As fashion week month was coming to an end in Paris, it was announced that Justin O'Shea, Creative Director at Brioni, was out. Hired in March and hailed as a saviour, O'Shea was celebrated by many for his unconventional background. A former buying director and then global fashion director at Munich-based luxury e-tailer MyTheresa.com (acquired by American Neiman Marcus in September 2014), he previously worked with streetwear and denim brands in Europe and in his native Australia and for the Kuwait-based luxury retailer Al Ostoura, focusing on womenswear, but didn't have any fromal training in tailoring or fashion design.
O'Shea formally entered Brioni on 1st April 2016; a few months later he launched a Brioni campaign, starring Metallica in crisp suits or tuxedos with a new gothic font logo (actually a tweaked version of the original logo by Brioni), and came up with his first collection that mainly featured body-fitting jackets with strong shoulders and nipped waists, matched with tight pants, cringing shiny silk shirts and ties with annoyingly huge knots and gangster chinchilla coats.
Why O'Shea didn't last long is obvious from the fact that - apart from spending more hours at the gym/the tattoo parlour (as his Instagram account proves...) than at his desk at Brioni - he styled (or as they say nowadays "designed"...) his first collection with his own persona rather than with wealthy consumers in mind (yes, you have to attract younger consumers, but what about mature consumers who like Brioni's classic style?), while considering secondary to his large ego the skills of the craftspeople making the Brioni suits.
"Guys want to get the coolest thing," he told Vogue US in July, but this decision proves that guys want the fit and the quality rather than the cool factor.
Innovating things gradually, moving forward without destroying the heritage or damaging it by behaving like a ranting maniac and fashion lunatic (he told Vogue US "I don't want to make pink and yellow and purple Pitti Uomo crap!" definitely not the best strategy to attract the attention of the Pitti organisers…) may have been a solution for O'Shea.
When he was appointed, critics cited the numbers of his followers on his Instagram account (over 80,000 at the time), rather than his skills in tailoring.
Yet his demise has proved that, while your skills and the content of your CV may not bring immediate visibility, they may actually end up producing real sales. Visibility and peacocking (a pastime Mr O'Shea favours as proved by his presence at the fashion shows and by the number of pictures featuring him on street style galleries/sites) instead mainly generate media revenue.
O'Shea's demise makes you sit down and start seriously thinking which will be the next trendy thing to collapse, maybe supercool collective Vêtements who sent on their Spring/Summer 2017 men and women's runway a series of collaborations, including monstrous "supersize me" suits by Brioni?
Who knows. As for Brioni, no formal announcements were made, but a spokesman stated that the next collection will only be presented to buyers at the brand's Milan showroom from mid-November.
We analysed the situation at Brioni months ago and we hate saying we were right, but Brioni'd better start looking for somebody genuinely talented. The next tailoring gem may indeed be hiding among the fashion university students who visit Brioni on a constant basis.
It's about time for Brioni to look for humble people with skills rather than for unskilled people with large egos. Above all, it's about time for Kering to start considering the situation of the Brioni workforce and the problems they have been going through in the last few months rather than throwing money out of the window to show us O'Shea's fancy trips to Australia or to restyle the Brioni shop entrance in Paris and the window shops into a series of ominous coffin-shaped motifs.
You may think that fashion is a frivolous and superficial thing, but it's time we started taking it more seriously.
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