Jonathan-Anderson

On 9 June 2026, Christopher Bailey — the British designer who ran Burberry’s creative direction for most of the 21st century — joined a small investor group to acquire Burleigh, the 175-year-old Stoke-on-Trent pottery, from administrators. It is the latest entry in a pattern that has hardened over the last decade: fashion designers craft house acquisitions, and the adjacent moves of founding craft prizes, launching scarcity-led brands, and seeding craft foundations, have become the most legible exit path for senior creative directors leaving the runway treadmill. The line runs from Jonathan Anderson’s 2016 Loewe Craft Prize through Phoebe Philo’s October 2023 brand launch, Tilda Swinton’s Hawick-made Hades collaboration, the December 2025 announcement of the Fondazione Dries Van Noten, and now Bailey at Burleigh’s tissue-transfer kilns in Burslem. ...

Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez became Loewe’s named creative directors on 7 April 2025 — the first American duo to inherit the 180-year-old Madrid house directly from the man who designed the Puzzle bag, and the first co-leadership in a loewe creative direction lineage that runs in a straight line from an 1846 Madrid leather collective through Narciso Rodriguez, José Enrique Oña Selfa, Stuart Vevers and Jonathan Anderson. LVMH announced Anderson’s departure on 17 March 2025 after eleven years; the Proenza Schouler founders were confirmed a week later and staged their Spring/Summer 2026 debut in Paris in early October. The lineage is short — fewer than ten named creative directors in a century and a half — but each appointment has redefined what a 180-year-old Spanish leather house is allowed to be. ...

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. ...

Jonathan Anderson is the first designer since Christian Dior himself, in 1946, to oversee Dior womenswear, menswear and haute couture from one office. The jonathan anderson lvmh trajectory — from the September 2013 deal that made him Loewe creative director and gave LVMH a minority stake in his independent JW Anderson label, to the April–June 2025 Dior appointments that consolidated three creative directorships under his name — is the most aggressive single-designer bet the group has placed in a generation. It runs across two brands (Loewe and Dior), one foundation prize, one curated museum show, and roughly twelve years. ...

Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Cruise 2027, staged inside Peter Zumthor’s still-warm David Geffen Galleries at LACMA on 13 May 2026, is the first Dior cruise show in Los Angeles since Maria Grazia Chiuri’s 2018 collection in the Upper Las Virgenes Canyon and the first ever directed by a creative director who simultaneously runs Dior menswear, womenswear and haute couture. The Jonathan Anderson Dior Cruise debut closed a thirteen-year arc that began at Loewe in September 2013 and routed, in just over twelve months, through three Dior appointments, the dissolution of the Chiuri-Kim Jones two-house structure, and the handover of the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize to a new pair of artistic directors at Madrid. ...

Jongjin Park’s Strata of Illusion won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026 at National Gallery Singapore on 12 May with a paradox: a chair-shaped porcelain sculpture made from thousands of sheets of paper, folded and stacked into a block, then fired until the paper burned away and gravity warped the shell. Park, a 44-year-old Assistant Professor at Seoul Women’s University, took the €50,000 main prize and the silver trophy at a ceremony that drew the Loewe Foundation jury — fourteen judges including Deyan Sudjic, Patricia Urquiola, Frida Escobedo, Abraham Thomas and Loewe’s new co-creative directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez — to Singapore for the first time in the prize’s ten-year history. Two special mentions of €5,000 each went to Álvaro Catalán de Ocón with the Baba Tree Master Weavers of Ghana for Frafra Tapestry #2 (2024), and to Graziano Visintin for Collier (2025), a set of geometric gold necklaces inlaid with niello. The shape of the answer to “what won the Loewe Craft Prize 2026” is therefore not just a name but a method: paper as a kiln-fugitive substrate, porcelain slip as a skin, gravity as the final hand. ...

The cruise 2026 creative director turnarounds are the season the post-Sarno, post-Kim-Jones, post-Tisci creative resets stop being announcements and start being read commercially. Demna at Gucci, Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Daniel Lee and Joshua Schulman at Burberry, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel have between them produced the most concentrated wave of artistic-director changes the four flagship houses of European luxury have ever shared in a single calendar year — and the Q1 2026 earnings prints arrived on the same desks as the cruise images. Business of Fashion’s 10 May briefing — “Gucci, Dior, Burberry: A Tale of Three Turnarounds” — named the three explicitly. The fourth, Chanel, is private and unrated; the fifth and sixth, Balenciaga and Versace, sit inside Kering and the Prada Group; and the cohort underneath them — Sarah Burton at Givenchy, Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier and Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela — extends the same logic down the holding-company chart. ...

Eleven major fashion houses debut new creative directors between January 2025 and October 2026, the most concentrated changeover in luxury since Tom Ford left Gucci in April 2004. The fashion designer debuts 2026 wave touches every European holding company that matters — LVMH and Kering on the top of the chart, OTB, Puig and Clarins underneath, and a Prada Group that just spent $1.375 billion on Versace and is currently running it without a creative director at all. The roll call: Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe, Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Demna Gvasalia at Gucci, Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga, Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela, Simone Bellotti at Jil Sander, Miguel Castro Freitas at Mugler, Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier, and a Versace seat that opens for Pieter Mulier on 1 July 2026. ...