Lanvin Group formally announced Humberto Leon as creative director of St. John on September 21. His first moves are already visible: a Fall 2026 capsule starring Tina Knowles, Marie Gray-era florals and animal prints pulled forward, archival jewelry turned into hardware, and a 1970s-inspired label revived for a new era.
For a designer associated with Opening Ceremony and Kenzo, the surprise is not that St. John suddenly looks louder. It is that Leon’s first moves are so archival.
In an interview published September 10, Leon framed the job around surfacing St. John’s history rather than breaking from it. The capsule feels less like a rebrand dropped onto the house than an argument about which parts of St. John deserve to be seen again.
The makeover starts with what St. John already owns
Leon’s first St. John capsule is built less on reinvention than retrieval.
St. John describes abstracted florals and animal prints as echoes of founder Marie Gray. Matte duchesse satin and brushed alpaca jacquard sit beside renewed jewelry, while pieces from the 1980s and 1990s are reissued or translated into hardware. Tina Knowles, a longtime St. John wearer, fronts the campaign photographed by Kanya Iwana.
Even the logo looks backward to move forward. St. John has restored an outlined block mark based on a version used in the 1970s, after decades of Marie Gray-era labels, St. John Collection and Sport identities, and increasingly minimal wordmarks.
Leon is not trying to make St. John unrecognizable enough to seem new. He is making old codes visible enough to feel current.
The strategy is already legible: new creative leadership, a revived label, Tina Knowles as campaign star, and archival motifs pushed back to the foreground. What remains intact is just as important—knitwear, craftsmanship, California identity, jewelry and Marie Gray’s design lineage.
What remains unclear is whether the repositioning can turn curiosity into growth. The campaign proves that St. John is changing how it presents itself. It does not yet prove that a broader audience will buy in.
Why Humberto Leon makes more sense for St. John than his résumé suggests
It is easy to read Leon’s appointment through the loudest parts of his past: Opening Ceremony, Kenzo, KATSEYE. The more useful through-line is his habit of treating product, image, collaboration and cultural context as parts of the same brand language.
Leon does not need to turn St. John into Opening Ceremony for the pairing to make sense. He needs to make a house with deep product recognition feel legible to people who know the name less intimately than the customer who has worn it for decades. His first capsule suggests he understands the distinction.
The business context makes the reset more interesting
St. John is not entering this creative chapter from a position of uncomplicated momentum. In the first half of 2026, the brand generated €35.5 million in revenue, down 10.5% year over year, even as e-commerce rose 31% in its reporting currency and gross margin held at 70%. In 2025, full-year revenue had declined just 1% to €78.2 million while Lanvin Group overall fell 18%, with North America accounting for 98% of St. John revenue.
That makes Leon’s assignment unusually precise. St. John has recognizable product codes, a concentrated customer base and signs of digital strength, but total revenue remains under pressure. Cultural relevance cannot be a decorative side project.
So the creative problem is not simply “make St. John younger.” It is to make the house newly desirable without making the customer who already understands it feel that the brand has been replaced.
The archive gives Leon room to change the volume without changing the source material.
The hardest part is not getting attention
A Tina Knowles campaign, a revived logo and a creative director with Leon’s résumé can generate curiosity. The harder question is what happens after people look.
A heritage brand can become fashionable again without becoming meaningfully larger. It can also pursue a new audience so aggressively that the people who sustained the business stop recognizing themselves in it. That tension is what makes Leon’s archive-first approach more interesting than a clean-slate makeover.
The newness is in the casting, styling, cultural register and the way old codes are recombined. The continuity is in the codes themselves.
Whether that balance holds once Leon moves beyond a capsule is the real test.
That may be the point of the hire: not to make St. John look like Humberto Leon’s résumé, but to make St. John look more unmistakably like itself.
Source: St. John official Humberto Leon Fall 2026 collection. Source
