Balenciaga

Luca de Meo’s first eight months as Kering CEO add up to a Capital Markets Day in Florence on April 16, 2026, five different creative-director appointments inherited or made across the portfolio, a Gucci Times Square takeover that BoF on May 24, 2026 called “back under the microscope,” and a three-phase plan called ReconKering that asks investors to wait until end-2030 to see the payoff. This is a Kering portfolio refresh on a scale the group has not attempted since the disposal of the sport-and-lifestyle assets, and it lands as the Kering AGM convenes May 28, 2026 at 3 PM Paris time at 40 rue de Sèvres. The question every house faces is no longer who runs it. It is what shape it should be by the time the Lead phase opens in 2029. ...

Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first Balenciaga collection, presented in Paris in October 2025, is the first time in 28 years that the house’s silhouette has retreated rather than advanced — the Ghesquière-to-Wang-to-Demna line, unbroken since 1997, ended on a runway that looked back to Cristóbal’s 1950s. The piccioli balenciaga debut is the most-watched test of Kering’s ReconKering plan because it is the only one of the group’s three creative-director changes where the new designer arrives without a brief to reset the brand’s commercial spine, only its image. CEO Gianfranco Gianangeli, in post since November 2024, and Deputy CEO Nathalie Raynaud, promoted in 2026, have already done the spine work: the Cagole, the Rodeo, the Bel Air, and the Le City revival did most of the un-streetwearing of Balenciaga before Piccioli arrived. What he inherits is a house whose leather goods are working and whose image needs a new sentence. ...

The most interesting new building in London this year is one that borrows its logic from fashion. The V&A East Museum, designed by Dublin- and London-based practice O’Donnell + Tuomey, opened on April 18 in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park — and it is, by any measure, a remarkable piece of civic architecture. What makes it genuinely distinctive, however, is the conceptual framework from which it emerged: the sculptural tailoring of Cristóbal Balenciaga and the Japanese spatial concept of Ma. Most museums begin with a brief about square footage, circulation, and climate control. This one, by the architects’ own account, began with the question of how a Spanish couturier shaped the air around a body, and what a building might learn from that. ...