Last week, the house of Emanuel Ungaro announced that a top name was leaving the company. Surprisingly, the top name was not Lindsay Lohan, the recently acquired adviser whose collection (co-designed with Estrella Archs) has become a favorite chew toy of fashion critics. Rather, it was CEO Mounir Moufarrige, the very man who hired LiLo. When Moufarrige was in talks to bring on Lohan, then-designer Esteban Cortazar bailed on the line, hinting that he refused to work with the troubled actress. Naturally, those in the know speculated that LiLo’s disastrous debut, which was followed by less-than-stellar sales, was the CEO’s main reason for leaving. Not so, says Moufarrige, who’s been at the company eighteen years. The departure “has nothing to do with Lindsay Lohan at all … The strategy is set for Ungaro and that’s it.” How wonderfully polite and noncommittal of him. Anyways, Moufarrige will still have a finger (if not a hand) in ongoing operations at Ungaro.
Moufarrige: “The retirement has nothing to do with Lindsay Lohan” [Grazia UK]
