She’s Done Being a Muse. Now She’s the Boss.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/style/camille-miceli-pucci.html

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For more than two decades, Camille Miceli was an open secret in the fashion world: an accessory designer whose personal style was so fabulously insouciant — so reeking of je ne sais quoi — that most of the male designers whom she worked with, including Marc Jacobs, John Galliano and Nicolas Ghesquière, decided she was their muse.

Well, not anymore. On Sept. 1, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton named Ms. Miceli as the new artistic director of Emilio Pucci.

Now, the only person she has to inspire is herself.

“I was ready,” said Ms. Miceli, 50, speaking from Cap Ferrat, the town in southern France where she bought a home during the pandemic, and furnished with vintage pieces sourced online. “It was time.”

Ms. Miceli will be the first woman to helm Pucci, which has been without a full-time designer since 2017, when Massimo Giorgetti, the Italian designer behind MSGM, left. (Instead, Pucci had a rotating cast of one-season “guest designers,” including Christelle Kocher of Koché and Tomo Koizumi of Tomo.)

And though Ms. Miceli’s appointment is fully in line with the recent trend of elevating accessory specialists to ready-to-wear designers (sparked by the success of Maria Grazia Chiuri, now at Dior, and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino), it also reflects a new approach to Pucci; one that focuses less on runway buzz and more on personality and community.

“I always felt Pucci was a missed opportunity,” said Ms. Miceli, who is half Italian and half French. When she was approached at the end of last year by Sidney Toledano, chief executive of the LVMH Fashion Group, and Delphine Arnault, the executive vice-president of Louis Vuitton, daughter of the LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault and the family member most involved with designer hires, Ms. Miceli said she didn’t hesitate. “It’s quite related to how I see things, to my fantasy of living,” she said of the brand.

As to that way of living: It is in hi-def and bright colors. “To me, as a complete outsider when I arrived, Camille was a representation of Parisian joie de vivre,” said Marc Jacobs, who added that Ms. Miceli was the third or fourth person he hired when he arrived at Louis Vuitton in 1997; her first job was in communications. “She was wearing these giant heels and this tiny skirt and had a huge smile and no makeup and her hair was sort of messy. And she just seemed like a storybook character.”

Pucci was founded in 1947 by Marchese Emilio Pucci di Barsento, part of an aristocratic Italian line whose family was once given a set of Botticellis by the Medicis and whose current heirs still live in the Palazzo Pucci in Florence. But he found himself needing to work for a living after World War II and discovered his calling after a ski suit he made for a girlfriend was photographed for Harper’s Bazaar.

He opened his first shop in Capri in 1951, carving out the Gstaad-to-the-Med territory that later defined his brand as it grew into a wardrobe staple for the European jet set, famous for its swirling prints and silk jersey separates.

LVMH bought a majority stake in 2000, with Emilio’s daughter Laudomia staying on as deputy chairman, and acquired the outstanding shares in June. Various well-known designers have helmed the brand under LVMH, including Christian Lacroix, Matthew Williamson and Peter Dundas, but it never had the breakthrough success of some of LVMH’s other brands, such as Givenchy or Celine.

Though Ms. Miceli has no formal fashion training, she grew up inside the fashion world, with a grandmother who wore Pucci and a mother who was close to Azzedine Alaïa and used to take her on shoots with Guy Bourdin. Indeed, Mr. Alaïa gave Ms. Miceli her first internship at age 16 (he also made her wedding dress, which featured a short skating skirt and backless halter top covered in frills). And when she finished her baccalaureate, she worked in the Chanel press office and studio with Karl Lagerfeld for eight years, until meeting Mr. Jacobs.

“She’s very connected to what is current, but also has a sense of history,” Mr. Jacobs said.

In 2000, Ms. Miceli had a child. When she came back to work, she wanted a new challenge. In response, Mr. Jacobs “told me I would be his muse,” she said laughing (she laughs a lot). “I said, ‘Isn’t that a little reductive?’ He said, ‘No, it will be great.’”

Mr. Jacobs explained his thinking: “She was a muse, constantly, and also amusing. I remember her running through the Milan airport with me one morning, and she was wearing this sweater I had made that was sort of transparent, and no bra and her giant smile, and all these guys were gawking, and she couldn’t care less.

“It was what she felt like wearing that morning,” he added. “That’s so much of her magic: the way she moves through situations and places.”

Her first design job was in fashion jewelry (a.k.a. costume jewelry), where she and Pharrell Williams introduced a highly successful collaboration. In 2009, she moved on to Dior under John Galliano (also, Bill Gaytten, who took over briefly after Mr. Galliano was fired, and Raf Simons), where she ran both fashion jewelry and consulted on leather goods. There she created the “tribales” pearl earring: an unbalanced, barbell-like pearl stud with a small stone in front and big stone in back that was inspired by her travels through Africa (she has spent time in Kenya, Tanzania, Senegal and South Africa; her mother now lives in Morocco). It became a best seller.

In 2014, Ms. Miceli returned to Louis Vuitton to work with Nicolas Ghesquière, a close friend, designing all accessories, including belts, scarves and sunglasses — and had another success when her wireless aviators also went viral. After seven years, however, she said she was ready for more. Then Pucci came up.

“Timing in life is very important,” said Ms. Miceli, who also has a thing about the significance of numbers.

Ms. Miceli is clear on her plans for Pucci, which she characterizes as about “joy and well-being.”

She is going to move to Milan, where she will be based full-time with her husband, Jerome Dernis (her son is currently a student at Warwick University in England). She wants to eschew runway shows and formal seasons, and instead have her collections “follow the life of a family through the year, and from 8 a.m. to 4 a.m.” From sun salutation to night cap.

Kind of like her life. One that involves dancing on tables and cooking large Sunday dinners; obsessing over acres of carpet and haunting flea markets; squeezing in Ayenga yoga (maybe 20 minutes, maybe 90) every morning and finding harmony in the mismatched.

As to what that looks like for everyone else, it will be unveiled in spring of 2022.