Celia Walden
France’s richest man on money and women
Afew weeks ago, Bernard Arnault’s children laid on quite a surprise for their father. “My son Frédéric called to ask me whether I fancied a game of tennis,” recounts the 66-year-old French magnate. “So I arrive at the court at 7.30pm and we start hitting some balls, only for him to make an excuse soon after and leave. Then suddenly the door opens and in walks Roger Federer. ‘Bernard,’ he says, ‘you and I are going to have a little knock-up.’ Now, we didn’t play a set,” Arnault goes on, “because although I’m a competent tennis player, there are limits. But it was sensational. Do you have any idea how much progress you make in just a few minutes playing someone like Federer?”
The LVMH chairman and chief executive isn’t used to playing with anyone above his level, either on the court or in the boardroom. With a 70brand empire that includes Christian Dior, Dom Pérignon, Bulgari, Louis Vuitton, Céline, Fendi and Sephora – and a net worth estimated at $36.4 billion – Arnault isn’t just France’s richest man and a growing force in the art world (he opened Paris’s muchanticipated Louis Vuitton Foundation last year), but one of the world’s preeminent tastemakers. This, coupled with the knowledge that he shuns press attention, only rarely giving interviews, and a cautionary description of him by one of his closest friends, Pierre Godé, as “not a cold man, but he doesn’t smile at anything and everything”, has me feeling apprehensive as I await Arnault’s arrival in a boardroom at the Avenue Montaigne townhouse that has served as Dior’s HQ since 1947.
Within a few minutes of meeting him, any trepidation has subsided. Tall and slim in his midnight blue Dior suit, the Roubaix-born son of a civil engineer does not, it’s true, “smile at anything and everything”. But when he does it’s out of genuine amusement, not politeness. His speech is cool and measured, his features refined and there’s a suppressed gaiety in his eyes that I find myself longing to bring out. Only when talking about his empire, the Fondation Louis Vuitton or recounting the moment – as a 21-yearold visiting the US for the first time – that he realised the global importance of the Dior name (the first company he went on to acquire) does the man known as “the wolf in cashmere” relax into warm and easy conversation.
“I got a taxi at JFK airport and the driver said, ‘You’re French!’ When I asked whether he had been to France or knew who the president was, he shook his head and said, ‘No, but I know Christian Dior.’ That was when the seed implanted itself,” he nods. A seed that grew throughout the Mitterrand years when Arnault – who had taken over the family construction company – moved to New York for a period. “This wasn’t because of the taxes,” he is careful to point out, “but because there was an extraordinarily negative feeling in France. I had a BMW and people would scratch it in the street because it was perceived to be ‘a rich person’s car’.”
Two decades after buying the ailing House of Dior in 1984, Arnault had turned the company into one of the “star brands” of his luxury empire, one he continued to expand throughout the Nineties. Is he still as ambitious now? “I’m not sure ambitious is the right word,” he frowns. “What I love is to win. What I love is being number one. But yes, today I still feel passionate about taking on brands like Dior, and mixing those world-famous roots with modernity. Business is very exciting. That moment where you’re about to do a huge deal… And then there’s the moment where a deal you’ve done keeps developing beyond what anyone expected. When I took over Louis Vuitton, everyone said, ‘it’s already so big – what more can you do?’ And since then we’ve multiplied that success tenfold.”
Not that money has been Arnault’s primary motivation. “Not at all,” he insists. “It’s just a consequence of what I do.” Power, then? Surely having such power feels good? “No,” he deadpans. “What feels good is choice. People think of politicians having true power, but that’s less and less true. I’m lucky in that I can say, ‘I want my group to be in such and such a situation in 10 or 20 years and formulate a plan to make it happen.”
Despite turning many of the raw design talents he has brought into his companies over the years into household names (John Galliano and Raf Simons at Dior, Alexander McQueen at Givenchy, Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton and Phoebe Philo at Céline) and being one of the first to hire celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Scarlett Johansson and Madonna for ad campaigns, Arnault has never courted celebrity. “Not only do I think that courting celebrity is unproductive, but I think it can be downright dangerous professionally. It’s fine when everything’s going well and everyone’s telling you how wonderful you are but the day things start going less well, you’ll get people laughing in your face. So I’m very prudent about all that. Added to which, celebrity serves me absolutely no purpose. All that interests me is promoting my brands; never myself.”
Although his business approach has been characterised as “brash” (even “brutal”) by the French media, you’ll never see Arnault the man described as such. A classical pianist, art collector and father of five who has been married to his second wife – the Canadian concert pianist Hélène Mercier – since 1990, he is the polar opposite of France’s other luxury mogul, François-Henri Pinault, who is often photographed on the red carpet alongside his wife, actress Salma Hayek. Arnault prefers to operate in the shadows. He rarely dines out and drinks “only very little, perhaps once a week – after all, I do sell alcohol and it’s not unpleasant.” For his last supper, he would choose “a bottle of Château d’Yquem”, he confides.
He is equally abstemious when it comes to technology. “I’ve got no email, just a phone, and I would never text, just call,” he says. Will his wife let him have his phone at the dinner table? “Yes, but she will make me keep it face down. In any case, I would never take a call at dinner or even look at it during a concert, or when I’m playing tennis or the piano.”
Once or twice a week he likes to visit the foundation – his obsession – housed in a magnificent light and airy Frank Gehry construction beside Paris’s Jardin d’Acclimatation, which boasts an impressive permanent collection, including works by Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gilbert & George and Ellsworth Kelly – and a musical programme to rival the capital’s most famous concert halls. “I went there last Sunday,” he tells me, “and 10,000 people had passed through the place that day. People kept coming up to me and telling me how wonderful it was.”
Recognition for this feted addition to France’s creative arts is about the only kind Arnault doesn’t seem to deem vulgar. “What I really like,” he says, with a glint in his grey-blue eyes, “is going into my shops incognito and serving people. I’ll do that abroad, especially in Japan, and nobody recognises me. The sales staff always find it most amusing.” This also gives him the chance to see what’s “working” and what isn’t, although with every new collection he is involved from the outset.
“I might say to Raf [Simons, Dior’s creative director], ‘There are too many evening dresses – we need more simple day dresses and jackets’.” His eldest daughter, Delphine, one of LVMH’s top management team, is invaluable in this regard, he says, but as an aesthete, Arnault will “notice what the women around me are wearing immediately.” He adds: “The one thing I don’t like is the tendency these days for certain women to try to be young. They want to wear things that are manifestly made for younger women.”
Despite his legendary attention to detail, Arnault’s Midas touch hasn’t always worked. “Obviously there are things I did wrong in my career. In 2000 I invested in some internet companies and I sold off some Google options far too fast. But I don’t like regrets. I prefer to look to the future.”
When it comes to the single professional moment he would like to relive, the mogul is in no doubt. “The moment I knew that I would be able to buy Dior. I was in New York and I remember getting on the Concorde home and feeling that I was on the brink of something huge. Right then, I knew I was going to build the biggest luxury company in the world,” he smiles. And for a moment Arnault looks genuinely happy. The Louis Vuitton Foundation; fondationlouisvuitton.fr
‘Courting celebrity is unproductive and downright dangerous professionally’