Heritage revival: how LVMH and Kering thrived with Dior and Gucci, while others like Schiaparelli struggle despite the red carpet acclaim with Kylie Jenner, Bella Hadid, Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian

South China Morning Post

23-04-2025

When
Bernard Arnault was made CEO of his grandfather's small construction firm in the early 1980s, he was an unknown businessman living in Lille. Today, he is the on/off richest person in the world and that same business – LVMH – is Europe's most profitable listed company. Arnault and his five children have become the de facto royal family of France, sitting on the front row of Paris Fashion Week and attending international presidential inaugurations – and all this came from reviving dormant fashion brands.
Bella Hadid in Schiaparelli at the Cannes Film Festival, in 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE
'LVMH was created by taking over companies with weaknesses,' says bestselling author and journalist Dana Thomas. 'Often, the brands were inherited by heirs who were not good at what they were doing and had not taken advantage of [what] the companies had to offer. That's when Bernard stepped in and turned them around.'
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This began in 1984 when
Arnault bought Christian Dior 's parent company, Boussac, for one franc from the French government when it was near bankruptcy – having been run into the ground by a series of poor business decisions. Later that decade he bought a percentage of a heritage luggage brand owned by the Vuitton family, then invested heavily in Moët Hennessy when its owners were struggling to keep it afloat. Today, all three companies make billions of dollars annually while LVMH itself piled up a total of around US$93 billion last year.
'Sleeping beauty' brand Patou, autumn/winter 2025. Photo: Handout
Kering too transformed from a reasonably successful timber factory into a luxury giant when François Pinault bought Gucci and from there moved into brands like Balenciaga, which had been all but ignored by the industry for years. Similarly, Johann Rupert turned his father's South African tobacco company into the watches and jewellery conglomerate Richemont through buying a few largely forgotten heritage watch and jewellery brands.
'Part of their immense success was due to timing,' says fashion documentary producer Camilla Hall. 'Big-name designers – think John Galliano at Dior or Tom Ford at Gucci – turned the fortunes of these brands around in the 1990s, but they did so as
logo culture grew and the brands became bigger than the designers who were fronting them.'
Then, China opened up and this, coupled with the arrival of social media, meant that brand names dominated everything and creative directors could be swapped around at will, while the conglomerates that owned them could all but print money.
Nina Ricci spring/summer 2025. Photo: Handout
Understandably, other people tried to muscle in on what appeared to be a close-to-foolproof recipe for riches. Over the last 15 years, numerous sleeping-beauty brands (as the industry has termed them) have been revived – House of Worth, Paul Poiret, Jean Patou, Madeleine Vionnet, Molyneux, Schiaparelli, Rochas, Doucet, Halston Heritage and Nina Ricci, to name a few. But while some have achieved critical acclaim, almost none have seen much financial success. This is in stark contrast to the brand revivals that took place two decades earlier.
'It is as if the industry decided which the huge-name brands were – the ones that could make millions from sunglasses and handbags, as well as ready-to-wear – and after that, the door was slammed shut,' says luxury expert Laura Smith.