Icicle rescued Carven from bankruptcy in 2018 — by 2024 it lost €14.4M on €7.3M of sales

Carven, founded in 1945, had slid into bankruptcy by 2018. Shanghai's Icicle Fashion Group bought the house out of court proceedings that October and created Carven France to relaunch it — a Chinese ready-to-wear group betting that a Paris couture name could be rebuilt from the runway outward.

The relaunch ran on creative directors, and kept consuming them. Louise Trotter was hired in February 2023 to restart the brand; she left in December 2024 for Bottega Veneta. Her right hand Mark Thomas was promoted in March 2025 and was gone by April 2026, after one year and two collections. A fourth designer was named in June 2026. Each departure reset the house's direction before the previous one had sold.

The filed accounts of Carven France show what the churn cost. Revenue climbed from €6.3M in 2021 to €15.1M in 2023 — then collapsed 52% to €7.27M in 2024, while the annual loss widened from €7.1M to €14.4M: the house lost nearly twice what it earned. Cumulative published losses for 2021–2024 total €28.4M, with 65 staff on the payroll in 2024.

A court alert had already recorded equity below half of share capital at the end of 2022, and the 2024 result deepened the hole. Carven France has never entered court protection — the owner has simply kept paying for the experiment.

The house lost €14.4M in 2024 on €7.3M of sales, nearly twice what it earned, as each designer left before building a customer base.

The relaunch was led by runway spectacle and designer names, but each creative director left before a customer base could form around their work

Losing Trotter to Bottega Veneta and Thomas a year later meant two consecutive relaunches with nothing on the shelf from the first

The 2024 numbers — revenue halving while losses doubled — show a cost structure built for a luxury house attached to a business with €7M of sales

Equity was already below half of share capital at the end of 2022; the owner kept funding the strategy instead of resizing it

A brand relaunched through creative directors needs each one long enough to build a customer — if the seat turns over every eighteen months, the relaunch starts from zero and the bill compounds.

Mark Thomas's departure was announced 2 April 2026; Kai Nesselrath was named to replace him in June 2026, the fourth designer of the relaunch era, with his first collection due at Paris Fashion Week that autumn. Carven France remains outside court protection, funded by its owner, with equity depleted.