The luxury brand DVF recently announced Nathan Jenden as the new chief designer vice president following fellow designer Jonathan Saunders resignation in December 2017.
“I want to make great clothes that resonate with women,” Jenden said. “I see DVF as being more relevant today than it ever was in its message of self-empowerment while being dynamic and modern. I want to give the DVF girl what she wants when she wants it, and with the joie de vivre and sense of purpose that epitomises Diane, DVF the brand and the spirit of women today.”
After Jensen graduated from Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art in London, United Kingdom, He worked as an apprentice for John Galliano in Paris. Later on, he designed for Kenzo for a year, before moving to New York in 1998 becoming a design director for Daryl K, which is known for their downtown cool and collected presentation. Moreover, In 2001, Jenden joined DVF as creative director.
In this newfound role, he will report directly to the head, Diane von Furstenberg, and DVF’s Fashion board. In addition, his Autumn/Winter 2018 collection will debut this February.
The role will reunite Jenden with Von Furstenberg, and also with Paula Sutter, the brand’s former president, who has come back to be apart of the board of directors. Sutter, who left DVF in 2013, started working with the brand in 1999, just after it was revived in 1998 and is widely recognized as a help in spiking the label’s growth in business internationally.
Furthermore , the roles come at a challenging time for the American fashion business, as the production and the way clothes are marketed is changing.DVF, in particular, faces some challenges from a waning wholesale model to the rise of social media-savvy direct-to-consumer labels, which is a growing market that the brand has to adhere to in a sense .
Subsequently, sources suggest that the brand, which plans to sell a stake of the business, will continue to attract interest from private firms, thanks to their potential to continuously build direct businesses in the US and abroad such as China, where consumers are openly excepting new brands. DVF also has yet to name a new chief executive of the business, which has been missing since Paola Riva resigned in 2016
