "There are some
moments you say yes and some moments you say no. There are limits. You may be
their servant, but you are also their boss." Toledano has done an excellent
job of walking that delicate line: he is widely credited with discovering and
nurturing two of the industry's biggest talents, Alber Elbaz and Phoebe Philo.

The 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, in order to listen better and figure
out what creatives need. He or she must be able to correct without
criticizing and disagree without being disagreeable because creative people
are different from businesspeople; they work from their souls, not from their
heads."

Floriane de Saint Pierre, a Paris-based headhunter whose clients include
Gucci Group, placed both the CEO of Yves Saint Laurent, Valerie Hermann—who
came from rival Christian Dior—and its designer, Stefano Pilati. De Saint
Pierre says fashion managers are hard to find because the job is paradoxical.
"If management is a science that can be taught, fashion is about culture, so
you need to have absorbed all the theory yet have totally surpassed it.
Fashion management is about driving a brand with fast-changing products, yet
it is also long-term artist management. Managers must be big-picture
visionaries yet obsessed by detail. They need to be rational, tenacious,
decisive leaders, yet also passionate moderators and not egoists."

Interviewed separately, both Sidney and Ralph Toledano cite the warmth needed
to be empathetic and the cool calculation needed to take risks as an
essential combination. "You need good nerves," says Sidney. "We're developing
the business in the Middle East because the potential is so high, but if you
open the newspaper ..."

Fendi's Burke adds the capacity to encourage others to take risks. "A CEO
must provide confidence. Designers need to be able to trust us. We're there
to support them, especially when they're trying to do something out of the
box. That's precisely not the moment to be rational and figure out whether it
is going to work. That's the moment to say, 'Yes. Let's go with it.' You back
'em up," he says.

Or sometimes you don't. Rare among fashion's top brass is Patrizio Bertelli
of Prada Group, who does not have an M.B.A., uses only Italian in a
multilingual peer group and has a fiery temperament. Bertelli has proved
brilliant at steering the Prada and Miu Miu brands with his wife Miuccia
Prada. But acquisitions have been rockier. Following a brief honeymoon period
after Prada Group acquired the majority stake in Jil Sander, the eponymous
designer walked, returned, then walked for good in 2004, to be replaced by
Raf Simons. (The Jil Sander company was sold earlier this year to the
British-based investment fund Change Capital Partners.)

The managers may hold the strings, but sometimes a designer snips them, as
Phoebe Philo did at Chloe when she resigned last spring. Ralph Toledano
concedes that although Chloe is currently a collective endeavor by Philo's
design team, a brand needs a fashion face. And the chain reaction cannot
happen unless all the elements are in place.

"Creativity is not something you just add like seasoning," says Burke. "It's
a crucial, integral part of the business, and [management] is not in
opposition. It's not, 'Let's not use too much of it because it can get
dangerous.' You embrace it completely."

Burke's best buddy from college days is now the CEO of a major construction
company. What has changed is his friend no longer thinks Burke is nuts for
entering the fashion business back in 1986. "People have realized that, if
done properly, this can be very lucrative," Burke says. As for Ralph
Toledano, he can't imagine using his M.B.A. in a more traditional way. "I'd
be terrible in the steel industry," he says, laughing.




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