Sabato De Sarno has traded the gilt corridors of Gucci for the pared-back ateliers of Icicle, taking on the role of creative director at the Shanghai-born, Paris-anchored label. The appointment, confirmed by parent group ICCF with Kering among its investors, marks one of the season’s most telling shifts in where luxury talent now lands.
Icicle began in Shanghai in 1997, built on a strictly eco-minded sense of luxury, natural fibres, quiet line, a wardrobe shaped around more than a single silhouette. It has since grown into a house with more than two hundred stores and a creative structure that runs dual tracks between Paris and Shanghai. Its parent ICCF also controls the storied French maison Carven.
For De Sarno, whose previous stops ran through Prada and Valentino, the move closes a chapter that opened with his Gucci directorship in 2023 and closed with his exit this year. His appointment signals something larger than one designer’s career: the gravitational centre of luxury is shifting toward Chinese capital, with Kering’s minority investment in ICCF this spring providing the runway.
De Sarno inherits a house whose creative model splits its energy across two cities, a structure that asks a designer to think in translation as much as in drape. His known register, clean construction, a tactile sense of fabric, deliberate proportion, reads naturally against Icicle’s restraint.
Whether De Sarno’s Italian clarity survives contact with Chinese eco-luxury’s quiet codes will be the question that follows his first collection. For now, the appointment reads as a statement of intent from a group buying both craft and credibility at the top of the market.
