Gianfranco Ferré Fires Creative Directors Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi
It's official: 2011 really is the Year of Fashion Breakups.
Following John Galliano's dismissal from Dior and his own eponymous line, Christophe Decarnin's parting with Balmain, and constant rumblings surrounding Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci, YSL's Stefano Pilati, and Chloé's Hannah MacGibbon, Gianfranco Ferré's new owner Paris Group has given creative directors Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi their walking papers, WWD reports.
After offering nothing more than a vague “we'll see” when questioned about the designers' fates at the label's Fall 2011 show in February, Paris Group's Abdulkader Sankari and his son Ahmed are said to have cut Aquilano and Rimondi loose in the face of weak sales figures.
“Sales didn’t go well at all and the designers have already left,” a source tells the paper.
A lack of samples and a possible misreading of their target audience may have also contributed to the firing of the duo, who were named co-creative directors in 2008 after Ferré's 2007 death and also run their own label, Aquilano.Rimondi.
“We bought a minimal amount of the collection for the sake of carrying the brand, but there simply were not enough samples,” an anonymous retailer adds. “There was almost no day wear and evening wear was fairy-tale-like, something for the Oscars. It may work for a small, niche brand, but not for such a global brand.”
Considering that Style.com's Nicole Phelps branded their Fall 2011 collection "the duo's most woman-friendly show to date" and suggested that it was sure to find fans amongst retailers, it appears as though Aquilano and Rimondi had been trying (in vain) to make their designs more wearable.
On the bright side, a lot of fashion houses are hiring …
