Fashion with a capital F has always had its tribes.
There’s the design crowd, where aesthetic is king and people ooze with personality.
Then there’s the more buttoned-up business side that lives and dies by the spreadsheet and ups and downs of the market.
Of course, that oversimplifies things and there have always been crossovers who naturally think with both their right and left fashion brains.
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But the people who really get both the dollars and fashion sense of the industry are rare.
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Many — most? — people have only a vague understanding of what the other is really up to.
So there’s a kind of truce that’s held, with the fashion folk holding tight to their mood boards and the finance gang following their tickers.
But that delicate peace has been rattled.
Financial analysts are increasingly weighing in — not just on sales and profit margins or even stores and product, but on the design talent pulling together the vision.
They are now more actively picking design winners, not just market share winners.
Jonathan Anderson got the thumbs up when he moved to Dior at LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
“Anderson has a strong track record from his time at Loewe — one of the top-performing brands at LVMH’s fashion and leather in the past few years,” said Jelena Sokolova at Morningstar. “It is a positive that he’ll be the sole creative director of Dior, where priorly creative director roles for menswear and womenswear were split. This should help Dior create a more consistent brand representation and improve its stance amongst peers.”
Likewise, HSBC’s Erwan Rambourg, said: “We remain believers that ‘Dior is not the next Gucci.’ We trust that with Jonathan Anderson running the creative show there is more poetic positive potential than risk. We expect the brand to rebound starting from Q2 2026.”
But true to form, it was Demna who was there right on the edge when Team Design and Team Dollar started to clash more this year.
Demna is loved by the fashion crowd, from his conceptualist streetwear at Vetements to his willingness to shake up everything at Balenciaga (even if dancing on the edge meant sometimes falling over it, with kids posing alongside handbags that looked like stuffed bears dressed in bondage).
For the analyst types, that controversial, zeitgeist-grabbing approach was fine and good for Balenciaga. But bringing all of that to Gucci — Kering’s now underpowered powerhouse — was just too much.
“At this stage, the announcement brings as much risks as opportunities,” said Carole Madjo, an analyst at Barclays, pointing to Demna’s “bold and sometimes controversial aesthetic.”
Bernstein’s Luca Solca rated the Gucci appointment a five out of 10 and said, “We are not sure that Demna measures up to the task, nor that he is the right fit for Gucci at the moment, but we understand their risk-minimization strategy: going for the well-known.”
Not everyone who understands how to discount a cash flow was up in arms, however.
“Demna leading Gucci should drive commercial, cultural and artistic impact, which could support [long-term] growth,” said Oliver Chen at TD Securities in a research note in March. “Demna has the potential to be a great leader for the next era of Gucci.”
The question is: Who has the right to declare that Demna or Anderson are right or wrong for their new jobs?
Wall Street has had its say. Critics and the chattering masses on Instagram will have another chance to weigh in as the designers’ first collections hit the runway.
And shoppers will get the final word when the looks finally go up for sale.
Where you stand might depend on where you sit.
Fashionistas want excitement, a chill down the spine, elegance or some aesthetic that will move the great project of design and culture forward.
The business side wants dollars and cents and efficiencies, great machines made up of human capital and intellectual property to create the value that everyone along the way taps into to pay for those Hamptons summers.
The equity analysts weighing in on design are doing their level best to get their brains around the whole of the enterprise, to understand how it all works to see if it will succeed.
“The framework is, there’s magic and logic, but you want some logic that helps support the magic,” said TD Securities’ Chen in a follow-up interview. “For analysts to be good at this, it’s slightly a balance of pattern-hunting plus being forward-thinking about change in art and culture and also juxtaposing that with logic around merchandising policies and then making a forecast.
“What analysts try to do is understand the biography of the creative,” Chen said. “Basically, you look at the past. For me, it’s OK, I understand some of Demna’s product attitude and I understand what Gucci needs. If anything, the Balenciaga story has been around innovative experience and excitement.
“If you’re not relevant, people don’t necessarily want to pay extra,” he said.
And to work, from any perspective, luxury always requires something a little extra, designers have to deliver and shoppers have to pay.
It’s that friction, that need to satisfy the demands of both art and commerce, that keeps fashion exciting.
The Bottom Line is a business analysis column written by Evan Clark, deputy managing editor, who has covered the fashion industry since 2000. It appears periodically.