A Non-Exhaustive List of LVMH’s Shakeups

Lately, it feels like with another day comes another drastic LVMH shakeup. Yesterday alone, the luxury maison sent the fashion world into a tizzy three times over: first, with the announcement of Hedi Slimane’s departure from Celine, where he has been the artistic, creative, and image director since 2018. Then it came out that Michael Rider, a design director there under Phoebe Philo, would be tapped to replace him. Then came the news that LVMH had inked a 10-year partnership with F1. All of this before lunch.

In the preceding 24 hours, the luxury conglomerate broke the same corner of the internet with the news that it would offload the late Virgil Abloh’s Off-White to Bluestar Alliance just after the dust had settled from its long-awaited New York Fashion Week debut. And just last Friday, LVMH acquired a 10 percent stake in Moncler CEO Remo Ruffini’s Double R, which itself has a 15.8 percent stake in the outerwear brand. If anything, sprawling multinational corporations have a reputation for being bearish, but LVMH is racking up major maneuvers in rapid succession. (Consider that Sarah Burton was recently tapped to helm Givenchy following months of speculation). Its major moves transcend fashion, too: it recently acquired a 30 percent stake in booze-free sparkling wine brand French Bloom.

It may be too early days to parse what all of these moves mean, exactly, but perhaps the most definitive clue lies in a statement LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault gave timed to the maison’s newly inked F1 partnership: “In motorsport as in fashion, watchmaking or wines and spirits, every detail counts on the path to success,” he said. “Both in our workshops and on circuits around the world, it is this incessant search to break boundaries that inspires our vision.”