In the months that followed the Spring/Summer 2026 season, we have seen a series of new hires in the communications, marketing and design departments of all major houses. Our new series ‘Fashion’s Real Reset Starts Now’ looks at all these changes and how they will redefine the fashion industry in the years to come.

Over the past two years, Lubomila Jordanova says she has observed a worrying shift in how luxury brands balance profitability, creativity and sustainability. Faced with supply chain disruptions, climate shocks, geopolitical tensions, tariffs and a general downturn in consumption, many have tightened their logoed belts, she explains, pointing to a “KPI fixation” that is strangling the latter two objectives in pursuit of the first. The recent creative director reshuffle has only served to accelerate this.

“This year we have seen the biggest and most complex reshuffle in the relationship between the CEO, the board and the creative director,” says Jordanova, co-founder and CEO of sustainability software company Plan A, and a member of the sustainability advisory board at Chloé. “All of a sudden, the push for profitability is questioning the space for creativity.”

Chloé Spring 2026 ready-to-wear.

Photo: Marc Piasecki/ Getty Images

Rather than pushing the boundaries of a brand’s codes and selling a dream, creative directors are often tasked with shoehorning those codes into the “consumables” — bag charms and small leather goods — that increasingly drive revenue, she continues. In line with this new mandate to push profitability, sustainability boards are being dismantled, sustainability teams shut out of design meetings, and sustainability-aligned materials reconsidered or removed in favor of cheaper alternatives — a trend that was already evident in the Vogue Business Sustainability Leaders Survey last May. “Now, the most important fixation is whether something is making money.”

At the individual brand level, a new creative director can signal seismic change for sustainability teams — fresh energy from a committed individual can push progress forward — but an apathetic or antagonistic creative director can easily do the opposite. Faced with such uncertainty, is there anything sustainability teams and their supply chain partners can do to calm the waters? We asked experts to share their playbooks.

Find common ground

In any brand, against any backdrop, it’s a rare alchemy getting the creative director, CEO and sustainability team aligned, but this is what really drives progress. “If sustainability is purely technical — based on materials, environmental footprints and supplier partnerships — it won’t feel alive at the brand or business level. So getting the creative director on board is seen as the holy grail for sustainability teams,” says Elisa Niemtzow, vice president of consumer sectors at Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and co-founder of sustainability platform Racine.

If the creative director is on board, it’s much easier for sustainability teams to connect their work with the brand values that drive emotional resonance among consumers, shifting mindsets and behaviors in the process. “Unfortunately, it’s still quite elusive. Sustainability doesn’t tend to be the priority in those first few months of a new creative directorship,” she says.

Backstage at Hermès Spring 2026 ready-to-wear.

Photo: Acielle/ Style Du Monde

Jordanova has heard from several sustainability teams about the postponement or cancellation of meetings with creative directors. “I hear of sustainability teams that are thrilled if they get the chance to speak to the creative director once a year,” adds Niemtzow. But not all hope is lost. “Even if those people are fairly inaccessible, there are teams of people below them that do a lot of the work anyway.”

Something as simple as an unrelated conversation over coffee can help sustainability teams understand what makes a creative director tick, and which elements of sustainability they are naturally more attuned to, explains Niemtzow. “Making that emotional connection is key to getting their buy-in and helping them feel like an active participant driving change, rather than it being pushed on them,” she says. “Maybe they eat organic food, maybe they try to make sustainable travel choices, or maybe they care more about animal rights. To avoid polarizing sustainability any more, we need to make it easier to understand and break it down into simple things people have a hard time arguing with.”

Hardwire progress as much as possible

Sustainability teams will quickly see where their new creative director’s priorities lie, and whether there is potential for them to become a sustainability changemaker.

In some cases, the incoming creative director wants to break with existing frameworks and rewrite the aesthetic, even if they slowly build up to this with a transitional collection inspired by the brand’s archive. In the process, they might be tempted to cast aside existing materials and designs, Jordanova says, and it might take three or four seasons to see what works and what doesn’t, and for the production to become less wasteful. “For a creative director to come into a maison and drive sustainability, there needs to be a KPI framework that embeds sustainability into the design process and basically classifies different materials as good, bad or worse,” she says. “Sustainability also needs to be considered at the board level — by the time something is in production, sustainability teams have lost the possibility to influence things.”

As much as possible, sustainability teams should try to “hardwire” progress, says Niemtzow. “A lot of brands already have commitments, as well as a system for how they rate and purchase materials, programs to decarbonize their supply chains, a way of integrating sustainability into procurement, logistics and so on. It’s tough for a creative director to come in and change this.”

(Left-right) Coach Resort 2026, Louis Vuitton Pre-Fall 2026 menswear.

Photo: Courtesy of Coach/ Courtesy of Louis Vuitton

If a creative director isn’t invested in sustainability, there are always other routes to progress, adds Jordanova. “Creative directors are the gods of this industry. They’re the ones defining the vision for the future,” she says. “But it’s not their job to become an expert in Life Cycle Assessments or product carbon footprints. They need to have experts in their teams who can source alternatives and push solutions.” And those teams hold plenty of potential changemakers lower down the rungs.

Sustainability teams can also focus their attention on the parts of production that lie beyond a creative director’s remit, adds Jordanova. “A simple example would be distribution: is the product traveling by land, sea or plane to reach the customer? That’s an operational calculation that doesn’t touch the creative side.”

Work with the supply chain for a smooth transition

Sustainability requires close collaboration with the supply chain, and this is often where the shock of a creative director change is felt first. Changes in creative direction often mean “a big, big mess” for suppliers, says Ettore Piacenza, general director of family-run Italian supplier Piacenza 1733, which supplies fleece and fabrics to the tailoring and haute couture sectors. “You might have been working on a sample for three months, but then someone new steps into the role and all of a sudden everything gets thrown in the bin and you have to restart.”

This is especially problematic when suppliers are working with brands on long-term sustainability programs, which can sometimes take years to perfect. “Say we’re working on tracing wool back to the farm level; if that program gets abandoned, we risk having all this wool in stock with no other outcome,” Piacenza says. “We are an industry, we have a factory — so we need to plan ahead. When these changes happen, we can’t plan anything. Everything starts from scratch. We have no history.”

For luxury suppliers like Piacenza 1733, changes in creative direction can bring uncertainty and stall progress on sustainability programs.

Photo: Courtesy of Piacenza 1733

Even if brands stick with their existing suppliers, they’re likely to cut orders back while a new director settles in, says Piacenza. “Orders were very limited this season because the creative directors were changing. Hopefully, the new ones will stay for a long time.”

Indeed, sustainability programs usually run on much longer timeframes than creative director tenures, says Andrés Bragagnini, senior manager of strategic engagement at the Apparel Impact Institute, which convenes industry stakeholders and funding around decarbonization. “We’re looking at 2030 goals, so the first challenge is timeline misalignment,” he says. “There’s always uncertainty in the supply chain that they will invest in long-term programs and then brands will seek alternative suppliers — that fear can create pushback against investments in decarbonization, for example. Suppliers need to know they will get the right quantity and volume of orders to fund these investments long term.”

Not all designers get involved in the supply chain, says another luxury supplier, who wishes to remain anonymous. Some bring preferred partnerships into new roles, while others leave production to their teams. Likewise, some brands have a stronger DNA than others, leaving more or less room for creative interpretation. In some cases — such as with Chanel and Hermès — craftsmanship is so central to the brand DNA that those relationships have been enshrined, and changing them is out of the question for creative directors.

Part of the transition could be showing creative directors what a valuable resource long-term suppliers are, says Jordanova, and not just for sustainability. Where many in the role delve into the archives for inspiration ahead of their debuts, few consult suppliers, which often have bigger archives than the brands themselves. There’s then the added bonus of knowing production volumes, which can reveal how well different designs resonated with consumers. “We need to learn from the past,” says Jordanova. “But you can learn a lot about a maison and its customers by looking at what sold and what didn’t.”