2012 is shaping up to be a year of (attempted) revival for fashion brands. The latest? Ungaro.
Almost exactly a year after it was announced that Giles Deacon, Ungaro’s most recent short-lived creative director, had left the company, followed by CEO Jeffrey Aronsson and other advisors, WWD reports that a new team has taken the reigns with plans to return the label to the runway next season.
The new creative director?
It’s been about a year and a half since Giles Deacon replaced, um, Lindsay Lohan as creative director at Ungaro. His first collection showed at Paris Fashion Week spring 2011 and today, with the spring 2012 show imminent, Ungaro and Deacon have announced that their collaboration has come to an end. WWD reports that both parties are calling it a mutual decision rather than a firing, and we’re not entirely surprised. The fashion house has seen a revolving door of creative directors over the past few years.
Giambattista Valli, Peter Dundas, Vincent Darre, Esteban Cortazar and then Lindsay and Estrella Archs all passed through before Deacon, and none of them lasted more than a couple of seasons. The troubled brand also hired a new CEO this year, Jeffry Aronsson, who previously held chief executive positions at Donna Karan International, Marc Jacobs International and Oscar de la Renta and is expected to turn the brand around.
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PARIS–“Haven’t we met before?” was the first thing Giles Deacon said to me as we chatted backstage after the show. I told him that yes, we had indeed met, but in far less glamorous circumstances, when I bartended in East London as a student, and pulled him a pint or two. “You must have made me lots of drinks then!” he said with a laugh. That sums up Giles Deacon in a sentence: unafraid to have a good time, whether in a crumby pub or at the Italian Embassy, where his second Ungaro show was held.
The collection was definitely better suited to a cocktail at the embassy than a beer in a dive bar: Giles presented a fearlessly sexual woman–a playboy bunny at times, a dominatrix at others. Referring to Ungaro’s famous comment that he “dresses mistresses rather than wives,” Deacon borrowed and condensed all codes of sexuality and taboo onto one catwalk.
