Former members of Phoebe Philo's team have taken the fashion world by storm The latest is Drew Henry, the new creative director at Courrèges

Yesterday, Courrèges announced the appointment of its new creative director, the South African Drew Henry, who will present his new collection in September. An essential detail, however, is that Henry, like so many others in today’s fashion industry, worked with Phoebe Philo during her time at Céline and thus his name further extends a list that is already very substantial of designers who have risen to positions of power in recent years after honing their skills under the command of the legendary British creative director.

Assuming that Henry will bring the brand a more «modern, useful and direct» approach, as he himself has said (code for: clothes that are wearable even if you are not a size-zero model), the interesting thing is to note how, after Daniel Lee’s dazzling season at Bottega Veneta, a fashion season dominated by former members of a team that, with this recent appointment, perhaps confirms itself as the most influential in the industry today has opened up. But who are these designers?

Phoebe Philo’s “School”

The first creative director to become famous as a former member of Philo’s team was Daniel Lee, who directed Bottega Veneta from 2018 to 2021. His relaunch of the brand imprinted such a strong image in the collective consciousness that it not only erased the memory of Tomas Maier’s creative direction before him, but also influenced all subsequent creative directions of the brand up to today. Following a mysterious “incident” that occurred more or less around the time of Bottega Veneta’s show in Detroit, Lee left the brand and resurfaced shortly afterwards at Burberry, and in his place Matthieu Blazy became creative director of the brand, a former senior designer at Céline from 2014 to 2016, who is now the all-powerful creative director of Chanel.

Blazy is in fact the most important of all the former members of Phoebe Philo’s team at Céline, which however also includes Michael Rider, who was the design director of the brand for Philo’s entire tenure, and who has now become its creative director in turn. There is also the current creative director of Moschino, Adrian Appiolaza, who worked with Philo during her years at Chloé; Yuni Ahn, also a former design director at Céline but for accessories, who has directed Maison Kitsuné since December 2018; and finally there is Johnny Coca, another master of leather goods and one of the creators of the Trapeze Bag, who worked at the brand from 2010 to 2015 before moving to Louis Vuitton and, more recently, becoming the director of leather goods and accessories for Saint Laurent.

The catalogue does not end here. In Philo’s former Céline team there were also Peter Do, the brilliant Vietnamese-American designer and founder of his own eponymous brand who, after an initial burst of fame, has become more underground and works with low productions and private clients almost like a made-to-measure atelier; and then Rok Hwang, founder of the rokh brand that regularly showed in Paris until last year but has now skipped two consecutive seasons even though it remains operational. At the moment he is overseeing a brand launch in Seoul. Among the design directors of the old Céline there was also Yvan Mispelaere, current design director for Haute Couture at Valentino.

Two other names are then that of the brilliant shoe designer Nina Christen, who after working on Céline’s footwear moved to Bottega Veneta, then to Loewe. There, under Jonathan Anderson, she created some of the most legendary shoes of the last ten years, including the balloon heels, and later followed Anderson to Dior where she is the current director of footwear. She has also launched her own brand called Christen. Finally there is also Valeska Dütsch, founder first of the brand Belize and, in 2023, of Valesque, an independent handbag brand. And then there is also Abnit Nijjar, design director at Jil Sander and from September women’s wear director at Bottega Veneta, who spent five years as a designer under Phoebe Philo.

Among the most influential teams of all time?

Perhaps one day we will talk about the Céline team in the years between 2014 and 2016 as a parterre de roi that rivals the Fendi of Karl Lagerfeld which at one point included Silvia Venturini, Alessandro Michele, Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri and, over the years, with more or less overlaps, also Giambattista Valli, Marco de Vincenzo, Sergio Zambon, Anthony Vaccarello and Frida Giannini. And this without counting the internships of Kanye West and Virgil Abloh.

In the two years we have indicated, Phoebe Philo’s team simultaneously included Daniel Lee, Michael Rider, Matthieu Blazy, Peter Do, Drew Henry, Nina Christen, Yuni Ahn and Johnny Coca and Abnit Nijjar, plus all the others who came and went in the previous years (Rok Hwang for example left the team in 2013) and also in her Chloé teams. It is clear that with the turnover and internal recirculation of creatives in the sector, over the course of a couple of decades, several creatives advancing and overlapping across various brands end up developing legendary careers.

But the success of the former members of Phoebe Philo’s Céline team (as well as that of Lagerfeld’s Fendi, after all) teaches us that fashion, with all its problems, can still contemplate moments not far from those of an ancient artist’s workshop where the master’s disciples end up becoming famous themselves and spreading throughout the world a vision, an approach and their own aesthetic. And whatever lesson Phoebe Philo taught, it was apparently worth learning.