Saint-Laurent

Jonathan Anderson opened his Dior on 2 January 2026 with a Book Tote embroidered as a 1955 first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — and that Book Tote, retailing at $3,550, is the most expensive single position in a market that the world’s twenty largest fashion houses are now actively publishing books to claim. The trigger for the dossier is Business of Fashion’s 1 June 2026 piece “How Books Became Fashion’s Favourite Flex”, which read Coach’s March 2026 ‘Explore Your Story’ campaign with Elle Fanning and the Dior Book Cover Collection as the same gesture. They are. They are also the smallest, most visible tip of a register that has been building since at least 1973, when Hermès printed the first German-language Die Welt von Hermès. This piece is an atlas of seventeen-plus programmes by the fashion houses publishing books in 2026, organised by what each programme is for. ...

On 4 June 2026, Carven confirmed that Kai Nesselrath — Polimoda graduate, Italian-of-German-descent, and for nearly a decade the womenswear head designer inside Anthony Vaccarello’s studio at Saint Laurent — would become the house’s new design director, succeeding Mark Thomas, who exited in April. His debut runway is set for Paris Fashion Week SS27 in October. The appointment is the latest, and one of the most legible, entries in a register that has run almost without interruption since 1996: the list of Saint Laurent studio alumni who left the avenue Marceau and avenue George V ateliers to take creative-director or design-director chairs elsewhere in luxury. Read end-to-end, that register reads less like a series of one-off exits and more like a farm system — an in-house finishing school that, for thirty years, has produced more chiefs than any other ready-to-wear studio in Paris. ...

Of the eight luxury houses with a dedicated publishing imprint in 2026, only one — Louis Vuitton — has run one continuously for more than two decades, starting with a seven-volume City Guides boxed set in a handmade leather sleeve in 1998. Every other operation on the map below — Hermès Éditeur, Chanel via Steidl, Dior via Assouline and Rizzoli, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Miu Miu, Burberry and now Coach — is younger, in most cases by fifteen years or more. The story of luxury publishing imprints in 2026 is how an industry that spent the 2010s collapsing into Instagram squares spent the 2020s rebuilding itself around printed objects: monographs, magazines, literary salons, micro-books on bag charms. ...

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. ...