All the signs that a designer is at their final show We've studied them and learned to recognize every clue

In recent years of the great creative reset, we have had to watch many farewell shows, or supposed ones. Anyone in fashion can lose their job at any moment, but when it's the creative director who loses it (or is about to) there are always clues in their final show. Now, designer exits fall into three categories: announced, presumed or unexpected. The announced ones are those we already know about, and they are the "softest": a designer who is retiring, one whose departure was communicated in advance, or even a designer who passed away before the collection was presented.

The presumed ones are, of course, the most interesting: they involve struggling brands, around which gossip and behind-the-scenes rumors often circulate, where there is ambiguity due to unrenewed contracts and, in some cases, departures that are taken for granted but not officially confirmed. The third kind, the unexpected exits, are also the rarest and the least predictable of all, because they happen due to internal quarrels, personal reasons or broader political matters that lie beyond the designers' own control. But so what are the clues that the show we are watching is a certain designer's last?

The Farewell Lookbook

If a brand that always shows suddenly decides to skip the season and present its collection in a showroom with a simple lookbook, its designer is often on borrowed time. When it's a fashion week show that gets skipped, the exit is mathematically certain. If instead it happens during the natural break of the Resort or Pre-Fall collections, it is a gentler exit, or one the brand wants to pass off discreetly, since a final show is partly a "reward". But it always depends a great deal on the brand, the designer and the specific timing.

For example: the gentlest farewell of all was that of Matthieu Blazy at Bottega Veneta, whose last collection for the brand, Resort 2025, was precisely a lookbook. Jonathan Anderson's last collection at Loewe was also gentle, but it came during the FW25 season as a lookbook/presentation. Much the same happened with Y/Project for FW24, Glenn Martens's last season before the brand shut down. Other cases point to more abrupt departures, if not hasty ones: when Gucci presented Pre-Fall 2025 with a lookbook, it was immediately clear that Sabato De Sarno would be leaving very soon; when Givenchy presented Matthew Williams's Pre-Fall 2024 with a lookbook, it was clear the brand wanted to bring down the curtain as quickly as possible.

The Unicorn Show

The unexpected or ex-post exit is the rarest, as we said, and we call it "ex-post" because the shows of one-season creative directors tend to share abrupt (but promising) aesthetic shifts for their brands. They are unicorn shows: they exist as a single collection, often a beautiful or at least convincing one. And even though they contain no clues in themselves, unlike the other cases listed, they are themselves the clue, because they are too different, provocative or divisive for the brand they come from. That doesn't mean they are bad shows, only that their difference is clearly felt, even if in an intangible way.

Here we recall just three cases. The first was that of Walter Chiapponi at Blumarine, after which the creative director chose to retire for personal reasons. It was a sweetly melancholic show that removed the aggressive Y2K look of the previous era in favor of a grungier, more wistful mood, more "Berlin zoo". It was a sudden but refreshing change. The same can be said of the only collection of Dario Vitale's Versace, where all the signs were there: the show turned into a surprise "intimate presentation", the complete otherness compared with Donatella Versace's long era and, in the background, the change of ownership that would cut short the designer's career at the brand.

Finally there is the debut/farewell of Ludovic de Saint Sernin at Ann Demeulemeester, the FW23 show (which, frankly, wasn't even that bad) but which, with a rather heavy hand, turned the brand's goth girls into it girls. Not that the collection was badly made, even if it was far too "simple" by the brand's standards, but it revealed a sort of misunderstanding at the root of its identity and design. Let's say that nobody expected such a quick exit, but that nobody was surprised by it either.

The French Exit

The French exit (which, in France and Italy, is actually called "leaving English-style") and which is known online as the "Irish goodbye", happens when someone leaves without saying anything. In fashion, this exit occurs when a creative direction that isn't "hot" ends with a show that looks routine but is in fact the last. It goes without saying that this is the most hurried farewell one can allow, after the summary and hasty one of the simple lookbook. Not with a bang but with a whimper, we might say.

The most striking case was Virginie Viard's exit from Chanel, who, after the Resort 2025 show in Marseille, plagued by a cloudy, dull sky as lifeless as the collection itself, was dismissed by the brand in a way that, according to Viard's own recollections, was rather abrupt. In many other cases this kind of show merely marks the end of an arc: Risso's last show for Marni, Véronique Nichanian's last for Hermès, Olivier Rousteing's for Balmain, as well as the last shows we saw from Riccardo Tisci, Nicholas Di Felice, Marco De Vincenzo, Adrian Appiolaza and Peter Do. They all shared an air of routine, the fashion equivalent of two people breaking up by text message without arguing.

The Grand Finale

When a creative director with a big personality stages a final show without feeling melancholic about it, with no desire for commemorations, they put on the grand finale. These shows are bigger, more spectacular, more over the top than usual. It is precisely their exceptional nature compared with more conventional formats that often lets us guess a farewell may be coming very soon.

This is obviously the case of Gucci's SS23 show, the one with the twins, which added to the classic conceptual Alessandro Michele-style show the further spectacular twist of the casting, with an overabundance of looks. It was also the case of Tom Ford's last show before the sale of the brand: a maximalist explosion of lurex and lamé fabrics amid mirrors and champagne glasses, with a level of disco decadence that simply hadn't been seen at the brand in a while and that could hint it would be Ford's last dance.

The Symbolic Funeral

This is the largest and most interesting category of farewell shows, because it occurs when the designer knows but the public doesn't yet. Many of these shows are "symbolic funerals": you can tell them by the abundance of total black looks, by the explicitly melancholic tone of the music or set and, of course, by the presence of symbolic elements referring to the afterlife, the funereal or the cemetery. The presence of many black-and-white looks is almost always a clue, especially at the opening and closing.

The most recent example is Saint Laurent's SS27 show: grand in its staging, but "funereal" both for the abundance of ceremonial-flavored gold and for a finale entrusted to five total black looks. The most atypical was Blumarine's SS24 show, Brognano's last, where the symbolism came from the angels in white seen on the runway, which today we can perhaps read as an oblique reference to the farewell.

For the celebrated Margiela Spring 2024 Couture show, Galliano's last, both the scope and care of the collection and its undeniably spectral, almost otherworldly aesthetic suggested a final act. More direct was the farewell of Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior, a procession of women dressed in white, while Kim Jones opened his last show with a model dressed in black and blindfolded; and an almost funereal procession of black looks likewise marks both Pierpaolo Piccioli's last show at Valentino and that of Luke and Lucie Meier at Jil Sander.

The Reset

This type of finale is the so-called "clean slate": a director knows it's their last show, wants to prepare the ground for whoever comes next and so goes for minimal, simple looks that tone down their aesthetic and leave the house in order for whoever comes after to do something else with it. It isn't confirmed, but Nicolas Ghesquière's last show at Louis Vuitton seemed to be exactly this: an unexpected minimalism, many white looks, a conceptual nod to looking toward the future. If this really is the designer's last, whoever eventually picks up the thread will do so with an audience already used to a less distinct "flavor".

When Pieter Mulier left Alaïa he sent very simple, quiet looks down the runway so that whoever comes next can, as it were, start from scratch without having to work harder to create differences. When Sébastien Meunier left Ann Demeulemeester with the FW20 show, he eliminated every extravagance, bringing the brand back to its original settings, while when Hedi Slimane left Celine, both SS25 collections removed every rock nuance and opted for cleaner, more "generic" bon-ton collections that returned the brand to its neutral starting state.

The Grand Retrospective

When the farewell is announced and a great era ends happily, the show becomes a celebration and the designer in question creates a retrospective collection of all their hits. A bit like leafing through a memory album. Famously, the last shows of the great couture masters were almost always like this: Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino Garavani, obviously; but also Jean-Paul Gaultier's farewell show for the SS20 season.

Recently, Giorgio Armani's posthumous SS26 show was long and full of references to the many designs the great designer created during his life; but Dries Van Noten's farewell, too, was full of citations of the past, also present in the casting, almost a storybook ending in which all the threads come together in one last knot. Donatella Versace, Sarah Burton and Silvia Venturini Fendi all retraced their best hits for their last shows at Versace, McQueen and Fendi, while Glenn Martens and Demna bid farewell to Diesel and Balenciaga respectively with collections that retraced all of the methodology and style they developed during their years at the brand.