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On Thursday, Mark Thomas will take a bow for the first time as Carven’s design director. The 49-year-old British designer was promoted to the top job in March after his boss, Louise Trotter, left for Bottega Veneta.
Among the dozen designer debuts this season, Thomas is the only one to have come from within the brand’s existing team. Trotter’s exit was announced last December, and Thomas has since overseen Autumn/Winter 2025 and pre-fall, which were presented in March and June, respectively, as lookbooks. For SS26, Thomas was “thinking of our woman in summer in Paris, in that kind of balmy, warm period and thinking about what she would wear”, he says, speaking from his office on Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, where Marie-Louise Carven established her Parisian fashion house in 1945. The collection is “a little bit more sensual than we’ve been up until now. There’ll be more skin visible than we’ve had previously, but still in a very tasteful way.”
Reviving Carven is a significant endeavour. In early 2018, the brand filed for bankruptcy and was later acquired by China’s Icicle Group, which has since rebranded as Icicle Carven China France, or ICCF Group. There has been creative volatility: Guillaume Henry was creative director between 2009 and 2014. Following Henry’s departure, Carven appointed a duo of creative directors, Alexis Martial and Adrien Caillaudaud, who exited in 2016. The last official holder of the position before Trotter was Serge Ruffieux, who left in 2018 after three seasons.
Trotter joined in 2023, and also stayed for just three seasons. But during that time, she and Thomas began developing an interesting design language: sophisticated, minimalist and wearable. Thomas has no intention of deviating from this path, given the early reception has been positive: “ We are really happy with where we’ve arrived. Collections have only been in-store for about a year and a half, so there’s no need to break what’s starting to work. We just need to build on top of that,” Thomas says. The brand counts two boutiques in Paris and two in Shanghai, with plans to expand in the Chinese market, as well as 50 wholesale stockists including Harrods in London, Printemps in New York and Antonia in Milan (the company declines to disclose its turnover).