Following the departure of creative director Anthony Vaccarello, the Paris house is expected to tap Chemena Kamali to focus on women’s daywear, menswear, high-end leather goods — and Asia.

PARIS — The next designer at Saint Laurent has already been selected and is expected to focus on women’s daywear, menswear and high-end leather goods as the Paris-based house plows into underpenetrated markets like Asia, and especially China.

That’s what equity analysts were told Friday morning after Kering revealed the departure of the brand’s star designer Anthony Vaccarello.

“The decision was driven by the longer-term prospects for Saint Laurent and is unrelated to any recent financial performance of the brand,” Barclays analyst Viktoria Petrova wrote in a research note following the sell-side call.

“Because of the current skew to carry-over leather goods, Kering expects no disruption to the Saint Laurent product pipeline from the creative transition,” she added, characterizing the forthcoming handover as “well-planned.”

“One could argue that after so many years, Vaccarello could be replaced in the interest of newness at Saint Laurent,” he told WWD. “But given the poor track record Kering has accumulated in appointing creative directors (Sabato De Sarno at Gucci, Alessandro Michele at Valentino), this in my view adds problems to problems.”

In his view, the exit of Vaccarello comes at a difficult time for the French group since “Gucci has yet to find a convincing direction, Balenciaga is having its own share of problems, and Alexander McQueen is going through a major restructuring.”

That said, he characterized Saint Laurent as a “very good brand, that has developed materially since Kering (then PPR) had acquired it more than 25 years ago.

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