PARIS — Lanvin has named Peter Copping its new artistic director, ending a designer search that took more than a year amid instability at the French brand’s Chinese parent company. Copping, a British native, will become the creative lead for womenswear and menswear from September 2024, the company said Thursday.
Most recently, Copping worked at Balenciaga, which he joined as head of couture in 2021, working with creative director Demna to revive the range which had been shuttered by founder Cristóbal Balenciaga in 1968. The designer worked to marry Balenciaga’s groundbreaking silhouettes with Demna’s vocabulary of crumpled survival blankets, elongated sleeves and oversized, couture twists on sportswear and denim.
He went on to focus on red carpet and VIP dressing, interpreting the brand’s couture signatures for custom looks like Kim Kardashian’s all-black Met Gala ensemble and Oscars dresses for Michelle Yeoh and Carrey Mulligan. Those efforts lifted awareness of Balenciaga’s couture legacy, rebalancing the popular narrative from its hit sneakers and merch.
Copping cut his teeth during a decade working with Marc Jacobs to establish a women’s ready-to-wear line at Louis Vuitton. He served as creative director of Nina Ricci from 2009 to 2014, then succeeded legendary designer Oscar de la Renta at the helm of his eponymous New York brand.
The appointment aims to open a new chapter for Lanvin, France’s oldest continually operating couture house, which has struggled to find steady footing since the ouster of star designer Alber Elbaz in late 2015.
In less than a decade, brand has been sold to China’s Fosun, which spun it off to create New York-listed Lanvin Group, and has gone through three creative directors: Bouchra Jarrar, Olivier Lapidus and, most recently, Bruno Sialleli, who exited the brand in April 2023. The brand also cycled through business chiefs Jean-Philippe Becquet and Arnaud Bazin, before hiring Siddhartha Shukla in 2021.
Shukla’s ambitions to relaunch the brand with a focus on classic French chic and sophistication have been partly stalled by the lengthy designer transition, as well as a shake up in Lanvin Group’s senior ranks. Group CEO and chairwoman Joann Cheng — who oversaw Lanvin as well as stablemates St John Knits, Caruso and Wolford and was the face of the group’s 2022 IPO — exited the company in December.
Studio teams have piloted Lanvin’s collections since Sialleli’s exit, while creative directors M/M Paris and photographer Steven Meisel were brought in to produce a series of palette-cleansing brand campaigns. A new store concept by Belgian architect Bernard Dubois was introduced in September on Madison Avenue.
“Peter Copping’s arrival at Lanvin is an important milestone in the renaissance of one of the great French maisons. I am confident that with Peter’s vision and technical rigour and the continued perseverance of our teams globally, we will identify a new frontier in fashion and deliver beauty and results in equal measure” Shukla said in a statement.
The appointment of Copping aims to reconnect Lanvin with Paris fashion’s post-WWII glory days: he was hand-picked for the Oscar de la Renta role by the designer himself, who trained at Lanvin and Balenciaga in the 1960s before founding his namesake house in New York.
During two years at De La Renta, Copping continued the house’s focus on unabashedly romantic, voluminous silhouettes while using bold graphic treatments and colour blocking to give collections a more modern spin. But Copping exited after two years, citing a desire to return to Europe for personal reasons.
“Jeanne Lanvin was a visionary of her time whose interests and passions extended far beyond fashion, as do my own. I am extremely honoured to have been chosen as artistic director of Lanvin and to be able, along with the atelier and teams, to write the next chapter for this iconic house,” Copping said in a statement.
Lanvin will sit out Paris Fashion Week again in September. The brand declined to comment on plans for unveiling.
Stay tuned to BoF for updates on this developing story.
