St. John hands its knitwear to the man who made Kenzo loud
Lanvin Group has named Humberto Leon creative director of St. John, betting that the Opening Ceremony co-founder can make a 65-year-old California knitwear house feel current without torching what made it valuable.
Lanvin Group announced on Monday that Humberto Leon is the new creative director of St. John, the California knitwear house it has owned since 2017. It is the most interesting hire the group has made in years, and the most counterintuitive.
Leon co-founded Opening Ceremony with Carol Lim in 2002, turning a downtown Los Angeles store into the reference point for a generation of fashion retail. From 2011 to 2019, the pair ran Kenzo, where they traded the house's quiet Parisian register for tiger sweatshirts, sprawling collaborations, and short films. Most recently he served as creative director of KATSEYE, shaping the visual identity of a global girl group.
St. John is a different animal. Its equity sits in boardroom knits, tailored sportswear, and the kind of clothing that gets handed down rather than aged out of. Lanvin Group framed the appointment as a partnership rooted in shared California sensibility, craftsmanship, and clothing that "feels as good as it looks" — language designed to reassure the customer who has been buying the brand for four decades.
The bet is legible. St. John owns a category — real knitwear, made well — that has quietly become fashion's most defensible product line while trend-driven houses churn through creative directors. What it has lacked is cultural volume. Leon has spent twenty years manufacturing exactly that, and doing it without the shock tactics that curdle a heritage label's core business.
The risk is equally legible. Kenzo under Leon and Lim was commercially potent and critically divisive, and its energy came from irony St. John has never traded in. The house turns 65 next year. Whether Leon reads that as a constraint or as raw material is the whole story.
Lanvin Group, which also owns Lanvin, Wolford, and Sergio Rossi, has spent the past several years searching for growth across a portfolio of famous names with uneven momentum. St. John is the one with a product story already intact. Leon's job is to make people look at it again.
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
