This is Connecting the Dots, a series in which writer José Criales-Unzueta looks at how fashion, pop culture, the internet and society are all interconnected.
“Wait, is he playing Tom Ford in a biopic, or what’s going on here?” read a late-night text from a friend on the night of the Academy Awards. The text in question was in regards to Glen Powell, who arrived at the Vanity Fair afterparty in head-to-toe Tom Ford. Except that he wasn’t just wearing Tom Ford, he was dressed as Ford himself: black tuxedo, a bow tie and the designer’s signature orange-tint sunglasses. Was Powell here as a surrogate for Mr. Ford himself in his absence?
Ford exited his label after selling it to Estée Lauder in 2022. One of the most acclaimed and highly referenced designers of his generation had left his post to dedicate time to greener pastures, meaning his film career and his son.
This week, Dries Van Noten — one of the most beloved, respected and influential designers today — announced that he’d be stepping down from his own label. The Dries Van Noten label will continue with a new designer to be announced at a later date; Van Noten himself will remain involved to some capacity, though he will relinquish his role as creative director.
Van Noten’s approach has been markedly different to Ford’s. He hasn’t leveraged his own public image in lieu of becoming a signifier for a visual world or language. He is well known within the industry, but generally, Van Noten is more of an omnipresence than a famous figure. The odds that whoever succeeds him will suddenly pick up pruners, plant a garden and cosplay as him are — sadly — extremely low.
Still, the Dries Van Noten label now faces a similar conundrum: how to reassure us fashionphiles, and most importantly, its loyal customers, that it is continuing in the same vein as its founder, while making way for the next iteration of the brand.
Introducing: “Designer drag”
Also in attendance at the Vanity Fair party — and also in Tom Ford cosplay — was the young actor Dominic Sessa. Powell and Sessa both worked with stylist Warren Alfie Baker, but it’s worth remembering that Ford’s successor Peter Hawkings also dresses in a manner evocative of the man himself.
Hawkings was Ford’s head of menswear, and an apprentice of his since his Gucci days. He was the best choice to take over the label for the sake of continuity — and continuity he has delivered, even if to lukewarm reception. He is faced with the ultimate challenge of operating in Ford’s shadow; building a legacy of his own while staying true to that of his predecessor.
In order to achieve the latter, he’s kept his collections close to Ford’s own, but also, it seems, started to lean on “designer drag” to keep Mr Ford present. If “everyone” who wears Tom Ford — and who designs Tom Ford — looks like Tom Ford, then it must all be Tom Ford, right? (Hawkings was unavailable to comment for this story, and a representative for the brand did not respond to a request for comment regarding the brand’s strategy.)
A few days after the Oscars I had dinner with a couple of friends. I mentioned the designer drag concept, citing this Tom Ford instance but also the way Phoebe Philo has cast Daria Werbowy as the face of her work, first at Celine and now at her eponymous label, or how Alessandro Michele used to dress Jared Leto as himself at Gucci. Think of the way Mrs Prada has become a style icon in her own right, being more present than ever before as both the image and the reference at Miu Miu, and with Prada collections that reference her style and mannerisms. Mrs Prada is a Vogue cover star. Influencers now not only wear Prada, they dress like Mrs Prada. Tom Ford has been immortalised in film (remember House of Gucci?). And the elusive Philo remains on everyone’s mood boards — just ask any fashion person who still wears Adidas Stan Smiths or tucks their hair into a roomy turtleneck, both Phoebe-isms. Their image is the marketing.
With Philo, this works as a surrogate for her otherwise shy and press-averse persona. At Prada, leveraging Mrs Prada’s image helps assure the public that, despite Raf Simons’s spot alongside her at the head of the table, this is still very much the Mrs P show — and in due time, when she does step down and should Simons fly solo, these Miuccia-isms shall remain integral to the brand.
“What the customer wants right now is to embody the brand,” says Jodi Kahn, VP of luxury fashion at Neiman Marcus, “for certain brands it might mean the actual designers, and for others it means the brand aesthetic.”
What Kahn is getting at here is what will possibly transpire at Dries Van Noten. It’s less about the personal look of the designer, and more about what the designer — even if somewhat esoterically — represents as an aesthetic or a mood. “Our customers do not say, ‘I’m dressing like Brunello Cucinelli today,’ they just embody the brand every day,” she says, also citing Donatella Versace. Even if Versace has famously dressed her ambassadors as herself, like Lady Gaga in her spring 2014 campaign for the house, the Versace customer is less likely to throw on a bleach blonde wig to be Versace. Their signature baroque print is enough to get the message across. The keyword here, Kahn mentions, is “lifestyle”.
In a way, lifestyle is the alternative to designer drag when looking to offer continuity, and preserve the legacy of a designer who is still very much alive. “What a customer wants is to create a connection so they can feel like they’re embodying the same aesthetic [as the designer],” says Kahn. If whoever takes on the DVN mantel preserves what Dries Van Noten represents to its customers — the conspicuous contrasts and clashes of prints, the unexpected mélanges of fabrics and materials, and the kooky but inextricably elegant hybrids of quintessential silhouettes — then what is there to fear? If they preserve his ethos of putting the clothes first — no celebrities to dress up in drag, no hype-chasing It-bags and sneakers — then perhaps Dries can still be Dries, and one can still be a “Dries girl”, even without Dries himself.
The artist is present
It’s a strong competitive advantage for designers to define a distinct look and have that become associated with them as well as a reflection of their brands. It’s what Ford did first with Gucci, then with his own label, creating a signature for himself too in the process Van Noten took a different approach, putting himself aside and creating a universe so specific that his name is now evocative of a particular visual language rather than just himself.
The 2024 version of this, it seems, at least for independent designers, is to do both – they are creating the universe and fashioning themselves as its most important ambassador. Amy Smilovic, founder and creative director of Tibi, started to share style tips and musings through her personal Instagram during the pandemic, and has since made herself the primary ambassador of Tibi. “When you’re talking with people rather than just at them, they give you a lot of bandwidth to make mistakes, recover, change your mind, and explain your rationale,” says Smilovic.
Smilovic will post pieces from her current collection and suggest how to style them alongside items from her personal wardrobe, many of which include pieces from older Tibi collections. It’s a circular approach that has seen her connect with customers in a way that promotes authenticity and transparency. “It’s about being in the same mindset,” she says. “We’re meeting them in a way where they’re already evolved. We don’t have to massage them to adjust their eyes. By the time the runway show comes, they’re usually halfway there with us.”
But there are risks to a designer making themselves the face of their own endeavour. Shaping the brand identity solely around the person means that it might struggle once the designer departs. Building an ecosystem around one single person also hinges on the public’s interest in them. The challenge at Tom Ford at the moment is how to leverage Ford’s legacy while allowing Hawkings to build something of his own.
The way in which Smilovic has evolved this strategy and scaled it is by folding in other members of her team. This allows her customers to have other people to relate to within the Tibi universe, but also to offer a broader range of products. If something isn’t ‘her’, then as long as it is still ‘someone’ within the Tibi world, it works.
Spencer Phipps, who worked at Dries Van Noten prior to launching his own label, has fashioned himself as the face of Phipps. He began by casting himself in lookbooks during the pandemic out of the ease of “already being there”, but around a year ago, he started posting casual images of himself in his own clothes. The reaction, he says, was different to when he shared more produced content on his label’s Instagram account. “People were asking about pieces they maybe hadn’t noticed a few seasons back.”
Phipps presented his autumn collection last October — he operates under a see-now, buy-now system — and realised he had a whole new wardrobe to experiment with, full of pieces that were also available on his website. This is when he started doing “GRWM” (Get Ready with Me) style videos incorporating pieces from his brand. The videos have performed well with a combination of entertainment, styling advice and, self admittedly, the fact that Phipps is a conventionally attractive man.
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“When you look at clothes [in the videos], they let you know there’s a merchandising scheme,” says Phipps, “but I also provide value in entertainment and make it fun for people who can’t afford to buy things from the brand but can learn the styling tricks.” Going by Instagram comments alone, Phipps’s audience wants to not only wear his clothes, but also wear them how he does. He has now doubled his following on Instagram since Christmas, added a couple of thousand — around 5,000 — to his label’s account, and launched a TikTok with now over 10,000 followers.
“We’ve seen immediate feedback, and we see the financial return in real time,” says Phipps. He will post about a product and sell a dozen in the next few days, so he’s now being more specific about what he posts and how, and which products he’d like to push. The videos have evolved from casual dress up to include explainers on product, and Q&As about his business or being a designer.
“It’s free, I’m a part of the deal, so I’m happy to do it,” he says. And while the pressure of producing content in addition to his other responsibilities was daunting and overwhelming at first, he’s gotten used to it and come to enjoy it.
The curious element to this strategy is that it goes against what most designers are taught. Phipps and I discussed how we have both been taught in our designer education to not “make it about ourselves”. “I think that if you have a creator or a personality that is the driving force, it would be foolish not to leverage that,” says Phipps. Enter Mr Ford or Mrs Prada. “The shift is going against my instincts, but I am looking at the results and realising this works for me.”
Designer drag, or fashioning oneself as the aspirational figure behind one’s brand, is not a one-size-fits-all approach. “For some people, there is a certain mystery that is the intriguing part. Martin Margiela is a case where the artist is completely not present, and it works,” says Phipps. Still, he’s noticed that it’s worked for him to be front and centre. “It’s been interesting to come to terms with that, and just say, ‘let’s just have me do the whole thing’.”
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