There is yet another job opening in fashion. On Monday, Tom Ford (the brand) announced the departure of Peter Hawkings as creative director after just over a year. That company now joins the ranks of Chanel, Givenchy and Dries Van Noten, all soldiering on without a designer — or any real design direction besides rinse and repeat.

It’s an unprecedented state of uncertainty, not helped by the fact that at the same time speculation is swirling about a host of other brands that still have artistic directors, though you’d never know it by the gossip.

A brief sampling of the theories floating around:

• Sarah Burton, the longtime designer of Alexander McQueen who left last year, is definitely, positively going to Givenchy. Soon. Everyone says.

• Hedi Slimane is 100 percent leaving Celine, going to Chanel and being replaced by Michael Rider, late of Ralph Lauren. (Never mind that the move was supposed to have happened in June and that Mr. Slimane is not only still at Celine, but Bruno Pavlovsky, the head of fashion at Chanel, pretty much dismissed the idea.) Or maybe Mr. Slimane is going to Burberry? They just changed chief executives. Who knows? If there’s smoke, there’s fire.

• John Galliano is leaving Margiela, and he’s going to Chanel. No, wait, Dior. No, wait, Fendi.

• Kim Jones, currently at Fendi women’s wear, is being replaced by Alessandro Michele. (Oops, that didn’t happen. Mr. Michele actually went to work at Valentino.) OK, by Pierpaolo Piccioli. By Maria Grazia Chiuri, who happens to be artistic director of Dior women’s wear. By [fill in the designer’s name].

Enough.

This kind of rampant, unfettered speculation, while occasionally entertaining in a fantasy football kind of way, is often rooted in nothing more than whispers and wishful thinking — or the product of strategically deployed leaks used as a tactic in a contract negotiation. And it is, in the end, good for no one. Not for the designers concerned or the hundreds of people who work for them or the consumers who buy their clothes — or who just follow the celebrities who wear them on social media, and thus are influenced by those clothes.

Insecurity just leads to boring fashion, even bad fashion. Most often, it makes designers choose the safe option, the thing that worked well last time — the banal. It mitigates against the wild ideas — the why nots? — that change what everyone wants to wear.

And yet the chaos of the current situation, which has even fans on social media tearing their hair, seems to reflect the general state of chaos in the world, the shortened attention span of the social media era and the reality that, as fashion itself has become entertainment, designer turnover has itself become a spectator sport.