Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

displayed like artwork, brandished like iconography. Arnault and his fellow luxury tycoons have shifted the focus from what the product is to what it represents. To achieve this, they “enhance [the] timelessness” as Arnault likes to say, by trumpeting a company’s heritage; hire a hip, young designer to give it a sexy, modern edge; strengthen the branding by streamlining the name (Christian Dior has become simply Dior, Burberry lost its ’s ) and splashing the logo on everything from handbags to bikinis; and advertise the entire package relentlessly to spread the new gospel to the masses.
    Arnault plays up the cachet of his brands that much more by attending their fashion shows with his striking blond second wife, a Canadian-born pianist named Hélène Mercier. The pair arrives in a chauffeured sedan, and bodyguards usher them through the crowd to their front-row seats. There they hold court, greeting high-profile guests such as France’s former first lady Bernadette Chirac or actress Sharon Stone, who are seated immediately to their right and left. They pose for pictures and chat with magazine editors and newspaper reporters until the show begins. Most other luxury-group chairmen do not attend their brands’ shows, and if they do, they sit in back rows and are unrecognizable. Few bring their spouses.
    The result of all this hype is a product line that, Arnault says, “fulfills a fantasy. It is so new and unique you want to buy it. You feel as if you must buy it, in fact, or else you won’t be in the moment. You will be left behind.”
     
    B ERNARD J EAN E TIENNE A RNAULT was born on March 5 , 1949 , in Roubaix, an industrial town in the north of France not far from the Belgian border. The France of big families and industrial fortunes, it is perhaps the most conservative region of the country. Arnault’s father, Jean, ran a family-owned construction business; his mother, Marie-Jo Savinel, was a pianist. As a boy, Arnault took up piano and showed great promise, though not enough to make it a career. “You have to be super-gifted,” he said, “and I wasn’t.” Instead, Arnault enrolled in the École Polytechnique, one of France’s prestigious grandes écoles that produce the country’s business and political elite, and took a degree in engineering. Upon graduating, he joined the family business, called Ferret-Savinel, and in 1973 married Anne Dewavrin, a pretty blond from a prominent textile manufacturing family in Roubaix. According to Nadège Forestier and Nazanine Ravaï in their book The Taste of Luxury: Bernard Arnault and the Moët-Hennessy Louis Vuitton Story , Arnault kept the marriage a secret from the employees at Ferret-Savinel. (Full disclosure: while researching this book, I discovered that I was related to Dewavrin through marriage; this has had no impact on my coverage of Arnault.) He didn’t wear a wedding band, and when his daughter was born, his secretary didn’t even know.
    Arnault was just as secretive about business. At twenty-seven, he negotiated to sell Ferret-Savinel’s construction division to the Rothschilds’ Societé Nationale de Construction for the impressive sum of 40 million French francs; he told his father only after the deal was done. Jean Arnault stepped down, and Bernard Arnault took over Ferret-Savinel. Within five years, the company’s development arm, Férinel, had become one of the top private home developers in France, specializing in vacation homes.
    In 1981 , François Mitterrand, the first popularly elected socialist president of France, swiftly nationalized banks and major industrial businesses. The new socialist economic policies made business conservatives like Arnault nervous. Arnault fled France with his wife and two small children, Delphine and Antoine, to the United States, where he bought a splendid Mediterranean-style home facing New York’s Long Island Sound, enrolled his children in good schools, and began building vacation homes in Florida with