Carven confirms Mark Thomas exit amid creative reshuffle

Carven has confirmed another turn in luxury’s creative-musical-chairs era: Mark Thomas will leave at the end of April after nearly a year as design director, just as the house tries to turn fresh momentum into something more durable. The next steps for the brand will be announced later this year, and its next Paris show is slated for the Spring/Summer 2027 season, pointing to a presentation in October.

The timing matters because Carven had only just begun to settle under Thomas, who joined in 2023 as senior designer and head of sartorial and creative collaborations before stepping up after Louise Trotter left for Bottega Veneta. In Carven’s own telling, Thomas’s vision and designs helped establish the brand’s identity and put it back on the fashion stage. That is the real cost of constant churn in a luxury house: momentum gets built, then reset before buyers, editors and clients can fully absorb the message.

Thomas’s most recent collection was shown at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris’s Marais, where the house leaned into clean silhouettes, wearable sophistication and commercial polish. The look had discipline: volume without excess, tailored precision, and draped eveningwear that felt made to move from runway attention to store racks. It was the kind of collection that can help a brand regain relevance, but only if the point of view is allowed to repeat, season after season, until it becomes recognizable.

In his farewell statement, Thomas thanked the Carven team and singled out Shawna Tao and Ye Shouzeng for the opportunity. The exit also reopens the broader question around Carven’s identity, a house founded in 1945 by Marie-Louise Carven and later acquired by Icicle in 2018 after liquidation. Today, it sits within ICCF, the Paris-headquartered Icicle Carven China France group, a structure that gives the brand backing but also makes consistency even more important.

For luxury labels trying to rebuild scale and status, creative stability is not a nice-to-have. It is what convinces retailers to buy deeper, clients to return and a brand image to feel like a story instead of a series of well-dressed interruptions. Carven now has to prove that its recent gains can survive the next reshuffle.