When Gucci announced the relaunch of its beauty line in 2019, it doubled down on the vision set out by then-creative director Alessandro Michele. Gucci first launched beauty in 2014 through Procter & Gamble before selling the license to Coty in 2016, when the beauty line went mostly dormant. Michele’s fanciful, gender-bending take on the Italian heritage house had been hugely successful in reinvigorating the brand on the fashion front since he took the creative director role in 2015: by 2019, Gucci had already racked up eight consecutive quarters with least a 20% growth in sales under Michele’s leadership, so why not extend his aesthetic to makeup and fragrance?
But Michele’s Gucci is no longer. Sabato de Sarno assumed the top job in 2023 and introduced a quiet luxury vision worlds away from Michele’s maximalist fantasies. His work has instead called back to Tom Ford-era Gucci, with minimal embellishments and sleek cuts. Last week, de Sarno debuted his first stamp on Gucci Beauty with the launch of the Rosso Ancora lipstick. Designed by de Sarno, the new shade retails for $47 and captures the deep burgundy red he’s made the house’s signature.
Michele, meanwhile, has joined Valentino, succeeding Pierpaolo Piccioli, who departed in early 2024 after helping the house reach €1.42 billion ($1.5 billion) in revenue in 2022. Though he has yet to unveil a full runway collection for Valentino, he has already shown his influence on the beauty side. Claudia Marcocci, who oversaw the launch of the successful Gucci Bloom fragrance line during Michele’s tenure, was named president of Valentino Beauty this spring.
The sharp change in creative direction at the fashion level at Gucci and Valentino suggests their beauty divisions will follow suit, but should they?
With decades-long tenures along the lines of Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel seemingly a relic of the past, the musical chairs of creative directors happening among heritage houses today has become a sport unto itself for fashionphiles. Currently, fans can place their bets on who will take on the open creative director roles at Chanel and Givenchy and whether poor reception will shorten the stint of Alexander McQueen creative director Seán McGirr, who was appointed in 2023 and has been criticized for failing to match the sophisticated tailoring of his predecessors. But beauty consumers, who often encompass a wider customer base than luxury fashion, may not care about such minutiae. And revamping a beauty brand to match the vision of a potentially short-term creative director could harm what is often one of the brand’s most lucrative operations.
“At the end of the day, beauty brands and their market need to stand the test of time. Unfortunately, as has been proven, unless you’re Karl Lagerfeld, creative directors don’t,” said luxury analyst Christopher Morency. “Brand equity always needs to come before the creative director’s equity, especially when there are billions of dollars at stake and a global appeal that touches everyone, which is the beauty sector.”
In short, it’s a high-stakes gamble with a lot to lose. “It’s very risky,” Pauline Brown, founder of executive development platform Aesthetic Intelligence Labs and former vp of corporate strategy at Estée Lauder, said of drastically altering a designer beauty brand’s creative direction.
Adding to the challenges of integrating the beauty and fashion creative visions is the fact that the beauty brands of many fashion houses are licensed to outside companies: Coty owns Gucci and Chloé, while L’Oréal has Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent. For the third quarter of 2024, Coty reported an 8% net growth in revenue for its prestige division, which includes designer beauty lines like Burberry and Gucci. A handful of designer beauty lines, like Chanel, are produced in-house.
“These licensee-licensor relationships are always products of long-standing negotiation and, I would say, a balance of power,” said Brown. “L’Oréal is a strong company. It doesn’t need to offer up as many controls and conditions as a lesser company, even a Coty.”
In the post-Covid years, beauty has emerged as an increasingly important part of a luxury brand’s universe. Labels like Dries Van Noten, Fendi and Off-White have all launched or expanded beauty in recent years, often with a particular emphasis on fragrance. But tapping into beauty is far from simple and can present a challenging learning curve for fashion brands as they adjust to a new industry and consumer base. Using a licensing model allows for less investment upfront but at the expense of creative control.
“Whenever I speak to big brands’ [leaders], they want to have more control of [beauty],” Morency said. “They’re actually pretty frustrated by the lack of risk-taking from these big beauty conglomerates.”
And those conglomerates are, in some ways, wise to take comparatively few risks. With loyal customers inevitably replenishing their lipsticks or eyeshadows year over year, the beauty industry simply doesn’t need to flip-flop between maximalist and minimalist styles every season to set — or chase — new trends and drive sales.
“The beauty companies don’t need to move on the same cycle. They can create new stories around those celebrity [ambassadors],” said Brown. “Fashion is a much more grueling industry, and [brands] are always looking for the next buzzworthy association.”
But beauty brands that don’t move at all with the original fashion house can face their own problems, as well. Hedi Slimane famously axed the “Yves” in “Yves Saint Laurent” when he assumed the role of creative director in 2012. While the fashion house, owned by Kering, rebranded stores and campaigns to the new “Saint Laurent” name, the beauty division, owned by L’Oréal, has kept the original name, with the “YSL” logo a distinct part of its branding. That sort of bifurcated positioning can be problematic but is commonplace in beauty where two parent companies or two management teams are often at play, noted Brown. “There’s a reason that, while elements of Dior [beauty] have been doing very well, over time, it hasn’t done nearly as well as Chanel, which is much more integrated in its management and in its decision making,” she said.
Fashion houses may avoid such confusion as they move more toward integration with beauty. Kering launched a beauty division in 2023, while Off-White’s parent company, New Guards Group, created an in-house division when it launched beauty in 2022. Celine, perhaps learning from Slimane’s changes to Saint Laurent, also kept its 2019 fragrance launch in-house and under the creative direction of Slimane, who joined the house in 2018. In 2022, Estée Lauder, which already launched and owned the Tom Ford beauty line, acquired the house’s fashion arm as Ford stepped away from the brand. The quick departure of Ford’s successor, Peter Hawkings, earlier this year puts the brand’s future creative direction in question, however.
Moving beauty in-house isn’t necessarily a matter of creative integration, Brown said, but rather a simple economic calculation. “The fashion houses are looking to diversify away from a relatively low-margin business,” she said. “If you look at any one of the multi-category luxury companies, their least profitable division will be ready-to-wear.”
Those economics are likely on the minds of major luxury conglomerates this year. Kering reported an 11% drop in overall sales for the second quarter of 2024, with sales at Gucci falling an even steeper 19%. LVMH, which owns the likes of Dior and Louis Vuitton, saw revenues fall 1% — sales in Asia outside of Japan, typically a key luxury market, dropped 14%. Beauty offered a more positive outlook: Sales at Sephora rose 5%, while LVMH’s perfume and cosmetics division climbed 4%.
Gucci’s struggles may point to trouble for de Sarno, though he’s far from alone in that struggle. Today’s creative directors must deliver a distinct vision while maintaining a cohesive through line to house codes. There’s no easy solution to such a task, but something new, be it a lipstick or creative campaign, may not always be the answer.
“I would be cautious sitting on a heritage brand with anything that reeks too much of newness or that feels too commercially oriented right now,” said Brown.
