PARIS, Dec 17 — Even in a world inured to designer change, no one expected this.

Not the editors and retailers and friends who sat front row at the Lanvin womenswear show in Paris last October, applauding the crisp tuxedo day looks, the shimmering jewel-toned cocktail frocks. Not Fashion Group International, a prominent industry organisation that bestowed upon Alber Elbaz, the Lanvin artistic director, its Superstar Award three weeks later. Not Meryl Streep, who handed him his award while wearing Lanvin, noting, “if what you’ve made me feel over the years is multiplied by all the other women whose lives you’ve enhanced, I think you should get this every year.” And most all, not Lanvin’s own employees, many of whom cried when they got the news.

No one expected on a Wednesday morning in late October that Elbaz would be sitting at his home in Paris reading a letter from Lanvin telling him not to come into the office, because he had been fired.

And no one expected that not long after, the storied brand of Lanvin, the oldest French fashion house in continuous existence, would be in court, engaged in a very public airing of its dirty laundry.

“I have never heard of anything like it,” said Julie Gilhart, an independent consultant and former fashion director of Barneys.

“The company is breaking up into two camps: the management on one side, the works council, the studio and the ateliers on the other,” said a recently dismissed manager who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of pending legal action against Lanvin.

An erstwhile happy fashion marriage between a designer and a proprietor has turned into a very ugly divorce. And, like many divorces, it is being played out in court — in this case, the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris, where yesterday, Judge Pénélope Postel-Vinay ruled on an emergency procedure brought by management.

Lanvin executives had accused the Comité d’Entreprise, a works council that functions as an intermediary between employees and executives, of abusing the internal communications network, fomenting unrest since Elbaz’s departure, and groundlessly alerting the board of directors to concerns about the company situation, especially its financial situation, and requesting an independent audit, and asked that such actions be halted. The judge found that the works council had behaved within its rights on the first two points and that the court did not have jurisdiction to suspend the right to alert. She further fined the company €3,000 (RM14,124), or about US$3,285, and instructed it to pay all legal fees for the works council, although she did not grant the €20,000 in damages it had requested. Both sides (confusingly, but not surprisingly) claimed a measure of victory.

Albaz and Lanvin executives declined to be interviewed. But the public nature of the case means that, while this year alone has seen a plethora of designer moves — including Alessandro Michele replacing the fired Frida Giannini at Gucci and Peter Dundas’ jump from Pucci to Cavalli — the situation at Lanvin has lifted the mink-trimmed silk charmeuse skirt of fashion, exposing the costs of such changes for everyone involved: protagonists, employees and even consumers.

“Everyone should pay attention,” said Ralph Toledano, the chief executive of Puig fashion division and, as the former chief executive of Guy Laroche, the man who took Elbaz to Paris from New York in 1996, to be creative director of Laroche. “It is a story of exactly what should not be done.”

It is a story, mostly, about relationships — between individuals, between corporate and creative — and about the gap that can exist between public perception and private reality.

There is a truism in the fashion world that the most successful companies are built on a designer-chief executive pairing: Pierre Bergé and Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti. This evolved, as fashion industrialised and globalised, into a team of creative director and chief executive officer (think Tom Ford and Domenico de Sole), watched over by the benevolent (or not so benevolent) eye of a majority shareholder, and became the model for the revival of fashion brands like Céline and Louis Vuitton. That was how Lanvin’s once-upon-a-time began.

The fairy godmother was Shaw-Lan Wang, a Taiwan-based Chinese-born former media mogul, who was part of a consortium that bought the then-largely wholesale menswear and fragrance business of Jeanne Lanvin SA from L’Oreal in 2001, quickly taking control. That was when Elbaz, the former creative director of Yves Saint Laurent — fired from his post after three seasons when Gucci Group bought the company — asked for a meeting. It is time to “awake the sleeping beauty,” Wang told Elbaz, according to a 2009 profile in The New Yorker. She cast him as her prince.

“We were really starting from scratch,” said Natasa Cagalj, currently creative director of Ports 1961, who worked closely with Elbaz at Lanvin from 2001 to 2005. “We could hardly get any models for the first show. We joked we would have to get people off the streets of Paris.”

By the second season, however, everything had changed. Elbaz began to establish the signatures that became trademarks of the house (as well as inspiring multiple copycats), from exposed zippers in the back to grosgrain ribbon trim and a love of what Virginia Smith, the Vogue market director, fashion and accessories, called “a sense of imperfect beauty; the appreciation of the humanity found in a frayed edge.” The press flocked in. “It’s one of the few shows I remember people practically dancing in their seats and clapping their hands,” Smith said.

Paul Deneve, the president of Nina Ricci, joined as managing director in 2006 (previously Wang’s son had held that position), and they began to build the business. “People would fight to get the brand in their stores,” said Cecile Andrau, the sales director at the time, who eventually became executive vice president for Lanvin Inc.

Retailers bought it not only for their stores, they bought it for themselves: Marigay McKee, the former chief merchant of Harrods, says she has “at least 10 black dresses” in her closet; Ikram Goldman, the owner of the eponymous Chicago boutique, who bought the brand from Elbaz’s first season, said she also made purchases “for my archives.”

Bruno Frisoni, creative director of Roger Vivier, who worked with Elbaz during two seasons at Yves Saint Laurent (and worked at Lanvin in the 1980s, before Elbaz), said Elbaz "is exhausting to work with.”

“He never agrees to anything until the last minute because of his level of perfectionism and passion,” he said. “He gives you notes and notes and notes, not drawings or silhouettes, and can talk for hours about images and ideas.”

Yet, at the same time, the intensity was balanced by a “humanity,” Frisoni said. Elbaz was famous for sending flowers on birthdays, on births of babies, after funerals. “He treasured the atelier, and they knew it,” said Cagalj. Indeed, they stayed with him: In his speech at the FGI awards dinner, Elbaz referenced a seamstress who had recently retired at 61 — after joining Lanvin at 17.

“Love” is a word that comes up a lot in relationship to Elbaz. Although fashion is famously fond of a comeuppance and a sotto voce aside, it is almost impossible to find someone with a negative experience with Elbaz. Toledano said he resigned a few months after Elbaz left Guy Laroche for YSL because: “When you are in love with someone and he or she drops you, you can’t fall immediately in love again. You need time.”

Cagalj says “he taught me design was an emotional process.” Frisoni, describing a Lanvin show he attended, said: “You could see he loved people, loved women, loved fashion. How could you not love Alber?”

But love did not characterise every relationship at Lanvin. Fissures had begun to appear in the relationship of Deneve and Wang. In 2007, reportedly without telling Deneve of her plans, she sold the perfume business to Interparfums. In January 2009, Deneve left — after “diverging opinions.”

It was the beginning of a pattern that would repeat itself: Disagreement would not be tolerated. Those who did, left. Or were asked to leave.

Deneve’s replacement, Thierry Andretta, former chief executive of Moschino, focused on changing the wholesale and retail balance of the brand and opening stores, doubling the revenues in four years from approximately €120 million to about €240 million, before leaving in 2013 for “personal reasons” widely attributed to disagreements over strategy.

And although for years they seemed to have a warm relationship, developing a famous routine in which at the end of every show, after bowing to the crowd, Elbaz would bow to Wang personally, and she would give him a kiss and a bouquet of flowers, now he, too, is gone because of a disagreement over strategy.

The word that comes up most often when associates are asked to describe Wang is “autocratic.” Fashion houses are not democracies, of course, and Wang is Lanvin’s majority shareholder; she owns the last word. Still,

it is striking that, over the years, the strategic disagreements all seemed to turn broadly on the same point: an alleged reluctance on the part of Wang to invest in the business, whether by putting cash back into the company after selling off assets or opening it up to investment from the outside.

Although she accepted a silent minority shareholder in Arpège, the company that owns Lanvin, in the form of German investor Ralph Bartel in 2009 (he now owns 25 percent and has a seat on the Lanvin board), and gave Elbaz some shares in her own Luxembourg-based holding company, Bluewater Investment (reportedly the indirect owner of Arpège although the company declined to comment on the relationship), Wang maintained a tight hold on Lanvin. “Everyone tried to buy it,” Andretta said. “She simply refused. In her way, she is very passionate about the company.”

Charles-Henry Paradis, a member of the communications team and the representative of the employees on the Comité d’Entreprise and to the board, said: “She is a very proud woman. She would see selling as an admission of failure.”

But in order to grow, Gilhart said, “You have to feed the machine.” Valentino and Brunello Cucinelli, two companies Andretta characterised as of comparable size during his tenure, have continued their upward trajectory in part by bolstering their balance sheets, thanks to both the acquisition by the Qatari royal family and a public offering.

Andretta’s successor was Michèle Huiban, the former finance chief, who had been hired under Deneve and promoted by Wang to deputy director general under Andretta. Unlike her predecessors, Huiban had almost no profile in the fashion community but was “seen as an extension of Madame Wang,” a former executive said. Her appointment coincided with a difficult financial period for the brand. Revenue and net profit fell in 2013 and 2014, and according to an internal announcement, there was a loss of €2.5 million in net profits projected for 2015 — the first since 2007.

Lawyers for Lanvin disputed claims that this was an issue in court, saying that the company is on a solid financial footing and pointing to the fact Wang is trying to buy back the Lanvin name and distribution rights in Japan as proof.

In an internal memo shown to The New York Times, the financial difficulties were attributed to the general geopolitical situation, lack of creative energy and the absence of a meaningful accessory business.

Although Lanvin had notable success with items like the ribbon-trimmed sneaker (worn by Michelle Obama, among many others) and the ballet flat (worn by Angelina Jolie), as well as tulle-covered pearls and other costume jewelry, Lanvin remained a heavily ready-to-wear business. Paradis said that today the balance is 60 percent ready-to-wear, 40 percent accessories. Lanvin does not officially release such numbers although another insider said the division could be as extreme as 80/20.

“It is true that I can’t recall a specific bag that broke through,” Smith acknowledged, “though I remember there were many good ones.”

In a letter written to both the management and employees, Elbaz said that it was lack of an articulated strategy and investment that was responsible for the stagnation, a view supported by many employees, Paradis said. And both Andretta and Gilhart say that every time they asked Elbaz to design an item for commercial needs — more jackets, say, or long dresses — once they had explained why the market needed the product, he was happy to comply.

Whichever side is right, it is not unusual in situations like this — falling sales, corporate change — for the designer or the chief executive to take the fall. In June, for example, after the fourth consecutive quarter of falling sales, J. Crew fired its head of womenswear, Tom Mora. Last year, after an extended sales decline, the chief executive and creative director of Gucci were both fired. But, in part because of Elbaz’s talent and charisma, the industry as a whole was so invested in Lanvin’s happy ending, no one imagined it would happen to him.

Maybe he didn’t, either, as he began to voice his belief that the brand needed to accept further outside investment and articulate a concrete management strategy; Lanvin executives allege that he tried to sell his shares in Bluewater without telling Wang and then pressured her to sell her own holdings. Lanvin became, according to numerous employees, a tense building in which to work. Last year, 65 people — almost 20 percent of the workforce — left. (The company’s lawyers characterised this as normal industry attrition.) Earlier this year, Hania Destelle, communications director for 21 years, who was known as being very close to Elbaz, was fired.

At the last show, Wang and Elbaz did not exchange their customary kiss, despite the fact that many retailers thought it was the best show the designer had produced in seasons. Indeed, Selfridges began buying the brand again after dropping it in 2013, according to Judd Crane, the store’s director of womenswear and accessories.

In October, the employees discovered that Elbaz had been fired when he called his assistant to ask her to pack up his office because he was not allowed back in the building. (His partner of over two decades, Alex Koo, is still director of merchandising; he also was not available for an interview.) At a large meeting later the same day, Huiban officially informed them of the decision to end Elbaz’s contract while many present chanted his name. Things escalated from there.

The Comité d’Entreprise said it did not get satisfactory answers to the questions of why Elbaz had been fired and what the strategy was for the company’s future (and its emails to Wang asking her to return to Paris to address the company in person were not answered), so it took its cause public, speaking on a French radio station about its concerns. Management said the employees were refusing meetings; the employees said the same thing. The works council posted a letter from Elbaz defending himself on a message board, to the displeasure of management, who viewed the council as partisans of Elbaz. The works council then asked for an independent audit. The next stop was the tribunal.

The question is: What happens now? Ironically (or perhaps purposefully), celebrities have been wearing the brand on the red carpet at an almost unprecedented rate, with Cate Blanchett, Michelle Dockery, Streep and Adele all modeling Lanvin in public in the weeks since Elbaz’s ouster.

In an internal email seen by The New York Times, Lanvin management said it would not pursue the court case any further and hoped to engage in more constructive dialogue with the employees. It is unclear what direct financial impact Elbaz’s ouster will have on the company, as the works council believes the company could owe him from €20 million to €40 million in severance, according to a statement from its lawyer in court, a figure denied by the Lanvin lawyers (Elbaz was not a full-time employee of Lanvin but rather contracted to them as a “creative consultant” via his own company, AEK Designs, and his current contract was due to end next year). In terms of perception, “the company lost half its value when Alber left,” said Toledano. — The New York Times