Creative Director — A Season at Maison Lievre

A four-round, advanced fashion/luxury simulation. You are the newly promoted Creative Director of Maison Lievre, a mid-tier Parisian ready-to-wear house (EUR 88M revenue, 11% EBIT) where a private-equity fund just took 60% and installed a commercially aggressive CEO. The founder's grandson — you — has a fixed runway slot on 2 March at Paris Fashion Week, a hard EUR 2.4M collection budget, and a split mandate the role has never had to hold at once: runway acclaim AND a measurable lift in sell-through. Last season earned a Vogue rave but only 38% full-price sell-through (segment healthy is 65–70%), pushing 42% of the line into margin-destroying markdown. The board now wants ≥62% sell-through, ≥3 tier-1 editorial placements, and the 4 anchor department-store doors (22% of wholesale) kept on side. Across four rounds you (1) set the creative thesis and a deliberate novelty mix targeting 'optimal newness' rather than maximal novelty or maximal safety; (2) allocate the EUR 2.4M as a portfolio across novelty tiers, decide show-vs-product spend, and protect a contingency for the atelier's warned 18% overrun; (3) choose an explicit, defensible design-evaluation method (curatorial single-vision vs cross-functional panel vs data-anchored scoring) and resolve the Head of Design conflict over the radical show-anchor look — valuing it on portfolio editorial pull, not standalone margin; and (4) read the season result against the dual mandate and propose a repeatable creativity-evaluation and creative-governance model. The math rewards optimal newness, portfolio budgeting with a real contingency, defensible cross-functional/data-anchored evaluation, keeping the statement look as the line's signal, and an honest governance answer — and punishes the five classic errors: maximising novelty to win the show, over-correcting to safe carry-overs, committing the full budget with no contingency, selecting by feel, and cutting the show anchor on its sell-through number alone. Final KPIs track Full-Price Sell-Through %, Brand Heat (editorial pull and novelty), and Creative Governance (a repeatable, defensible process), against the EUR 2.4M cap.