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Icicle has appointed Sabato De Sarno as creative director, the Chinese fashion house confirmed on 7 September, putting the former Gucci designer in charge of women’s and men’s ready-to-wear, accessories, and eyewear.
His first collection for the label arrives for Autumn/Winter 2027-28. The appointment lands five months after Kering took a minority stake in Icicle and signals the brand’s push to build a genuinely global business.
Icicle shaped its identity around what it calls “Made In Earth”, sourcing cashmere from Afghanistan and Inner Mongolia, linen from Belgium, wool from Italy, and silk from China, then working these fibres with a light hand. The label runs an ongoing experimental arm called the Natural Way Project, a materials laboratory that tests recycled cashmere yarns and closes the loop on other materials. A separate collaboration with the Woolmark Company has pushed traceability further, tracing wool back to specific Australian farms.
The Autumn/Winter 2023 edition was made from surplus fabric left over from previous collections reworked into new pieces, and a Spring/Summer 2022 capsule turned its attention to hemp, a fibre grown across East Asia for centuries.
De Sarno’s Gucci ran on a comparable instinct toward restraint. His signature moves included the deep Ancora red he extracted from Gucci’s webbing strap, clean tailoring stripped of Alessandro Michele’s maximalist layering, and archival references reworked into something closer to daywear. He had been without a major post since leaving Gucci in February 2025, after roughly two years of steering the house through a leaner, more pared-back aesthetic.
Before Gucci, De Sarno built his reputation at Prada and Dolce & Gabbana, then spent a decade at Valentino, where he eventually became fashion director with responsibility for both men’s and women’s lines.
His final Gucci runway show, presented in Milan in September 2024 for Spring/Summer 2025, drew on Jackie Kennedy and what he described as “casual grandeur.” He announced his departure in February of next year, two and a half weeks before his scheduled Fall/Winter 2025 show, which Gucci’s in-house design team presented instead. A Pre-Fall 2025 collection had already debuted in December 2024, before the exit news broke, and several outlets called it his strongest outing yet for the house.
Benedicte Laloux will remain design director of the women’s show collection, working under De Sarno. She has been part of Icicle’s Paris Design Studio since 2013 and was named artistic director of womenswear in 2019, giving her continuous history with the brand’s aesthetic through the transition.
Less settled is what happens to Mark van Beek, who has led the menswear atelier since September 2025. Icicle hasn’t commented on whether he would stay on under a new arrangement.
Founded in Shanghai in 1997 by Ye Shouzeng and Shawna Tao. Icicle now runs more than two hundred stores worldwide and operates a dual creative structure split between Paris and Shanghai, with flagship locations in Beijing, Shanghai, and the French capital. The company sits within the ICCF Group, which also owns the French label Carven.
Icicle’s most recent Paris outings have leaned into a quieter version of that Paris-Shanghai split, often described in the press as a balance between European restraint and Chinese material philosophy. Laloux tends to frame her own work differently, saying in past interviews that she designs less with a specific market in mind and more around the story a given collection tells.
The Autumn/Winter 2026 Atelier Collection was shown inside the Musée des Arts Décoratifs on 5 March 2026, built around the themes of permanence and natural movement. Titled “The Fall of Nature,” it featured cashmere jumpers and wool coats in sandy beige, misty grey, and anthracite. Six months earlier, Icicle had shown Spring/Summer 2026, called “Looking Through The Window,” at Paris Fashion Week in 2025, a lighter, airier counterpoint with a palette drawn more from nature’s brighter register.
Icicle’s five product lines each correspond to one of the five elements in Chinese philosophy, metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, and the past collections have spotlighted traditional techniques such as Dong cloth, a fabric from Guizhou province finished with an egg-white wash that gives it its distinctive sheen. Ye Shouzeng framed the appointment as an extension of that founding vision; reconnecting people with nature through lasting fashion has been the brand’s ambition since it began.
De Sarno, for his part, said he was drawn to the label by what he called a deep alignment between its principles and his own creative outlook, tracing his interest back to raw material sourcing and the craftsmanship applied to shape it.
The move fits a broader pattern reshaping Asian fashion. Francesco Risso now designs for Fast Retailing’s GU, Kim Jones works with Bosideng’s Areal, Kris Van Assche leads design at the Chinese sportswear giant Anta, Daniel Fletcher has joined Mithridate, and Clare Waight Keller has taken a role with Uniqlo. De Sarno’s move to Icicle extends that list.
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