"Someone asked me, aren't you worried people are going to say it looks like you?" Mr. O'Shea said. "At the beginning I was thinking, I don't want it to be like me — but then, I don't know anything else. And F.H.P." — François-Henri Pinault, the chief executive of the Kering group, which acquired Brioni in 2012 — "was like, if there's not you in it, don't turn up to work."
Mr. O'Shea is the first to admit that he is not a trained designer. The only sketch he has ever made was of a pair of sunglasses on a napkin on an airplane. And while many pundits wrote approvingly of his appointment, for some hand-wringing about its implications began immediately.
"O'Sh ea is, however, a man," Alexander Fury wrote in The Independent. "A highly visible man. Who wears suits. Which, oddly, seem to be the few concrete reasons for his appointment. At Brioni, O'Shea will be afforded access to some of the finest craftsmen in the industry. It's a pity that their skills won't be challenged."
That misses the point, according to Brioni executives.
"The creative director role, as we knew it in the past, changed," Mr. Flore said. "The market changed, the consumer changed, and necessarily we changed. I don't think 'trained designer' or 'not designer' is necessarily relevant any l onger in our industry, at least for Brioni."
Trained or not, Mr. O'Shea is experienced in the selling side of fashion. On either side of his sabbatical, he worked in fashion sales and retail, eventually landing at the German e-commerce site MyTheresa and working his way up to become its global fashion director. By the time he left, MyTheresa (and its bricks-and-mortar sister store in Munich, Theresa) had been acquired by the Neiman Marcus Group and the companies' revenues were approximately $130 million annually.
As a retailer, Mr. O'Shea gained an appreciation for those designers and brands who committed to an aesthetic, however strong or divergent from the crowd.
"Success and failure in the modern era — it's all based on that," Mr. O'Shea said. "At the end of the day, it's better be loved by a few than liked by many."
Accordingly, in the Paris nightclub things were looking somewhat less than classic. There was a rack of wool and mohair suits in pinstripe, tweaked to Mr. O'Shea's specifications from the existing template, with stronger shoulders, smaller waists and slightly longer jackets, as well as plenty of pieces that veered toward the baroque, including full-length chinchilla coats and crocodile trenches, velvet blazers and champagne-colored silk shirts.
"It's very gangster to wear a silk shirt," Mr. O'Shea said. "That's the kind of guy I want to appeal to."
A practicing gangster?
"Totally," Mr. O'Shea replied. "They� �ve got so much money. I don't think anyone actually says they want to approach gangsters, but I'm very open about it."
Mr. O'Shea's first show will be an imaginative play on Bram Stoker's "Dracula" featuring two "characters": an over-the-top decadent Dracula and a heroic, less ornate Van Helsing: "Something that still looks like you're working on Wall Street, you're just far cooler than everyone else you're sitting next to," he said. There will also be a selection of women's wear, available only as custom made.
Despite this, Mr. Flore insisted that, "We are not going to play the fashion card; we are not a fashion brand." Asked whether its new look (even the logo has been redesigned) may alienate Brioni's existing customer base, Mr. Flore said no.
"It's our goal to make our current customer feel even more special," he said, adding that about 40 percent of the seats at the couture show would go to clients. "Those customers are already speaking this language; we didn't."
He added: "Do we want also to attract a new customer? Absolutely." He projected a goal of doubling Brioni's revenues, to 300 million to 400 million euros annually, in three to five years.
Mr. O'Shea will spend the day after the show doing couture and custom appointments. He is spending little time considering the opinions of those who question his new placement. "A lot of people I don't care about," he said. "So I just say: 'I don't even like you. I don't care if you like it or not.'"
Continue reading the main story
