Hedi Slimane Exits Celine After Seven Years At The Helm

After a seven-year run, Hedi Slimane is leaving Celine. “Under his creative and artistic direction, Celine has experienced exceptional growth and established itself as an iconic French couture house,” Celine said in a statement on Wednesday. “The extraordinary journey taken together over the last seven years has made Celine a house with a formidable foundation for the future.” No successor has been announced.

Slimane became artistic, creative and image director of Celine in February 2018, after Phoebe Philo’s departure. He was previously artistic director of menswear at Yves Saint Laurent until 2000, when he joined Dior Homme. This is where he created the skinny silhouette that famously prompted Karl Lagerfeld to go on a diet. Slimane left Dior in 2007 and returned to Yves Saint Laurent in 2012 as creative director, where he cut “Yves” from the name immediately before his first show. He left in 2016.

At Celine, he dropped the accent over the “e” in Céline, and introduced a new logo before his first show. His debut for spring/summer 2019 (where he added menswear) received “a raucous chorus of criticism”, wrote The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan. “In a single evening, he has blown up everything that Celine was, flushed it clean. His name might not be on the label, but in every other respect, the brand might as well be called Hedi Slimane,” Givhan wrote. For autumn/winter 2019, he shifted to a bourgeois French-girl look. This time, “it was a near-unanimous oui,” Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower wrote.

At the LVMH annual earnings conference in January 2018, soon after the announcement of Slimane’s appointment, LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault said: “The objective with him is to reach at least €2 billion to €3 billion, and perhaps more, within five years.” At the time, Celine’s sales were close to €1 billion. Five years later, sales reached an estimated €2.6 billion in 2023, per HSBC, making it LVMH’s third largest fashion brand after Louis Vuitton and Dior – overtaking Fendi in terms of revenue. Slimane oversaw the introduction of Celine fragrances in 2019, and make-up (initially in the form of a lipstick line) is slated to follow this autumn.

Having shied away from the press from his start at the company, Slimane more or less stopped doing live runways after the pandemic, even as other designers in the LVMH stable resumed regular shows. Although he receded from public view, his amalgam of Parisienne haute bourgeoisie and Los Angeles rocker glam remained a persuasive vision.

In December 2022, Slimane chose Los Angeles – the city where he lived and worked as Saint Laurent’s creative director – for his first physical runway since the pandemic, titled “Age of Indieness”. “If Slimane is ever going to step out with an eponymous brand, this nostalgic collection would surely be its basis,” wrote Vogue Business’s Christina Binkley.

Still standing free from the fashion calendar, in early September, he unveiled his men’s SS25 collection in the format of a 13-minute film that he directed titled The Bright Young. This past weekend, during Paris Fashion Week, he also released an SS25 film titled Un Été français. The designer sent out a tweed-heavy collection, prompting commentators to believe he’s leaving for Chanel, which has yet to appoint a new designer.

“Celine continues to make strong progress,” said Arnault during the LVMH annual general meeting in April. “Celine is chic, hip, sexy fashion for young people even if the prices are what they are, and it works. I was in Japan last week with Delphine [Arnault]. I could see that in front of the Celine boutiques, there was an incredible line, up to two hours.” Where will Slimane land in his next act? Fashion will be watching closely.