Is something rotten in the state of fashion?

On Wednesday — six days after it was announced that the designer Raf Simons was leaving Christian Dior, and weeks after Alexander Wang’s last show for the house of Balenciaga — Lanvin, the oldest surviving French fashion house, announced that its creative director, Alber Elbaz, is also leaving the company, “on the decision of the company’s majority shareholder,” according to a statement from Mr. Elbaz.

“Feels like the industry is shedding its skin right now,” Linda Fargo, the women’s fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, wrote in an email.

But unlike Mr. Simons and Mr. Wang, both of whom lasted approximately three years at Dior and Balenciaga respectively, Mr. Elbaz has been at Lanvin since 2001. He single-handedly revived the brand, making it a favorite of regular women and celebrities like Meryl Streep and Natalie Portman, in the process becoming one of fashion’s most beloved figures.

He is known not only for his talent, but also for his generosity (he regularly sends flowers to other designers before their shows) and his self-questioning. Last week, receiving his award at the Fashion Group International Night of Stars, the Roger Vivier designer Bruno Frisoni noted that the event was especially important to him because Mr. Elbaz was also being honored. “I love you, Bruno,” Mr. Elbaz called out.

In his statement Wednesday, he also expressed “gratitude and warm thoughts” and “affection” for all his colleagues. (When contacted for comment for this article, he texted a heart emoji to me, but no words).

As a result, and though Lanvin itself is privately held (it is owned by the Taiwanese publishing magnate Shaw-Lan Wang, and Mr. Elbaz reportedly has a 10 percent stake) and relatively small, with 2014 revenues of 250 million euros, Mr. Elbaz was regularly on the shortlist for every major fashion appointment in the last five years.

But he regularly denied any impulse to leave. In 2011, when asked if he would consider moving to another brand from Lanvin, he told The Financial Times: ‘“How could I do that? The people who work there enable me to do what I do. They are my orchestra. I can’t say to them, ‘Oh, bye, Mummy’s leaving now.’ ” In the end, it was not his decision, though a pointed line in his statement — that he hoped the brand found “the business vision it needs to engage in the right way forward” — suggests disagreement between himself and his corporate colleagues.

Still, Mr. Elbaz has also long expressed a certain discomfort with the direction the industry at large is taking. Receiving his Fashion Group International award, he said, “We designers, we started as couturiers, with dreams, with intuition, with feeling.” Then, he said: “We became ‘creative directors,’ so we have to create, but mostly direct. And now we have to become image-makers, creating a buzz, making sure that it looks good in the pictures. The screen has to scream, baby.”

But, he said, “I prefer whispering.” Combined with Mr. Simons’s departure for “personal reasons,” and Mr. Wang’s, this is sure to exacerbate the storm of existential self-questioning currently roiling the fashion world and focused on “the system.” Whether the constant cycle of collection after collection, far-flung store opening after far-flung store opening, Instagram after YouTube, demands too much of its creative talent. Whether, as Mr. Elbaz said at FGI, “everyone in fashion just needs a little more time.”

That is part of the problem, no question. But I also think it’s actually time to look a little harder at what is going on. Because, while “the system” is a disembodied, nonspecific entity that may be the most obvious culprit for our dissatisfaction, it seems to me that all these departures are also a very powerful reflection of an insidious, and potentially more destructive, trend.

That is, the current situation in which brands treat designers as “work for hire” — stewards that set a course for a style ship for a time, but who can be replaced as necessary while the ship itself sails on — and its inevitable corollary: that designers start to see themselves the same way. The result transforms the relationship from that of a marriage, where you pledge to love and care for each other through sickness and in health, into a dispassionate contract-to-contract arrangement.

While on the one hand this makes for a cleaner and more professional pairing — one less fraught with the highs and lows (and mood-altering drugs and rehab stints) of the generation before, like Mr. Galliano and Alexander McQueen, one where expectations between the parties are theoretically aligned — it also means that creative directors are more willing to weigh the costs and benefits of an employment situation and make a conscious judgment that it may no longer be working for them.

Put another way: They can leave. And increasingly, it seems, they do.

Fashion is now on a slippery slope of its own making that began with Tom Ford’s departure from Gucci Group in 2003. It was a rupture caused by disagreements over the scope of his power that was first seen as a dire event (How would Gucci survive without its superstar designer?) and latterly introduced the ascension of the brand: the idea that it was the house that mattered, and the designer served that master.

Gucci tested the theory by hiring three unknown creative directors after Mr. Ford (for women’s wear, men’s wear and accessories), a situation that lasted only until 2006, when one of them, Frida Giannini, became the sole creative director. Ms. Giannini remained at her post for nine years, before being replaced earlier this year by Alessandro Michele, also an unknown.

Meanwhile, other brands began to go through creative directors at a notable rate, for a variety of different reasons. Alessandra Facchinetti, Gucci’s head of women’s wear post-Ford, was let go from the brand in 2005, and joined Moncler Gamme Rouge, before jumping to Valentino, only to be replaced after two collections and hop to Pinko, where she introduced a new collection called Uniqueness in 2011, leaving in 2013 to become creative director of Tod’s following the American designer Derek Lam, who had been there for six years. (Phew.)

At Nina Ricci, Lars Nilsson was creative director from 2003 to 2006 before being replaced by Olivier Theyskens (2006 to 2009), who in turn was replaced by Peter Copping (2009 to 2014), who was replaced by Guillaume Henry. Mr. Theyskens resurfaced at Theory in New York in 2011, where he lasted for just over three years.

(In case you were wondering, the standard term for most creative director contracts is at least three years.)

At Céline, Michael Kors left in 2004, and was replaced by Roberto Menichetti, who after two seasons was replaced by Ivana Omazic, who in 2008 was replaced by Phoebe Philo, who famously insisted (after leading Chloé from 2001 to 2006, when she resigned — shades of Mr. Simons — for personal reasons) that she be allowed to stay in London with her family, and work from there.

It’s a decision that has been cited often in the last week as an example of the way the current generation of designers has made an effort to prioritize their own needs along with their brands’ needs for better balance, as was Alexander Wang’s decision, made mutually with the brand, not to renew his contract with Balenciaga, in part to concentrate on his own company.

Whether or not Balenciaga actually wanted him to stay (as Dior did with Mr. Simons), or it already thought things weren’t working out — and it has since appointed Demna Gvasalia of the French label Vetements to the post — Mr. Wang didn’t go quietly into that good night. He went running and jumping and practically celebrating, as all of us who were at his final Balenciaga show could see, suggesting that he was more than happy to be free of the grind.

We have reached the point where designers feel as justified in leaving a brand as the brand does in leaving them — and after it has happened once, for whatever reason (as it did when Mr. Simons left Jil Sander in 2012 under cloudy circumstances), it gets easier to do.

Indeed, Ms. Philo has publicly mused about her desire to spend more time in nature, and that, combined with the fact she left Chloé at the height of her success, has made rumors of a potential departure from Céline almost impossible to squash. It’s simply too believable that she could just walk away, not because she had a different job offer or a falling out with management, but because she simply wanted a different life. Like Mr. Simons.

The problem is, if we divorce emotion from the creative process, if designers don’t care as much about their brand, and brands are not as wed to their designers as they were when the same name shaped a sartorial identity over decades, then the risk is that consumers will feel the same way. It’s the part of this equation that doesn’t add up.

As a retailer who asked to remain anonymous because she sells many of the brands said on hearing the Lanvin news: “Why do people covet Chanel or Comme des The brands send a consistent message about what they are and what they stand for. If you are going to invest, you invest in that. Even if you don’t like a collection or a season, you can’t deny the purity of the message. All these changes means fashion doesn’t feel pure any more. What do you say to the women?”

When designers leave, by choice or not, the value proposition becomes broken. No one needs a new bag, or a fancy dress; they desire them because of what they represent. Once upon a time, Mr. Elbaz said in his Fashion Group speech, he used to ask himself: “What do women want? What do women need? What can I do for a woman to make her life better and easier?”

Without that — the seduction and sentiment, the promise of transformation — it’s just stuff. And really, who wants that?