The below post originally appeared in GQ's Show Notes newsletter on February 27. To receive more like it, sign up here.
Since last June, GQ fashion writer Samuel Hine has been sending out Show Notes from the front lines of “fashion week,” which is not a week and no longer exclusively about fashion. These days, it’s shorthand for a biannual, globe-spanning, months-long pop cultural ecosystem unto itself. GQ conceived Show Notes as a guide to what was really going down both on and off the runways in this strange and increasingly influential world, and a way to meet the characters who populate it.
Show Notes is about to kick back off. On June 12, the Spring-Summer 2024 menswear shows get underway in, you guessed it, Berlin. It's fashion week once again, and this season all eyes will be on Pharrell's Louis Vuitton debut in Paris. But there will be plenty of action on and off the runways elsewhere, too. Saint Laurent and Anthony Vaccarello have the (unofficial) honors of leading off with a hyper-exclusive show at the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie in the German capitol. Then it's off to Florence, Italy, where Eli Russell Linnetz (of Venice, California) will take over menswear fair Pitti Uomo with a late-night ERL experience. The next morning, it's the first train back to Milan, where Valentino and Pierpaolo Piccioli are making their long-awaited return to the men's schedule. After several days of quaffing aperitivos in Prada country, it'll be time to fly to Paris to see what Pharrell (and Grace Wales Bonner, and Rick Owens, and Dries van Noten, and Kim Jones, and Jonathan Anderson) have up their sleeves in a whirlwind blitz through a jam-packed calendar.
If you want to make sense of it all, sign up for Show Notes. As a subscriber, you’ll be the first to receive regular dispatches from the front lines of the menswear zeitgeist.
Over the course of the Fall-Winter 2023 fashion season, I spent a lot of time pondering some of fashion’s most profound questions: Does anybody wear a suit better than A$AP Rocky? Are those Bottega Veneta dad jeans and button downs made out of leather? Will I ever be able to afford Loro Piana’s heavenly Fall-Winter 2023 collection?
And then there’s the query I’ve been turning over ever since Pharrell was tapped for the open men’s designer job at Louis Vuitton: what’s the difference between a creative director and an artistic director?
This is about as inside baseball as it gets, but bear with me. At almost every major luxury house, the designer takes one or the other title. And brands take the semantics seriously, despite the distinction being somewhat unclear. As anyone who’s done a little fashion blogging knows, if you misidentify an AD as a CD in a story, you’ll swiftly receive an email from a PR asking for a correction.
And the work of global fashion designers is changing. These days, an expert curator of ideas and vibes is as likely to get a big time fashion job as a silhouette oracle who works behind a sketchpad. A new generation of designers also oversees a higher and higher output not just of clothing, but of marketing and campaign images. They are responsible for collections of clothing, but also for an entire visual world that defines the brand across print and social media. And they’re increasingly expected to hit eye-popping revenue goals season after season. In other words, the job is becoming more important while the job description is shifting.
An obvious place to start our inquiry is at Louis Vuitton. Pharrell’s new title is creative director. Louis Vuitton womenswear designer Nicolas Ghesquière, who worked his way up through fashion ateliers, is an artistic director. In a casual poll of several fashion insiders over the course of Milan Fashion Week, several said they thought creative director felt like a bigger job than artistic director; after all, in print media the art director reports to the head creative. Others disagreed. “To me, artistic director signals craftsmanship, or knowledge of it,” said Joerg Koch of Berlin-based fashion biannual 032c. “And creative director is kind of like a non-copyrighted term—like, anybody can be a creative director.” Perhaps the distinction isn’t in the job description but in simple preference: now that we’re all creative directors of our own personal brands, according to our Instagram bios, is it classier to be an artistic director?
But it’s not as clear cut as the terms suggest, with one role signaling artistry and the other signaling mere creativity. When I pointed out to Koch that Gucci’s new designer, the classically trained Sabato de Sarno, is called creative director, Koch shrugged. “Maybe it’s a French thing,” he said.
One high powered French fashion publicist admitted the difference wasn’t clear to him, before positing that “artistic director” indicates a more expansive role, one in control of both creative design and global image. “Artistic seems superior in the word,” he said. A compelling theory, but one that doesn’t totally hold up: Jonathan Anderson, who oversees image at Loewe, is a creative director. “There are no rules,” the publicist concluded.
The distinction is almost certainly related, in many cases, to contracts and preferences—and potentially rivalries—across brands and luxury groups. At Celine, Hedi Slimane is the artistic, creative, and image director, an impressive-sounding title (collect ’em all!) that would seem to reflect the fact that Slimane photographs the house’s campaigns. Not to be outdone, Slimane’s successor at Saint Laurent, Anthony Vaccarello, is also called the artistic, creative, and image director, which would represent a new title at the brand.
Vaccarello’s Kering stablemates have different jobs, in name: Demna is artistic director, and Matthieu Blazy is creative director. We can only speculate why Slimane’s colleagues at LVMH have the titles they do, too: Kim Jones is an artistic director at both Dior and Fendi, while Maria Grazia Chiuri and Silvia Venturini Fendi are both creative directors at Dior and Fendi, respectively—indicating that these roles might not be related to seniority.
In an attempt to achieve official clarity, I asked a Louis Vuitton representative if they could explain the difference between Pharrell and Ghesquiere’s job titles. In an emailed statement, they said, “Pharrell will have the same exact role as VA.” Which seems likely to be the case, but it doesn’t help us read any clearer into the difference. Because unlike Pharrell, Abloh’s official title was artistic director.
