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Versace confirmed the departure of CEO Emmanuel Gintzburger. Moschino appointed Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo as co-creative directors simultaneously. Rabanne parted with the designer who had spent 13 years rebuilding its identity. All three announcements landed within 48 hours of each other, in a season already heavy with personnel shifts across the European houses.
On 24 June, the Prada Group confirmed Emmanuel Gintzburger’s departure, effective the previous day. Gintzburger joined the house in September 2022, when it was still owned by Capri Holdings, and had since led it through a change of ownership worth 1.25 billion euros, the departure of Donatella Versace as creative director after nearly three decades at the helm, and the arrival of not one but two successors in quick succession. Dario Vitale lasted just one season. Pieter Mulier, formerly of Alaïa, takes up the role on 1 July.
Prada’s statement shed little light on the new governance structure. The vagueness is consistent with how the group has handled Versace since completing the acquisition in December. Andrea Guerra, Prada’s chief executive, has been clear that the brand’s recovery will require patience, acknowledging that Versace’s operating losses are expected to continue through 2026 as repositioning work gets underway.
The changes at Versace go beyond personnel. Versace Jeans Couture, the diffusion line licensed to Swinger International since 2009, is being discontinued entirely, with no replacement sublabel planned. Over 30 per cent of Versace’s sales currently flow through factory outlets and discount channels. Prada is pulling back from those too. Atelier Versace, the historic haute couture line, will return to the Paris Fashion Week couture schedule in 2027. Versace recorded revenues of 684 million euros in 2025, and the group has forecast some degree of top-line contraction in 2026 as the repositioning beds in. Gintzburger oversaw the groundwork for all of it.
The announcement from Aeffe came on 22 June. Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo, who founded the Milan independent label Sunnei in 2014 and left it before its eventual liquidation last year, are now co-creative directors of Moschino, effective immediately. Their predecessor, Adrian Appiolaza, had departed two days earlier after two years in the role. What makes the appointment interesting is the fit.
Sunnei built its reputation on satirical show concepts, retro-athletic codes, and a fashion vocabulary that treated the industry’s conventions as material to be worked against. Franco Moschino was doing much the same in the 1980s, running campaign posters that read “Stop the Fashion System” while selling very well-made clothes.
Aeffe executive chairman Massimo Ferretti cited the duo’s “contemporary creative vision” and their ability to develop distinctive creative languages. Their debut collection will show at Milan Fashion Week in September 2026, giving them roughly 10 weeks to translate that into a first collection for a house navigating its own ownership pressures. Aeffe received a restructuring offer from Oxy Capital in May and remains in an ongoing corporate composition process.
Julien Dossena’s departure from Rabanne, confirmed the same day as Gintzburger’s exit from Versace, closes a chapter that lasted longer than most designers manage at a single house. He joined in early 2013 at 30. Eight months later, he was the creative director. Over the next 13 years, he did something few thought possible with Paco Rabanne’s legacy: made it feel urgent without dismantling what made it distinctive.
The chainmail and metallic discs remained throughout Dossena’s tenure, but he widened the wardrobe to include daywear built on workwear references and something approaching the kind of found, flea-market ease that sits comfortably alongside the more obviously party-ready pieces. The commercial results tracked the critical ones. In 2023, the year the house dropped “Paco” from its name, Rabanne became the first Puig label to clear one billion euros in sales. Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter, and Miley Cyrus wearing the house in their own time rather than in staged moments reflected that the clothes had earned a place in the actual wardrobes of women with options.
Puig, which owns Rabanne, confirmed Dossena’s exit with the usual warmth of the official goodbye. Ana Trias, president of Puig’s prestige and fashion brands, said he had profoundly shaped a new era for the house. No successor has been announced, though Olivier Rousteing, who departed Balmain in November 2025 after 14 years, has been widely mentioned in industry circles as a potential candidate.
The Gintzburger, Dossena, and Messina-Rizzo announcements land in a year already crowded with appointments. At the American Apparel and Footwear Association’s annual executive summit in March, Joe Preston of New Balance was confirmed as chair for the 2026-2027 term, with five new members elected to the board. At Carven, Kai Nesselrath took the creative director role with a brief to rebuild a house that had been without a strong identity for the better part of a decade.
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