Kering named Martine Rose creative director of Balenciaga on 6 November, a day after Pierpaolo Piccioli left the house. Rose already knows the building. She spent three years inside it.
Rose is a menswear designer from south London. She was born in Croydon, and she started her own label in London in 2007. For most of two decades she worked at the edge of the system, respected by the people inside it and rarely handed the middle of it. Balenciaga puts her there.
The house she takes over is a Paris name with an Italian founder and a recent history written mostly in streetwear. Demna ran it for ten years and left it loud, built on dark styling and distressed sneakers that moved real volume. He is at Gucci now. Rose worked under him at Balenciaga for three years, so the codes she inherits are partly ones she helped shape.
Piccioli
Piccioli held the job for a short run. He arrived from Valentino, where his name meant colour and couture gowns, and he was brought in to warm Balenciaga after the Demna decade. He showed three ready-to-wear collections and one couture line. His departure was confirmed the day before Rose was named.
He was hired before Luca de Meo took over as Kering's chief executive. De Meo is rebuilding the group from the top, and the people placed under the previous management are the first to move. Piccioli thanked his teams in a short note online and stepped away without a next post announced.
Balenciaga's Clair-Obscur Fall-Winter 2026 show, staged by Pierpaolo Piccioli in Paris. Courtesy of Balenciaga.
The group
Rose is the third creative change at a Kering house in a month. Saint Laurent has no successor yet for Anthony Vaccarello, who resigned in October after a decade. Alexander McQueen has had no creative director since Sean McGirr stepped down. Gucci has Demna. The group is remaking its roster house by house.
The commercial backdrop is plain. Kering is trying to return to growth after a three-year slowdown, and Gucci took the worst of it. Balenciaga is a smaller line in that ledger. A house without a designer still cannot sell a point of view, and Kering needs every one of them working.
Kering spent a decade selling Balenciaga as spectacle. It has hired someone who built her name in the margins to sell it as something else.
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De Meo framed the choice around culture. He said Rose's link to a younger generation and her read on the street bring a new dimension to the house, which is a way of saying the group wants the energy Demna had without the noise that travelled with it. Rose called the appointment a privilege and pointed to the heritage of the house and its nerve.
A menswear designer running a Paris house is a real change in who gets handed the keys. Rose built her name on nineties rave culture and on clothes that read high and low at the same time, and she brings a history with Nike and Supreme behind her. Now she has couture ateliers and a global network in front of her. The first collection will say whether the fit holds. The appointment already says what Kering is betting on.