Fashion is an all-enveloping, multi-faceted, all-consuming thing, and when, for whatever reason, one steps away from it—whether for a brief interlude or a complete change of life—it seems that it’s always still throbbings away, just under the surface. A few years ago, when I was ripped away from fashion—and interiors, and all the things I have most coveted in my life—through a stroke and spent six months in hospitals recovering, slowly, bit by painful bit, what did I turn to? Strangely enough… football. Never have I ever shown the faintest interest in the sport, but now I was gripped, absolutely gripped. Unexpected things happen when life changes. Over the past year or so, we’ve seen a whole new panoply of players in fashion—some 17 new arrivals at storied brands in Paris and Milan, by my count—but for each newcomer, another player has stepped away from the game. What did they turn to? What unexpected things happened to them when fashion was no longer at the center of their lives? And did any of them lose that burning desire to create?
I called around to find out, thinking at the start of designers like Christian Lacroix, the ne plus ultra of 1980s fashion, who left his own house in 2009 to turn to theater design. Brilliantly. Lacroix, oddly, was the first person to tell me about Helmut Lang, who came to define the fashion of the 1990s but left his label in 2005 to focus on making art. Or Rifat Ozbek, whose va-va-voom design work spanned both the ’80s and ’90s before he transferred his immense talents into interiors, including for Maxime’s, Robin Birley’s private club in Manhattan. Francisco Costa left behind 13 years of design work at Calvin Klein to found his own wildly successful sustainable beauty line, Costa Brazil; the list goes on.
When Dries van Noten stepped down in 2024 from the design brand that he had nurtured for almost 40 years, he immediately started another kind of life. (He and his husband, Patrick Vangheluwe, still oversee the shops—in New York and in the recently opened London location in Hanover Square, with its exquisite small Stephen Tennant drawing for which I have long yearned!) When they were initially building their brand they lived in Antwerp, above the shop, so to speak, working every hour that God gave. Some years later they discovered an enchanting columned 1840s country house with some 60 acres around it near Lier, and it became a second part of their lives, occupied as they were with decorating it (with help from Gert Voorjans) and filling it with gardens (by Piet Oudolf and Erik Dhont, among other magicians of the land).
More recently, though, they had been exploring Venice, which has become both the site of their new home and the setting for their foundation. They took on the apartment of the late designer and collectsor Victoria Press, a place of silvery enchantment in a storied palazzo looking down on the wide canal beneath them. “We loved Venice—it’s really a fantastic city to live in, and interesting too, because you have all the arts, all the exhibitions and the biennials.” Thus inspired, they started to look around for a space that would be “not too big, and not too decorated—and then we found a huge palazzo, and we fell in love!” They bought the 15th century Palazzo Pisani Moretta, with an interior created in the 1730s, to house the Fondazione Dries Van Noten.
Dries is speaking to me from the third and private floor of the palazzo, its stucco work made by an assistant of Tiepolo. “For me, craftsmanship is very broad,” he says, describings the scope of the foundation’s focus. “I want to do a lot of different disciplines—not only ceramics and silver and glass and things like that. Some people use their hands to create ceramics—to express themselves and their feelings. Some people use their voice—they sing, they make music. Other people put their soul in food.”
So while they have largely stepped back from the work the world knows them for, they have stepped forward into a vast and exciting new world. Life, in fact, is spread before them.
Haider Ackermann walked away from his own label, for which he’d produced one ravishing, flawless collectsion after another, in 2019, leaving behind a business partner who was unaligned with his way of thinking. It was a stunning departure. “I’ve always been quite an insecure and anxious person,” Haider confides—rather astonishingly, as one thinks of him as being the least insecure and anxious person that ever drew breath. “For me,” he continues, “it’s been a benefit—to question myself, to help me move forward.”
A year or so into Haider’s self-imposed hiatus, “I realized how much I love my job, how much I missed it,” he says, “because you never really stop; you’re always inspired. But at the time I had no way to express it—this thing that makes my heart beat and makes me live.” In the downtime, he said, “You take the time to see art, to go to museums, to read books again, to go to the ballet. You take the time to feed your mind and your soul. The silence has been very beneficial for all that’s ahead of me now.”
In the years in which he did not have a proper job, he was still busy making exquisite clothes for style stars from Timothée Chalamet to Tilda Swinton—clothes never to be reproduced but instead conjured for a single, fleeting moment of perfection on the red carpet. Then, all of a sudden, Canada Goose came calling, which was from left field, one could say, but then, amidst so much change in the big houses, just as Haider was contemplating a job with a starry Paris label, Tom Ford called to offer him the gift of designing for his label in addition to his Canada Goose work. In the electrifying months that have followed, Haider has set the Paris runways afire, giving us three Tom Ford collectsions with both pitch-perfect casts and remarkable senses of color—Karen Elson in neck-to-ankle lilac fringing, Erin O’Connor and Scott Barnhill in inky trouser suits, Susie Cave, untouchable in an off-white cashmere dressing gown—and the sort of sex appeal that’s kept simmering just under the surface. “The fact that I can express myself again,” he says: “It’s the biggest gift.”
Sarah Burton had the same instinct; to express herself, to create is to come alive. So when she left the house of Alexander McQueen after 26 years, one was somewhat aghast. There was a period when she didn’t do, or create—for the public, at least—anything. The Paris fashion shows were bereft without her. And then, it was announced that she would be the new designer at the house of Givenchy, and she has brought to that storied establishment her own whimsical, idiosyncratic, focused touch.
Clare Waight Keller has worked with care and consideration in New York for Calvin Klein, in Milan for Gucci, in London for Pringle, and in Paris for Chloé and Givenchy. She left Givenchy in the spring of 2020—“the time of COVID”—for some time to reflect on what she wanted (and didn’t want) in a future job. “I took a year where I really did start to do things that I hadn’t done for a while.” After a non-stop schedule of work and unrelenting deadlines, she was now completely footloose. “I read a lot,” she says, “looked at a lot of different references online, took a lot of walks… doing nothing, letting my mind drift. You just want to cleanse your thoughts—I think we don’t do enough of that in fashion; it’s often jumping from one to the next one to the next one, and I’m certainly guilty of that. This was the first time I’d had a clear break.”
She was, during this period, she says, approached with a lot of opportunities—”some of which I felt were going back to something I’d done before.” But in 2021, she began working for Uniqlo, “under the radar,” as she describes it. She’d spent time in Japan, a country that had long fascinated her. “It was just such a brilliant opportunity to deep-dive into another culture not only from a fashion point of view, but just culturally—how they work and look at business, how they look at creativity. It’s fascinating, the dialogues that you go through. It’s wonderful to be able to be exposed to that.” For her entire working life, she had been enmeshed in the world of luxury and fashion, moving at their lightning pace, “but now I’m seeing a different context and a different world.”
She’s kept her Notting Hill working studio, which she loves in large part because it faces north. Today, she produces a lot of her sketches here, though to be clear, the pace of her days is slower than before, more considered. “Often, my Japanese colleagues will say, ‘We need to think deeply about this decision’,” she says, with a wry smile. (Claire, of course, isn’t the only designer looking to the East as the global fashion industry continues to evolve: Francesco Risso has also joined Uniqlo, leaving Marni, which he helmed for a decade and where he produced utterly whimsical clothes, for what he calls the “quiet radicality” of designing “real clothes, made with intelligence and care”; Kim Jones, who left Dior menswear and Fendi last season, is now creative director for the high-end Areal brand of the massively scaled Chinese outerwear brand Bosideng, while Kris Van Assche, late of Berluti, is designing for the Chinese kidswear company Balabala.)
Sometimes, though, one’s life changes so fundamentally that a new creative career, or fashion career, becomes rather a moot point. Christopher Bailey had built an illustrious career working like a crazed person for Donna Karan in New York, then Gucci (in Milan, where he lived out of a hotel for years) and, finally, Burberry. Christopher and his husband, the actor Simon Woods, had a young daughter, Iris (another daughter, Nell, soon followed), and Woods had given up his work to look after her. At the time, Bailey was not only the creative director of Burberry, but also, since 2014, its president, following the departure of CEO Angela Ahrendts. Burberry was a public company, and the workload was, in a word, excessive. Bailey—in spite of being “quite a hundred-percent-type person”—just didn’t feel that he could do both.
“I completely loved my life at Burberry—particularly the energy of being a part of a team and working with people that I admired, that I enjoyed, that I was inspired by,” but at the same time, “I was ready to figure out what my identity was outside of my professional life. I just had this very strong emotional desire to be a very hands-on dad—but I also have to acknowledge that I was in an incredibly privileged position to be able to do that,” he adds. When he had finally successfully extracted himself from Burberry, Woods immediately began working again—intensely—while Bailey wrapped himself up in his life as a father. “I have felt so nurtured,” he says, “by the life that I chose with the girls.”
As for my own journey back to my former life—it continues. I’m indifferent to football although I was obsessed by it when I was in the hospital; in fact, after months and months of recovery, it was the excitement of fashion runways, where I’d spent so much of my life, that I yearned for.
One night in particular stands out: January 2024, when I went to see John Galliano’s Margiela show in Paris, arriving at a little before seven at night, in the driving rain, at the fantastical Pont Alexandre III. The entrance was at the top of a long, rain-shined flight of stairs—the show itself turned out to be underneath the bridge—and for one ghastly moment, I thought that I couldn’t make it, not with the heaving masses, not with those slick, endless steps. And then, like a gift from God, Sally Singer (an old friend and one time cicerone of Vogue) said, “Hold on to me—we’ll go down together.” With someone to lean on, I made it. (Crazy how these tentative moments come back to me now that I am fully mobile.)
Inside, everything was magically transformed into a 1930s Parisian low-life dive. My table had Stephen Jones, the exquisite Francesca Hayward from the Royal Ballet, Lila Moss, and a few others, all conjuring up a flavor of those long-ago guests at a decadent bar. The show started an hour late, but that didn’t matter. In fact, nothing did—the show was everything I had yearned for.
When it was over, with the rain drip-drip-dripping outside like a captured Brassai moment, I thought about how John—who’d had his own well-documented break from fashion—had come back and, now, created something completely magical. Forty years after his mind-blowing Les Incroyables collectsion, he was still spinning that indefinable magic. (John has since left Margiela, and he’s only just announced that he will be joining Zara, the Spanish based high street brand. One waits with breath baited to see what he does there, in that whole new-for-him, accessibly priced world). For this was what I had yearned for in those torturous therapy sessions at the hospital, where one noticed only the tiniest improvement every time (but one did notice it). I looked around at that soi disant 1930s boite on that rainy, dark night, and I cried. I cried with joy.