Creative Direction Succession in Luxury Fashion: The Illusion of Immortality at Chanel and Alexander McQueen

Abstract

This article examines how luxury fashion houses Chanel and Alexander McQueen have mobilized the “spirit” of their founding designers to become part of the commercial brand’s founding myth and vocabulary. Pierre Bourdieu highlighted how within the field of fashion, the creative vision of the designer which should be irreplaceable is in fact replaceable where their products and business can live on long after their death through the succession of another designer. We present the case studies of Chanel and Alexander McQueen as examples of how luxury fashion labels strategically assimilate new designers (Karl Lagerfeld and Virginie Viard in the case of Chanel and Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen) into the mythology of the brand. We develop the phantasmagoria succession framework to explain how founding designers of luxury labels are systematically conjured as “spirits” that inhabit the brand’s seasonal commodities. To establish a link between the past and the future, the “spirit,” “essence” or “aura” of the founding designer is transmitted through the ritual means of the fashion spectacle to a successive designer. We demonstrate here how the mythology of the original designer’s “spirit” is summoned and reproduced by the brand through: the use of mystified storytelling in the fashion press; the consecration of particular fashion products as a chest of symbols; and the ritual acts and spectacular theatricality of catwalk presentations.