Among the noises: Is there still room for new ‘designers’?

“I’m not a fashion designer,” Pharrell Williams, creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear, said during his interview with Vogue China in 2024, “Creative director, for sure.”

As scholars such as Liroy Choufan analyze the rise of celebrity fashion designers through Williams’ case, Williams has already set his role apart from other designers who share the same title of 'creative director.’

This is a witty way of avoiding answering the doubt that many might have - why an entertainment superstar can become a “designer” for one of the top houses on the fashion pyramid.

Celebrity designers are no longer a new profession, but only a few are recognized with the capital D. Most simply sell their own persona.

Williams, instead of begging the designers to let him join the table, created his own and opened it to any “outsiders” like him — applying the same strategy in his interpretation of equity for people of color during the Vogue China interview.

Unlike other celebrities who seek the fashion system’s validation of the “D” title, Williams subtly redefined the hierarchy of fashion: the creative director is no longer just a fancier title for a fashion designer, but is now positioned above them, embodying a broader sociocultural vision.

Williams seems to have paved the way for ambitious creators who are not fashion majors, but the legitimization of a non-fashion-designer creative director applies only to people like him — celebrity fashion figures. After all, fashion is just one of their businesses.

Williams can continue making his music and holding shows while enjoying the dream-like feeling of leading a fashion empire, but we don’t see a single sign of relief on designer Jonathan Anderson’s face when he debuted his Dior womenswear collection this season.

The message behind this different level of pressure is that celebrities like Williams have the privilege to fail and leave fashion whenever they want, and slightly say, “I’m not a fashion designer.”

Celebrities who dedicated themselves to the fashion industry have struggled, not unlike the traditional designers. Victoria Beckham — former Posh Spice, one of the most famous “Wives and Girlfriends” of athletes, always in tabloids — has just staged another successful eponymous collection during the recently concluded, noisy Paris Fashion Week. This now-optimistic-looking brand might have died if Beckham hadn’t been stubborn to prove herself, whether during its 2016 debt crisis or before she presented her first 10 dresses in front of poker-faced journalists in September 2008.

Ironically, the celebrity whom the audience and media took least seriously treated the fashion industry most sincerely and has received Vogue’s approval for a designer title without a hyphen.

Williams, on the other hand, has consistently been a multihyphenate admired and praised by media outlets as a highly creative artist, a hitmaker, an ambitious and visionary entrepreneur, a master collaborator, and more. It’s hard to find negative comments on him before this Vuitton position.

Whatever Vuitton chooses to call this jaw‑dropping designer appointment — however they play with the word — Williams’s contract reads more like an advanced ambassadorial one. To say he aligns with Vuitton’s cultural vision is less accurate than saying he aligns with their attention strategy in this attention-economy system.

Leveraging attention to celebrities has been at the heart of fashion since the very beginning. From Empress Eugénie serving as Charles Frederick Worth’s walking billboard to the Oscars nearly becoming “The Armani Awards,” the attention that fashion attracted was part of what the audience gave to the celebrities.

But when key stakeholders frequently emphasized shifting from attention to retention at Business of Fashion’s 10th annual gathering - VOICES 2025, the fashion industry, the first beneficiary of the attention economy, finally has to battle with its own currency in this everyone-as-media era.

Modern Western fashion, born as “luxury” and once reserved for royals and socialites, took a gamble when it reached into the wallets of ordinary people, rebranding them with an elegant title: aspirational clients. What emerged was a seemingly flawless, sustainable model — selling exclusive products to the upper class, promoting them through figures who embody the illusions and desires of the masses, while stimulating the audiences to buy the brands’ mass-produced, more affordable pieces.

This dual strategy has shaped today’s luxury market, where mass audiences and the (ultra) high-net-worth elite almost equally drive revenue.

For decades, it worked pretty well, eventually propelling Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, to the top of the world’s rich list — until the current moment of macroeconomic uncertainty.

The industry is clearly paying the price for stretching its reach too far.

After all, the model thrived on a spatiotemporal information gap between elites and the masses, who had little idea of each other’s real lives; the only bridge was the presence of celebrity images in mass media. Fashion brands poured glamour into those images, allowing audiences to project their ideal lives and selves and channel that longing into purchasing decisions.

Social media collapsed the information barriers. Attention, once the exclusive currency owned by celebrities, star designers, and media, is now openly circulated in the mass market. The shift to the creator economy caused an inflation of attention and ultimately challenged luxury fashion’s marketing strategy — selling dreams.

People from all income levels and regions can now easily compare designs and quality across brands, instantly share shopping experiences, and voice complaints about unreasonable prices on various social platforms. Luxury products are much more accessible to everyone; even if they don’t own one, they already understand their value and vanity.

Like the influencer Gstaad Guy said, “Consumers are getting smarter. Products are getting dumber.”

When customers realize that a high price doesn’t guarantee high quality and long-lasting value, luxury fashion becomes nothing more than an illusion.

Luxury fashion still claims to sell dreams and emotions, but customers now look for practicality — give me what is worth my money.

It’s a tough question for luxury fashion — even Prada CEO Andrea Guerra kept skating around customers’ doubts about the incompatibility of high fashion’s overstretching prices and their quality.

As big houses work to sort out their mess, there can be an opportunity for new designer brands to keep things simple and think small.

Instead of chasing social buzz or market share, aspirational designers can revisit what fashion creatives and craftsmen did centuries ago – make beautiful, high-quality products with a reasonable price point for their targeted audience. The unique stories are necessary packaging for each brand, but they are not the core.

Or if one is a multihyphenate like Williams, try to make even bigger noise than the powerhouses, and say, “I’m not a fashion designer, I am…” who knows, you may invent a new role that precedes the designer, just as Worth placed the designer above the tailor.