18 months after Emma Hill left, British fashion house Mulberry has finally appointed Johnny Coca
Almost 18 months after the departure of Emma Hill, Mulberry has finally announced a new creative director. Johnny Coca joins from Céline, where he has been head accessories designer, responsible for some of the bestselling – and most copied – bags and shoes of the past decade.
Coca’s appointment, rumoured for several months, draws a line under one of the fashion industry’s longest-running sagas of recent years. Names including Roland Mouret, Erdem and even John Galliano have been linked with the vacancy. The significance of the appointment is that Mulberry has opted for a backroom name with a prestigious record, rather than a well-known designer. Coca’s expertise is in leather goods, reflecting the reality that it is these – not clothes – that drive fashion profits. His arrival suggests that Mulberry aims to win back its position as the aspirational It bag label for British women – a position it has ceded in recent years to other labels including, ironically, Céline. The Céline “trapeze” handbag, created by the studio headed by Coca and Céline’s overall creative director, Phoebe Philo, became as recognisable a status symbol as the Mulberry “Bayswater” had been before it.