And they aren't fashionistas. They're kids in Shepherd's Bush. Sasha Charnin Morrison, the fashion market director at Allure, recently wrote about reaction to a Dior camouflage bag she was carrying around. This is one kind of influence. But if what fashion insiders buy and wear themselves is another measure of influence, Galliano's clothes and accessories for Dior haven't been as popular as those by Gucci or Prada.
Editors choose, and by picking one brand over another, they are, in effect, casting crucial votes.
But things are changing at Dior, in part because of the perception that fashion has become thoughtlessly uniform, and in part because of real strategies imposed by Toledano over the last three years. Unlike the perennially turned-on kid in the street, the fashionista may go for Prada, Gucci and Chanel, which churn out bigger sales numbers than Dior, but it shouldn't come as any surprise that these competitors are looking at Dior more closely these days. In some ways, they've been much smarter commercially than we have. When Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, who oversees Dior, hired Toledano seven years ago, the label was resting on its French laurels. We had 400 licenses, and we had to stop that.