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Gianfranco Gianangeli, previously CEO at Maison Margiela and currently chief commercial officer at YSL, is to succeed Charbit at Balenciaga.

Cédric Charbit, chief executive officer of Balenciaga since 2016, is to become the new CEO of Saint Laurent, effective Jan. 2.

Gianfranco Gianangeli, previously CEO at Maison Margiela and currently chief commercial officer at Saint Laurent, is to succeed Charbit at Balenciaga on the same date.

French group Kering, parent of both Paris-based houses, revealed the twin appointments in a statement on Monday after the close of trading on the Paris bourse.

It marks a return to Saint Laurent for Charbit, who was executive vice president of product and marketing there when he took the management helm of Balenciaga eight years ago, arriving one year after creative director Demna.

Charbit takes over the title at Saint Laurent from Francesca Bellettini, who held onto the role when last year she was promoted to Kering’s deputy CEO in charge of brand development.

All brand CEOs — Kering is parent to Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Brioni, Boucheron, Pomellato, DoDo and Qeelin — report to Bellettini, who was tasked with steering these companies in their next stages of growth.

“Cédric was one of my key collaborators during my time at Saint Laurent, and I’ve always admired his leadership and unique skills,” Bellettini said, speaking exclusively to WWD. “At Balenciaga, he not only drove incredible growth but also managed to steer the brand through challenges and bring fresh momentum. I’m confident he is the perfect leader to shape the next chapter of Saint Laurent.”

Bellettini has helmed Saint Laurent since 2013, initially working with designer Hedi Slimane, who dropped the late founder’s first name, Yves, from the brand name as his first order of business. Bellettini appointed Anthony Vaccarello as creative director in 2016.

During her tenure leading the house, she grew the size of the business roughly sixfold, according to market sources.

For her part, Bellettini said she is “excited to focus entirely on my role as Kering’s deputy CEO for brand development.…With the recent changes at Gucci and all other key appointments, we’ve got the right people in place to tackle today’s challenges and set the stage for the future.”

Charbit had initially joined YSL in 2012 as director of product strategy.

Once at the helm of Saint Laurent, he will be faced with reigniting sales momentum amid a slowdown in luxury sales, especially in China, and as inflation and high interest rates weigh on discretionary spending worldwide.

Comparable sales at Saint Laurent have been decelerating in 2024: down 6 percent in the first quarter, 9 percent in the second quarter and 12 percent in the third quarter.

Kering said Charbit’s mission would be to “leverage his expertise and leadership to further develop the iconic Parisian house, building on its unique positioning, heritage and identity.”

Before YSL, Charbit was deputy general manager at Emilio Pucci. Previously, the Frenchman held management roles in retail — as general merchandise manager for womenswear at Harrods in London and Printemps in Paris.

He is a graduate of ESC Toulouse business school and is prized for his strong fashion instincts and complicity with designers.

An exuberant, straight-shooting executive, Charbit had an eventful tenure at Balenciaga, leading the hype brand through a dynamic growth phase amid lusty demand for streetwear-tinged luxury items like sneakers, caps, logo sweatshirts and heavy-duty outerwear.

He also helped Balenciaga gingerly navigate its way back into the fashion spotlight after the brand was rocked by the advertising campaign crisis at the end of 2022 over images that critics claimed promoted the exploitation of children.

Gianangeli helmed Maison Margiela from 2020 to 2023, joining the OTB-controlled house from his family-owned, namesake knitwear manufacturer in Perugia, Italy, which he had revitalized, securing production contracts for several marquee European luxury brands.

He joined Saint Laurent in September 2023, and is one of clutch of fashion CEOs from smaller brands who have recently taken on lesser C-suite roles at luxury megabrands.

Before that, he was global retail director at Givenchy and associate international director at Prada. He began his career in 2006 at Bottega Veneta in various merchandising positions and as that brand’s regional vice president in Japan.

Sources describe Gianangeli as a well-rounded executive with an entrepreneurial streak, and strong merchandising flair.

“His task [at Balenciaga] will be to continue strengthening and expanding the house’s reach and renown,” Kering said.

Bellettini has known Gianangeli since 2008, when she joined Bottega Veneta as merchandising director.

“He was working in the merchandising team, and I immediately appreciated his talents,” she told WWD. “We worked together for several years at Bottega Veneta, and we remained always in touch through all those past years.

“I have always considered him as one of the most brilliant professionals of our industry,” she continued. “When he joined Saint Laurent last year, for me he was a great addition not only for the brand but for the group, and he is the perfect successor of Cedric at Balenciaga.”

“These evolutions further reinforce our organization,” François-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of Kering, said in the statement. “We have the right leadership team in place to address current industry challenges and set the pace for long-term growth.”

Mistral’s Le Chat chatbot platform can now search the web — with citations in line, a la OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s also gained a “canvas” tool along the lines of ChatGPT Canvas, allowing users to modify, transform, or edit content, like webpage mock-ups and data visualizations, leveraging Mistral’s AI models.

“You can use [the canvas feature] to create documents, presentations, code, mockups… the list goes on,” Mistral writes in a blog post. “You’re able to modify its contents in place without regenerating responses, version your drafts, and preview your designs.”

In addition to all this, Le Chat can now process large PDF documents and images for analysis and summarization, including files containing graphs and equations. As of today, the platform incorporates Black Forest Labs‘ Flux Pro model for image generation. And Le Chat can now host shareable automated workflows for tasks like scanning expense reports and invoice processing; Mistal calls these AI “agents.”

Some of Le Chat’s new capabilities, all of which will remain free while in beta, are made possible by Mistral’s new models.

One, Pixtral Large, can process both text and images — it’s the second in Mistral’s Pixtral family of models. Weighing in at 124 billion parameters, Pixtral Large matches or bests leading models including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o on certain multimodal benchmarks. (Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.)

“Particularly, Pixtral Large is able to understand documents, charts, and natural images,” Mistral wrote in a second blog post. “The model demonstrates frontier-level image understanding.”

Mistral also today unveiled a new version of Mistral Large, its flagship line of text-only models. Called Mistral Large 24.11, the new model brings “notable improvements” in long context understanding, Mistral says, making it well-suited for use cases like document analysis and task automation.

Both Pixtral Large and Mistral Large 24.11 can be used outside of Le Chat under two licenses: a more restrictive license for research and an enterprise license for development and commercialization. Mistral Large 24.11 is already in Mistral’s API and on AI platform Hugging Face, and will soon be available through cloud platforms including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, Mistral says.

Paris-based Mistral, which recently raised $640 million in venture capital, continues to gradually expand its AI offerings. Over the past few months, the company has launched a free service for developers to test its models, an SDK to let customers fine-tune those models, and new models, including a generative model for code called Codestral.

Co-founded by alumni from Meta and DeepMind, Mistral’s stated mission is to create highly competitive models and services around those models — and ideally make money in the process. While the “making money” bit is proving to be challenging (as it is for most generative AI startups), Mistral reportedly began to generate revenue this summer.

“At Mistral, our approach to AI is different — we’re not chasing artificial general intelligence at all costs; our mission is to instead place frontier AI in your hands, so you get to decide what to do with advanced AI capabilities,” the company wrote in one of its blogs today. “This approach has allowed us to be quite frugal with our capital, while consistently delivering frontier capabilities at affordable price points.”

Backers of new US-British film and TV company include Nike, RedBird Capital Partners and Liverpool FC owner Fenway

Liverpool FC owner Fenway Sports Group, Nike and US financier Todd Boehly will come together in a newly merged US-British film and TV company run by sports and entertainment veterans including NBA star LeBron James.

On Monday, LeBron’s US-based The SpringHill Company will announce a merger with Fulwell 73, a UK film, television and music production company that is co-owned by a group including actor James Corden and producer Leo Pearlman. 

As part of the merger, shareholders will invest a further $40mn to help the company to grow. 

“I don’t think there’s an independent production company anywhere in the world that can boast a group of financial partners quite as strong as this merger is going to have,” Pearlman told the Financial Times. “It’s a hell of a line-up of people who are coming into this new business.”

SpringHill is a production company founded in 2020 by James and sport marketer Maverick Carter. It has directors including Serena Williams, and the backing of Fenway, Epic Games, Nike, RedBird Capital Partners and Main Street Advisors.

The group also includes the Robot Company, a marketing agency and consultancy, and Uninterrupted, which provides a platform for athletes to produce their own content.  

Fulwell 73, the production company behind TV series including The Late Late Show with James Corden and The Kardashians, is backed by Boehly’s Eldridge Industries. 

The group is helping develop a £450mn film and TV studio complex in Sunderland, north-east England. 

Pearlman said the deal, which is expected to close this quarter, would be a “merger of equals” that would position both businesses for the next “iteration of this industry”. 

He added that the merged group would be “a global content company” with entertainment at its core that would also look at “the tangential opportunities that exist in the industry now that you have to exploit to truly be successful”.

Pearlman pointed to the growing demand for sports stars in particular to create content directly for consumers on YouTube and social channels, alongside platforms such as Netflix. “The partnership between brand and content is becoming ever more important,” he said.

Carter, who is chief executive of SpringHill, said. “Like everyone, we see the ways audience behaviour is shifting.”

The combined group has not yet agreed on a name. SpringHill is named after the housing complex where James was raised, while Fulwell 73 refers to a stand at Sunderland Football Club’s former stadium and 73 to the last time Sunderland won a major trophy.

Fulwell 73 produced the Netflix documentary series Sunderland ‘Til I Die.

“We’re trying to convince LeBron and Mav to ditch their Liverpool allegiance and become Sunderland fans with the rest of us,” Pearlman said.

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