Is this the era of designer musical chairs?

What happened to the days when designers would hold onto their creative director posts until they retire?

It was recently announced that Hedi Slimane might be exiting Saint Laurent. His rumored replacement is Anthony Vacarello, creative director of Versus, the diffusion line of Versace.

If Slimane does exit Saint Laurent, he will be adding to the round of designer musical chairs that fashion houses have been playing over the past year.

This is a game that the industry has been playing forever. You can't always expect someone to stay in their creative director role forever. Slimane got his role at Saint Laurent when founder Yves Saint Laurent passed on to that great big fashion house in the sky. Coco Chanel joined that same fashion house before Saint Laurent did, which eventually lead to living legend Karl Lagerfeld claiming the role that made him famous as artistic director of Chanel.

However, major shakeups like that were rare and momentous. The past 12 months have seen more creative director departures than the industry has ever seen before.

In January 2015, Frida Giannini left Gucci an entire month earlier than expected. While Gucci was stagnant under her leadership as creative director, she was at least expected to stay through Fashion Month and present her last collection. But, as she departed from the world of runway shows, Alessandro Michele descended like a fashion angel from the sky to give the stagnant luxury label life again.

Michele's first show received mixed reviews, but pieces were quickly purchased by celebrities, turning him into one of the most googled names in fashion of 2015. The designer was instantly catapulted to fame, and under his leadership, Gucci's sales have risen, so he has more than proven himself.

Giannini seemed to set off a chain reaction in the fashion industry, however. Several months later, Donna Karan, the founder and longtime creative director of her eponymous label and DKNY, announced that she would be leaving Donna Karan International. Our hearts be still, no one saw that one coming. To the fashion industry, Karan was viewed as a goddess that would go immortal and untouched in her role forever.

There was fear over what her company would turn into without her. DKNY was handed over to good hands, however. Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne, the design duo behind CFDA winning label Public School, took the reins at DKNY and had a hit show at NYFW last September.

While Giannini's departure was considered a longtime coming due to how stagnant Gucci's sales and public appeal had become, and Karan had more than served her time at her own label, next came a departure that really shook the fashion industry: Alexander Wang's departure at Balenciaga.

Creative directors seem to be departing fashion houses more often than ever

That was a move no one really saw coming. Balenciaga was doing well under Wang's tenure, and the collections were receiving positive reviews by the press. With only three year under his belt at the label, Wang flew the coop to focus on his namesake line. Many in the industry were confused by his departure, some even blaming it on his inability to produce an It bag or something of the like for the fashion house.

Wang's replacement is Demna Gvasalia, the founder of Vetements. He is expected to be more commercial than Wang, which perhaps what Balenciaga wants.

Part of the blame that has been put on designers no longer wanting to stay in creative director positions for too long is how bloated the fashion calendar has become. No one made this more apparent than Raf Simons when he stepped down from Dior.

Simons held one of the most coveted positions in the entire fashion industry as creative director of Dior. In this role he was responsible for six collections a year, a number that proved to be exhausting to him. On top of his doing his own namesake men's label, it's a wonder he didn't burn out sooner.

In an article from System magazine by fashion journalist and critic Cathy Horyn, Simons said "When you do six shows a year, there’s not enough time for the whole process. Technically, yes — the people who make the samples, do the stitching, they can do it. But you have no incubation time for ideas, and incubation time is very important. When you try an idea, you look at it and think, Hmm, let’s put it away for a week and think about it later. But that’s never possible when you have only one team working on all the collections. Also what people forget is that when you do a runway show, it eats time away from your schedule. Just the prep time before a show is six or seven days, especially when you are showing abroad."

Simons wasn't the only designer from a Parisian luxury fashion house to critique the size of the fashion calendar. Just a few days later, Alber Elbaz was removed from his post as artistic director of Lanvin. The entire staff under him was so furious that they were ready to stage a mob.

Okay, maybe staging a mob is pushing it, but they certainly weren't happy. They began petitioning for the board of directors, which had him removed, to bring him back. Unfortunately, their efforts worked to no avail, but Elbaz was quoted saying this about his departure to The Cut: "During Fashion Week in Paris, I spoke with a few editors that I know, and I asked, 'Hey, how are you?' And they said, 'Exhausted.' They said to me that they used to see 50 shows a week. Now they have to see 50 shows a day. But only 24 hours. I spoke with a few writers in Paris, and they said the same thing. They used to write their review in a taxi, having an apple — and I’m not talking Apple computer, just a green apple — in between shows. That’s how they gave us our verdict. "Now they have to do it during the show, with no apple, and stay long hours, and with no time to digest. And we know that fashion people don’t eat much, don’t we? The fashionistas are very, very busy during the show, filming everything. And when I came out after the show, I felt that there was no clapping. And I asked, 'What’s going on?' And they said, 'They are filming, they don’t have two hands, so what can they do?' "My friend Ronnie Newhouse, who lives in London, suggested to create a new app for clapping, so you can film, Instagram, and clap all at the same time. [Crowd roars.] "Retailers, they tell me that they don’t have the time to be in the stores. They don’t have time to meet the people on the floor. Traveling, and more traveling, around the world, going from one show to the other, and looking at numbers; numbers and open-to-buy. And I say, retailers, look at people, because people make numbers. Numbers don’t often make the other way."

The last designer to have his creative director title go bye-bye in 2015 was Jonathan Saunders who after 10 years shut down his label. Saunders is one of the many designers who was reportedly too tired of being in the high fashion gladiator pit where it took so multiple collections a year and quick response to consumer demand to be considered successful.

Slimane isn't just another designer who could be moving on. He's part of what seems to have become a not so pretty trend in the fashion industry. Vacarello might be excited at the prospect of taking over Slimane's role, but how long will he last in it.

Yes, the time has to come for turnover and new talent to bring about the next industry revolution, but not when the current talent is still young, fresh, and creative enough that they are still part of the current fashion revolution. Eventually, something in the industry will have to change, whether it be producing smaller collections or the industry refusing to bow down to so much consumer demand. Until then, the game of musical chairs continues, and these creative directors have to hope they won't be the next person out.

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