LVMH Leather Goods 2026: Every House, Every Lead

Marco De Vincenzo’s 27 May 2026 appointment to Givenchy as Head of Leather Goods Design completes an eighteen-month restructure that has put designer-led leather goods leadership in place at every commercially significant LVMH house except Berluti. The question this piece answers — every LVMH house with a dedicated leather goods design lead in 2025–2026, and where each designer came from — turns out to map almost perfectly onto the group’s wider talent rotation since Jonathan Anderson left Loewe in March 2025. Eight houses, eight different reporting structures, one consistent decision: at the houses where the bag drives the P&L, the bag now has its own author.

The shape of the answer is asymmetric. At Louis Vuitton, leather goods sit inside the women’s and men’s artistic directorates — a single house, two creative directors, and a Maroquinerie team that has been the largest in luxury for decades. At Loewe, the entire house is leather. At Fendi, leather goods are the founding craft and have just been reabsorbed under a returning chief creative officer. At Celine and at Dior, leather goods report into a single artistic director with a long bag-design pedigree. At Givenchy, leather goods now have a named lead beneath the artistic director — a structural decision LVMH has not made publicly at the house since the Riccardo Tisci years. Below, every house, in the order Bernard Arnault tends to read them.

Givenchy and the lvmh leather goods 2026 question

The Givenchy announcement on 27 May 2026 is the one that closes the loop. Sarah Burton was named Givenchy creative director in September 2024 and showed her Fall/Winter 2025 debut at 3 Avenue George V in March 2025. That collection was read, fairly, as a Burton thesis statement on tailoring, eveningwear, and a particular British grammar of cut. It was not read as a leather goods statement, because Givenchy in May 2025 did not have a dedicated leather goods leadership voice — the category was being managed through the studio without a public name attached.

The 27 May 2026 hire fixes that. Marco De Vincenzo, born in Messina in 1978, joins as Head of Leather Goods Design reporting directly to Burton. The pedigree is specific: he joined Fendi at twenty-one as an accessories designer, became head of leather goods at Fendi in 2008 under Silvia Venturini Fendi, launched his eponymous Marco De Vincenzo label in 2009 (with LVMH backing through a joint venture from 2014, label currently on hold since 2020), and served as Etro creative director from June 2022 to early 2026. The Etro exit and the Givenchy hire are sequential — there is no gap year, no consultancy phase. Inside the LVMH org chart, he reports to Burton; inside the talent stack, he is the most Fendi-trained leather goods designer the group has had at a non-Fendi house since the late 1990s.

That last fact matters. Givenchy is a house LVMH bought from Hubert de Givenchy in 1988 for roughly 45 million French francs — an acquisition the group has been trying, on and off, to convert into a leather goods business for the better part of two decades. Riccardo Tisci’s tenure (2005–2017) gave it the Antigona; Clare Waight Keller’s couture instinct sold gowns and royal weddings; Matthew M. Williams’ streetwear vocabulary did not. Burton’s mandate at Givenchy was always going to be the long-form recovery of a couture house with a leather goods opportunity. De Vincenzo is the operational answer to the leather goods half of that question.

What it means commercially is that Givenchy’s bag development is now a named function with a public face, not a studio-internal workstream. Investors who have asked Antoine Arnault and Bernard Arnault for a Givenchy turnaround number can now mark the calendar against a runway debut for the De Vincenzo-led leather goods category — which on current cadence falls into the Fall/Winter 2026 women’s show in Paris in March 2026. (Editor’s note: the show schedule cited here refers to the next Givenchy women’s runway following the May 2026 appointment.)

Louis Vuitton: Ghesquière, Williams, and the Maroquinerie

Louis Vuitton is the LVMH house where leather goods design is structurally inseparable from the rest of the house. The brand has produced leather goods since 1854 and is the group’s largest single revenue line by a wide margin. There is no “Head of Leather Goods” title at Vuitton because the entire artistic directorate is, in functional terms, a leather goods directorate.

Nicolas Ghesquière has been Artistic Director of Women’s Collections since November 2013, a role he was given after fifteen years at Balenciaga. His Vuitton tenure has been, in revenue terms, the most successful single creative tenure in luxury history: the Petite Malle, the Twist, the Capucines extension, and the LV X collaborations all sit inside his oversight. The Maroquinerie team that develops Vuitton’s bags reports up to him on women’s, and to Pharrell Williams on men’s.

Pharrell Williams was named Men’s Creative Director in February 2023, succeeding the late Virgil Abloh, and debuted at the Pont Neuf in June 2023. Williams’ brief is explicitly multi-category — music, image, collaboration — but the Vuitton men’s bag business (Keepall, Christopher, Soft Trunk, the Damoflage capsule) flows through his studio. The structure has held for three years now and is the one Vuitton org chart in luxury that does not appear to be under review.

What is worth noting, for the LVMH 2026 picture, is that Vuitton does not need a head of leather goods because the artistic directors are head-of-leather-goods. The same is functionally true at Loewe.

Loewe: McCollough and Hernandez succeed Anderson

Loewe is the Spanish leather house LVMH has wholly owned since 1996. It is, like Vuitton, a leather goods business with everything else built around it. Jonathan Anderson ran it as creative director from September 2013 to March 2025, transforming a regional cordovan and shearling specialist into one of the most quotable houses in modern fashion, with the LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize (founded 2016) as the institutional asset he built on the side.

Anderson’s exit to Dior in March 2025 created the largest single-house succession question LVMH has had to answer this decade. The answer was named on 7 April 2025: Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the co-founders of Proenza Schouler (2002), arrive as joint creative directors. They are the first American designers to run Loewe and the first co-CD duo at any LVMH house since Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli shared Valentino. Their Proenza Schouler pedigree is leather-heavy — the PS1, the PS11, the PS1 Lunch Bag — and at Loewe, like at Vuitton, leather goods design is what the artistic direction does.

The McCollough–Hernandez debut at Loewe is scheduled for the Spring/Summer 2026 women’s show in Paris and was, at time of writing, the most-watched single debut on the LVMH calendar.

Dior: Anderson assumes a three-category brief

Dior is the LVMH house where the leather goods question changed shape twice in 2025. Maria Grazia Chiuri had been Dior’s first female artistic director since 2016, leading womenswear and haute couture, and her ten-year run produced the Book Tote, the 30 Montaigne, and the Lady D-Lite extension — bags that became Dior’s modern leather goods spine alongside the Lady Dior itself. Chiuri’s departure was confirmed on 29 May 2025, after her Cruise 2026 show in Rome.

The Dior leadership decision was sequenced across two months. Jonathan Anderson was named Dior menswear artistic director on 9 April 2025; on 2 June 2025 his brief was extended to womenswear and haute couture. Anderson is now the first designer since Christian Dior himself, in 1946, to oversee all three Dior categories from a single office. He showed his first Dior menswear collection on 27 June 2025 and his first Dior womenswear collection at the Cour Carrée du Louvre on 1 October 2025; his Cruise 2027 show was confirmed for Los Angeles the following May.

Leather goods at Dior sit, like at Vuitton, inside the artistic directorate — there is no separately named Head of Leather Goods. Anderson’s Loewe background is the bag-development pedigree the group is asking him to bring across. The Lady Dior, the Book Tote and the 30 Montaigne are the three franchises the studio inherits; what shape they take under Anderson is the watch item for 2026.

Celine: Michael Rider returns to the bag

Celine sits in a different category of LVMH leather goods house. Phoebe Philo’s 2008–2017 tenure built Celine’s modern bag business — the Luggage, the Trapeze, the Belt, the Sangle, the Trio — into one of the most influential leather goods catalogues in luxury. Hedi Slimane’s 2018–2024 reset rotated the bag mix toward the Triomphe and the 16, but did so under his own singular creative direction.

Michael Rider was named Celine artistic director in October 2024, succeeding Slimane. His debut runway was staged in Paris on 6 July 2025. The biography is the leather goods story: Rider was Celine’s ready-to-wear design director under Phoebe Philo from 2008 to 2018 — the decade during which the modern Celine bag was made — and prior to his Celine return he was Polo Ralph Lauren’s design lead. He is, in effect, the person who designed under the people who designed the bags he now owns.

At Celine, like at Vuitton, the head-of-leather-goods title does not exist as a separately announced role because the artistic director is the bag author. Rider’s first Spring/Summer 2026 lookbook re-introduced the Sangle in two new proportions; the Triomphe family was retained; the leather classification was reset to a tighter palette. That, at Celine, is what a leather goods statement looks like.

Fendi: Chiuri returns, Venturini Fendi steps up

Fendi is the LVMH house with the longest continuous family leadership in the group. Silvia Venturini Fendi — the third-generation Fendi who designed the Baguette in 1997 — oversaw accessories and menswear from 1994 and, in the years after Karl Lagerfeld’s death in 2019, also added womenswear. She stepped down as Fendi creative director effective 1 October 2025 and was named honorary president.

The Fendi succession was announced late in 2025: Maria Grazia Chiuri returns to the Roman house as Chief Creative Officer. The biography is unusually circular. Chiuri co-designed the original Baguette at Fendi with Venturini Fendi in the 1990s — she is, with Venturini Fendi, one of the two named co-developers of the bag that defined Fendi’s modern leather goods era. She left Fendi for Valentino (where she shared creative direction with Pierpaolo Piccioli), then Dior (2016–May 2025), and now returns to Fendi as Chief Creative Officer with a full-category remit.

Fendi’s leather goods design at the operational level — the Peekaboo, the Baguette, the new bag developments — sits inside Chiuri’s CCO brief. Venturini Fendi remains involved as honorary president and continues to consult on accessories. The succession is the rare case where the outgoing creative director’s most important collaborator returns to the house twenty-five years later, after a Dior decade, to run the entire creative output. It is also the most explicitly leather-goods-anchored CCO appointment LVMH has made in the last decade.

What changed: the lvmh leather goods 2026 table

The comparison below is the most useful single artifact in this piece. It maps every commercially significant LVMH fashion house to its current creative lead as of May 2026, the date of appointment, and where each designer came from.

Two structural notes about the table. First, of the ten lead-design seats above, six were appointed or restructured inside the eighteen months between October 2024 and May 2026. That is the densest LVMH creative-leadership rotation in the group’s history. Second, the only named “Head of Leather Goods Design” job title in the group sits at Givenchy. Every other house treats leather goods as a function of the artistic directorate, either because the house’s entire business is leather (Vuitton, Loewe) or because the artistic director is being asked to author the bag personally (Dior, Celine, Fendi).

What the rotation is not

Three houses inside LVMH fashion and leather goods that do not appear in the table above are worth naming.

Berluti is LVMH’s men’s leather goods and footwear house, currently positioned around men’s bespoke shoes and the bag franchises (Scritto, Toujours). Berluti’s creative leadership is unchanged in the 2024–2026 window and is not part of this restructure.

Marc Jacobs is no longer an LVMH house. The group sold the label in May 2026 to a 50/50 joint venture between WHP Global and G-III Apparel; Jacobs remains founder and creative director, but the brand is outside the LVMH perimeter. Any leather goods reorganization there is now WHP Global’s call.

Loro Piana is LVMH’s cashmere and textile house. Its leather goods are a secondary category developed inside the broader product organization rather than under a named creative director; the Loro Piana CEO appointment of Frédéric Arnault in 2026 was an operational hire, not a creative one. Loro Piana is not, structurally, a creative-director house.

Two more clarifications worth making. The LVMH watch and jewellery maisons — TAG Heuer, Bulgari, Tiffany & Co., Chaumet, Hublot, Zenith — are run by CEOs and watchmaking directors rather than creative-director-led design offices and sit outside this piece’s scope. Christian Dior Couture’s couture leather goods development continues to run through the Avenue Montaigne studio under Anderson; the parfumerie, eyewear and small leather goods adjacencies sit under separate operational leads.

The bigger pattern

What the LVMH leather goods 2026 picture rewards, read in one sitting, is the realisation that the group has rebuilt almost the entire creative leadership of its fashion division in eighteen months without disturbing Vuitton. The hires fall into three clear patterns.

The first is the bag-author hire: a designer whose entire pedigree is the leather goods category, brought in to author both ready-to-wear and bags. Anderson at Dior, McCollough and Hernandez at Loewe, Rider at Celine, and now De Vincenzo at Givenchy all sit here. The group is treating bag-design literacy as the senior qualification, not as a craft layer beneath ready-to-wear.

The second is the return hire: bringing a designer back to the house where their formative work was done. Chiuri at Fendi is the cleanest example — the co-developer of the Baguette returning twenty-five years later as CCO. Rider at Celine, returning to a house where he spent ten years as RTW design director under Philo, is the second.

The third is the structural break: naming a leather goods design lead beneath a creative director as a separately public role. Givenchy is the only house where LVMH has done this in 2026, and the choice of De Vincenzo to fill it — a Fendi-trained, Etro-tested, LVMH-incubated designer — is the most explicit statement the group has made in years about where leather goods design literacy is supposed to come from.

The May 2026 picture, taken whole, is a portfolio in which every bag franchise inside LVMH fashion has an author with a name attached. That is not a small thing. It is the thing the designer buyback playbook has been making space for, the answer to the question Jonathan Anderson’s LVMH trajectory sets up, and the closing of the eighteen-month restructure that began with the September 2024 Burton announcement and ended, for now, with De Vincenzo at Givenchy.