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Ten days after Steven Kolb resigned, the CFDA gave its chief executive title to Hildy Kuryk, a former Vogue communications head who is not in the running to keep it.
Hildy Kuryk now holds the most senior staff title at the Council of Fashion Designers of America, along with something rare for anyone handed a chief executive’s job: a public understanding that she will be giving it back. The New York trade body named her interim CEO on September 28, ten days after Steven Kolb stepped down from the role he had held since 2011, and it was unusually direct about the terms. Kuryk is on a temporary contract, she will sit between the board and the staff while the organization looks for a permanent leader, and she is not a candidate for that permanent job.
Signal. What happened: The CFDA named Hildy Kuryk interim chief executive on a temporary contract and retained an outside firm to find a permanent successor to Kolb. Exact object: Kuryk, who ran communications at Vogue from 2013 to 2017 and founded the consultancy Artemis Strategies, in a role defined as a bridge between board and staff. When and where: Announced in New York on September 28, 2026, with a search expected to last three to six months. Source: A board statement from chairman Thom Browne, reported by other trade outlets after Vogue Business broke the news. Why it matters: The CFDA sets the official New York Fashion Week schedule and stages the CFDA Fashion Awards on November 2, so the interim period covers both the organization’s biggest night and the run toward its next fashion week. Earlier: a cover this same New York Fashion Week through Proenza Schouler‘s Spring 2027 show, and the month’s other closely watched leadership change through Dario Vitale’s appointment at Armani in September.
Vogue Business had the appointment first, together with a statement from Thom Browne, the designer who has chaired the CFDA board since January 2023. Browne thanked Kuryk for “steady interim leadership” and said the board’s attention was now on finding someone to guide the council into its next chapter. The CFDA added that Kuryk would oversee the transition and serve as the working connection between its staff and its directors. She has no existing ties to the organization, and she will keep her role at Artemis while she holds the post.
The search itself goes to Karen Harvey Consulting Group, an executive search and advisory firm with offices in New York, London, Paris and Los Angeles that places chief executives and creative leaders across fashion, luxury, lifestyle and beauty. The firm is no stranger to the account, since it already appears among the partners listed on the CFDA’s own website. Its founder and chief executive, Karen Harvey, also runs the Fashion Tech Forum conference series. The council expects the process to take three to six months.
stir
The vacancy opened on a runway. On Sunday, September 13, two activists from PETA walked into the COS show at WSA in New York, in the middle of New York Fashion Week, to protest the brand’s use of wool. Video of what happened next spread fast: rather than leaving the pair to event security, Kolb stepped in and physically restrained them.
He conceded the same day, on Instagram, that he had reacted inappropriately and should have let the security team handle it. A fuller apology followed, in which he took responsibility, said he was taking voluntary leave, and accepted an invitation from PETA to talk through its concerns. The group’s president, Tracy Reiman, had written to him proposing a meeting. On Monday, September 14, the CFDA board formally placed him on leave. Four days later he resigned.
Kolb announced the decision on his Substack, Steven Says. In the statement, which the Associated Press carried on September 18, he said he believed it was “the right moment for both me and the organization to begin a new chapter,” and that he was proud of what had been built together. The board answered with a short tribute, describing him as a devoted champion of American fashion across more than two decades and saying it respected his choice. PETA, for its part, said it still intended to sit down with him, and the group has credited Kolb with helping get fur off runway shows on the CFDA’s official schedule.
The protest itself was one front in a wider campaign. PETA has been pressing H&M and its sister label COS to drop wool from their collections, and in responding to the resignation the group argued that the confrontation would never have happened had the retailer acted on its earlier requests.
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Kolb arrived at the CFDA in 2006 as executive director, working alongside Diane von Furstenberg, who led the council at the time, and became chief executive in 2011. Over the following two decades he served under four board leaders, ending with Browne, while the council’s remit widened well beyond membership and an annual awards show.
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The milestones are concrete. The CFDA acquired the Fashion Calendar in 2014, which put it in charge of the official New York Fashion Week schedule, and a dedicated men’s week followed in 2015. The Fashion Manufacturing Initiative, started in 2013 to protect the city’s garment factories, had grown into a $14 million public and private partnership by 2019, and the council says its grants have since reached 54 factories and touched more than 2,000 jobs. When the pandemic hit, the CFDA and Vogue launched A Common Thread, which raised roughly $5 million for designers, independent retailers and manufacturers. In 2021 the council set up IMPACT to identify and support Black and Brown creatives working in the industry, and the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which predates Kolb, kept expanding on his watch. By 2025 its winner was taking home $300,000, with $100,000 apiece for two runners-up.
The figures from his final years show how much now runs through the council’s offices. In 2023 the CFDA handed out $380,000 in scholarships and put 69 shows on the official New York Fashion Week schedule. In 2024, more than 70 percent of its scholarship recipients came from underrepresented communities, and by 2025 the council reported stronger finances, fundraising above target, and a relaunched Fashion Calendar and website. Kolb’s resignation statement ran through a similar list, from scholarships and sustainability work to the council’s growing international reach.
Leadership gaps are not new territory for the council. When Tom Ford‘s three-year term as chairman ended on May 31, 2022, it was Kolb who covered the empty seat as interim chair until Browne, elected unanimously by the board, took over the following January. This time the gap sits on the staff side, and the board looked outside the building to fill it.
from
Kuryk’s career before fashion reads like a campaign finance file. Born and raised in Manhattan and a political science graduate of Vanderbilt, she started in legislative affairs in the Clinton White House, then moved into fundraising. She worked for former U.S. Senator Tom Daschle and on Dick Gephardt’s 2004 presidential campaign, and in 2006 on Charlie King’s run for New York attorney general.
Her bigger break came with Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, where she worked on East Coast fundraising strategy and was, by June 2007, the campaign’s senior New York finance consultant. She joined the Democratic National Committee as deputy finance director in 2009 and was promoted to national finance director in 2011, the same year Politico named her among its fundraisers to watch. After leaving the committee’s staff she kept consulting for it into early 2013, a path summarized in her public biography that adds up to roughly 15 years in politics.
Then came the pivot. In April 2013, Vogue hired her to run its communications, and she worked directly with Anna Wintour through 2017. Wintour later acknowledged that the hire had been something of a gamble, since Kuryk arrived from politics with no claim to fashion expertise. In a 2017 profile republished by WRAL, the editor called her a fast learner and said the bet had paid off because her “judgment is sound.”
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In June 2017, Kuryk struck out on her own with Artemis Strategies, a consultancy built on a plain reading of the market: companies were increasingly being pressed to state their values in public, and plenty of them were fumbling it. She pitched the firm as a way for brands to shape their messaging for socially conscious consumers, and she pointed to Pepsi’s widely ridiculed 2017 ad, in which Kendall Jenner joins a street protest, as exactly the kind of misfire she wanted clients to avoid. She argued that the work called for someone with real experience at every level, and her years of moving between government, campaigns and a media company were the selling point.
The client list filled quickly. Within its first year, Artemis had signed Nordstrom and Condé Nast, with the Condé Nast work centered on Vogue and the Met Gala. At the time, Kuryk was renting office space from the publisher inside One World Trade Center, the tower that houses its headquarters.
Later client rosters have also included The Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose Costume Institute benefit sits at the center of Vogue’s calendar. That mix of publishing, retail and cultural institution work is the closest thing on her record to the CFDA’s own blend of designers, sponsors and city partners.
There is also a shh symmetry in the appointment. The CFDA was founded in 1962 by Eleanor Lambert, a publicist. Sixty-four years later, the person steering it through the aftermath of Kolb’s resignation built her own career on helping institutions explain themselves.
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A three to six month search, counted from late September, lands a permanent hire somewhere between the end of December and the end of March. That window brackets the February edition of New York Fashion Week, the official schedule the CFDA has controlled since buying the Fashion Calendar, which means the next season could open under an interim chief or a brand new one.
Until then, Kuryk’s brief is mostly internal. Her stated job is to keep the line between staff and directors open while a board chaired by Browne, with working designers in its vice chair, treasurer and general secretary seats, decides what kind of executive it wants next. The council describes itself as home to more than 300 American designers, and at Kolb’s departure it said he had left behind a clear mission and a team in place. Whoever Karen Harvey’s firm eventually delivers will inherit that team, the Fashion Week calendar, the scholarship programs and the manufacturing grants.
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The most visible test of the interim setup is already on the calendar. The 2026 CFDA Fashion Awards take place on Monday, November 2, at the American Museum of Natural History, the ceremony’s home for a fourth straight year, with Keke Palmer hosting. The awards date to 1980, with the first honors handed out in 1981. This year’s nominees and honorees were announced on September 9, four days before the COS show, and the announcement carried a quote from Kolb in his capacity as CEO and president.
Voting by the CFDA Fashion Awards Guild, the invitation-only body of designers, editors, retailers and stylists that decides the competitive categories, opens on October 7 and closes on October 21. Browne himself is among this year’s nominees for American Menswear Designer of the Year. The ceremony also marks the 30th anniversary of the CFDA Scholarship Fund, with a student viewing section set aside for CFDA scholars and fashion students. When the doors open on November 2, it will be the first CFDA Fashion Awards since 2006 staged without Steven Kolb on the council’s staff.
