The Spring 2024 ready-to-wear shows wrapped at the start of October, and the season had two big anchor stories. Sabato De Sarno’s debut at Gucci was the most-watched debut in years, and the result was a deliberate, polarising reset away from Alessandro Michele’s maximalist run. Around it, the “quiet luxury” thesis that had defined Fall 2023 deepened into a real industry consensus. Sarah Burton was confirmed to be leaving Alexander McQueen after seventeen years. Pierpaolo Piccioli’s departure from Valentino at the end of September added to the season’s wider sense of generational change. We watched the shows unfold across New York, Milan, and Paris and put together a thesis from what kept reappearing.
Sabato De Sarno’s Gucci debut
The September 22 Gucci show was Sabato De Sarno’s first as creative director and the most-discussed fashion moment of the year. The collection delivered a sharply restrained vision: sharp tailoring, slim-leg trousers, a controlled palette of red-orange-and-rust, and brushed-leather pieces that read as quiet-luxury-meets-Italian-craft. The hemlines were short and assertive, the silhouettes were clean, and there was almost nothing of Alessandro Michele’s maximalist hand left visible.
The fashion press was split. The detractors argued that Gucci had retreated too cautiously from the Michele era and produced a collection that could have been any major European house’s mid-tier outing. The supporters argued that De Sarno had courageously reset the brand for a quiet-luxury moment and that the first show had to be a clean break from the previous direction rather than an attempt to bridge it. We landed in the second camp: the collection was deliberately quiet because Michele’s maximalism had become a creative cul-de-sac for the house, and the only way out was through a hard reset.
Quiet luxury solidifies
The “quiet luxury” thesis that had emerged in early 2023 reached full industry consensus through the Spring 2024 shows. Khaite‘s Catherine Holstein continued her run with the season’s most-watched New York show — long lean tailoring, oversized leather, an editorial palette of black and chocolate brown. Bottega Veneta‘s Matthieu Blazy delivered another tight, craft-focused collection. Saint Laurent Anthony Vaccarello kept the slim-silhouette 1990s vocabulary running.
The underlying signal was that the customer for quiet luxury had moved beyond a single visible cohort (the fashion-Twitter crowd, the Succession-adjacent commentariat) and into mainstream prestige consumer behaviour. The middle-market American department stores, the European pre-fall buying offices, and the resale market were all moving toward the same fewer-better, quieter-pieces purchasing pattern. The Spring 2024 shows had legitimised what had previously been a niche aesthetic.
Sarah Burton’s farewell at McQueen
Sarah Burton’s departure from Alexander McQueen was confirmed in September, with the Spring 2024 show serving as her seventeenth and last collection. The show was emotionally weighted — Burton had inherited the house after Lee McQueen’s death in 2010 and had steered it through one of the most-consequential creative-leadership transitions in modern luxury. The collection was a controlled, refined version of the house’s gothic-romantic vocabulary, deliberately understated as a closing statement rather than a final dramatic moment.
The post-Burton question for McQueen was significant. The house had been built on Lee McQueen’s singular vision and held together by Burton’s careful stewardship; the next creative director would be the third major chapter in the brand’s life. Names being circulated in industry commentary included Pieter Mulier (Alaïa, but already in place there), Yohji Yamamoto’s lieutenants, and the possibility of an internal promotion from the McQueen design team. The eventual answer would come later (Sean McGirr was announced as the successor in October).
Pierpaolo Piccioli leaves Valentino
The other major creative-leadership departure of September was Pierpaolo Piccioli leaving Valentino after twenty-five years at the house (eight of them as sole creative director). The announcement came on September 30, days after the brand’s Spring 2024 show, and was widely interpreted as Piccioli having earned the timing on his own terms rather than being pushed out. His final Valentino collection was the dramatic-pink-and-couture-precision work that had defined his run.
Piccioli’s departure was the season’s most-symbolic single moment for the wider fashion industry. He had been one of the few remaining creative directors who had spent more than two decades at a single house, and his exit confirmed that the industry’s creative-leadership churn was now affecting even the most stable, longest-tenured directors. Where Piccioli would go next was the most-watched secondary question.
Loewe and the indie-creative-director moment
Against the legacy-house drama, the Spring 2024 season’s most-applauded individual show was Loewe‘s. Jonathan Anderson’s collection continued his run as the season’s most-watched designer outside the legacy creative directors. The show built on his Pixel collection from Fall 2023 with another set of sculptural, slightly-surreal pieces — heel-as-balloon revisited, oversized polo collars, and a closing sequence of crystal-encrusted simple dresses that managed to feel both contemporary and genuinely playful.
Around Anderson, the broader “indie creative director” moment kept gathering force. Daniel Lee’s Burberry continued building the British-luxury reset. Matthieu Blazy’s Bottega Veneta remained Milan’s most-applauded house. Glenn Martens’s Diesel kept the Y2K-surrealism vocabulary alive at the louder end of the market. Whatever 2024 brought to the legacy creative-director chairs, this cohort was already running fashion’s most-interesting houses.
The Spring 2024 shows closed at the start of October, and the season’s thesis was clear. Gucci had been hard-reset under Sabato De Sarno. Quiet luxury had moved from niche to industry consensus. Sarah Burton’s seventeen-year run at McQueen had ended. Pierpaolo Piccioli had walked away from Valentino. And the indie-creative-director cohort (Anderson, Blazy, Lee, Martens) was holding the season’s most-interesting work. We will see you on the first Tuesday of October.