After one year on the job, the Italian executive sat down with WWD to share his views on creativity and fashion - and to elaborate on his "re-engineering" of the French luxury group.

“The studio is the soul of a luxury house,” according to Luca de Meo, chief executive officer of Kering. “There’s an element of magic.”

That said, the former Renault Group boss, a little more than one year into his tenure leading the French luxury group, has an expansive and democratic vision of creativity that might surprise you – and also strong opinions about how it should be organized, governed and nurtured.

In an exclusive interview with WWD, the executive said he defines creativity within a luxury brand as “the product creation and product development stream,” rattling off such disparate components as the design studio, merchandising, purchasing, suppliers and visual merchandising.

“I’m looking at this horizontally and trying to analyze the process,” he said in his matter-of-fact way. “One of my priorities in the next six months is to re-engineer that.”

De Meo was interviewed in his sun-drenched office on Monday, near the tail end of a Paris Fashion Week dominated by talk of imminent creative director changes at Saint Laurent, led by Anthony Vaccarello for the past decade, and at Balenciaga, in the midst of a creative transition under Pierpaolo Piccioli that de Meo described as “pretty extreme.”

He declined to comment on Kering ’s plans for those two marquee houses, and weighed his words carefully as he waded into the topic of creativity, which fascinates him and which he’s studied extensively.

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