Kylie Jenner’s fashion label Khy has appointed Laura du Rusquec as its chief executive officer, the company announced on June 15. The move brings a seasoned luxury executive to a brand that has spent its first two years navigating the gap between celebrity-launch hype and lasting commercial viability. Du Rusquec joins from Ganni, where she served as CEO from 2022, overseeing a period of significant international expansion for the Danish contemporary brand. Her resume includes tenures at Balenciaga and Kering, giving her a fluency across both luxury and contemporary retail channels that Khy’s board clearly views as the right blend for the brand’s next phase.
Du Rusquec inherits a brand with considerable momentum and equally considerable expectations. Her mandate includes building out the executive team, establishing a more traditional design and merchandising calendar, evaluating wholesale partnerships (Khy has operated almost entirely DTC to date), and extending the brand’s reach beyond the Jenner core fanbase. Her track record at Ganni — where she oversaw the brand’s expansion into China, the U.S., and the Middle East while maintaining its Copenhagen aesthetic identity — suggests she understands how to scale a brand with a strong founder vision without diluting it.
The appointment comes at a pivotal moment for Khy. Launched in late 2024 as a direct-to-consumer fashion label built around Jenner’s personal style and vast social media reach — 400 million followers across platforms — the brand initially traded on accessibility and speed, releasing limited-edition drops that sold out within hours. The model worked well for generating revenue, but it created a structural challenge: Khy was behaving like a fast-fashion operation with luxury ambitions, and the infrastructure required to bridge those two modes — supply chain depth, wholesale relationships, design studio continuity — was not yet in place. Du Rusquec’s arrival signals a deliberate shift from drop-based scarcity to a more traditional seasonal calendar and broader distribution network.
For the industry, the appointment is a signal that celebrity-owned fashion brands are entering a new phase of professionalization. The early generation of celebrity labels relied on licensing deals, minimal capital investment, and the founder’s personal platform as the primary marketing engine. The next generation — Skims, Khy, Good American — are increasingly run by seasoned executives who treat these brands as serious businesses rather than passion projects. Du Rusquec’s hire suggests that Khy is prepared to make the investments — in people, systems, and infrastructure — required to survive beyond its launch cycle. Whether the market rewards that discipline, or whether celebrity fashion brands will always be captive to their founders’ fluctuating cultural relevance, is the open question her tenure will answer.
The timing also reflects a broader recalibration in the celebrity fashion space. The wave of celebrity-founded brands that crested between 2020 and 2024 — from Fenty to Skims to Good American — has matured into a more discriminating market. Investors and consumers alike are demanding proof of concept beyond founder star power: real margins, repeat customers, and a design point of view that survives without the founder’s personal endorsement of every drop. Khy’s early performance, buoyed by Jenner’s direct-to-consumer savvy and a series of well-received collaborations with designers like Namilia and Momo special, has kept the brand in the conversation, but the infrastructure gap has been an open industry talking point.
