Who still remembers Marguerite? In the past, Louise de Vilmorin described her as a ” butterfly “ flourishing at the same pace as the boutiques of his mother, Jeanne Lanvin. And it is this filial complicity which inspired, in 1921, the drawing of a mother and a child used as an emblem. A century later, Marguerite has long disappeared from Lanvin’s storytelling. The house founded in 1889 itself seems uprooted and withered for several years. Erratic management, cash flow difficulties, change of ownership, confused stylistic statements due to a waltz of artistic directors…
Since the ouster, in 2015, of Alber Elbaz, the last to have managed to give momentum to Lanvin, Bouchra Jarrar, Olivier Lapidus, Bruno Sialelli have taken turns. No one seemed able to define the essence of the oldest Parisian fashion house anymore. “Rebirth is urgent and vital,” immediately agrees Siddhartha Shukla, appointed deputy general manager at the end of 2021 by the Chinese group Lanvin Group (formerly Fosun), which bought the brand in 2018 after filing for bankruptcy and is now listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Siddhartha Shukla said he ” a mission “ consisting “to reveal and shine one of the greatest jewels of French fashion and culture”. To its teams, this applied framework hammers home its ” war cry “ : “The return to elegance. It may seem cliché, but on the market there is no longer necessarily an offer associated with what Jeanne Lanvin herself called “ultimate chic”. »
Son of Indian immigrants settled near Washington, graduate of Yale, Siddhartha Shukla made a career in communications and marketing in groups like Kering or Fast Retailing (parent company of Uniqlo) and is not unaware of the skepticism that inspires to some his profile and the label he now manages.
But he brushes aside the sarcasm with diplomacy: “Being an Asian American and running the oldest French fashion house, all with Chinese shareholders thousands of miles away, is not easy. But, and I say this with all humility, this house has tried more traditional approaches in the past to come to the surface and it hasn’t worked. »
Demands and savagery
Former assistant to Tom Ford at Gucci, ex-communicator to Stefano Pilati at Yves Saint Laurent, Siddhartha Shukla has an asset that other CEOs do not necessarily have: he knows designers well, their demands and sometimes their wildness. In their daily contact, he learned a lesson: it is necessary ” of career “, as he says in French.
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