Is tear gassing customers bad for luxury?
Swatch CEO's statement on the Audemar Piguet Royal Pop disaster defy belief, LVMH's farcical anti-tax lobbying efforts and James Bond sells Chinese cars while Aston Martin requests another bailout
In this week’s Dark Luxury news round-up
Tear gas, fist fights and the Swatch x Audemars Piguet debacle
How LVMH lobbied against a French tax and lost
Bernard Arnault sells Marc Jacobs for $850 million
Daniel Craig does donuts for a Chinese carmaker
The €1 billion French art Ponzi scheme
LVMH offloads Marc Jacobs
LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault once said he was more worried about Marc Jacobs than who was US President. Well, Bernie’s worrying no more, because he’s offloaded LVMH’s stake to private-equity firm WHP Global and G-III in a deal valued at $850 million. WHP Global is a sprawling American “brand management firm” which owns everything from Toys’R’Us to Vera Wang, and G-III owns and licences brands such as Karl Lagerfeld and Levi’s. Marc Jacobs remains creative director.
Bloomberg Opinion’s Andrea Felsted called it the opening offer in a “great luxury garage sale” as Arnault tightens the company’s belt as the post-Covid luxury boom fades into distant memory. Analysts will be watching whether Celine, Kenzo or other mid-tier LVMH labels face similar scrutiny.“Marc is still America’s most important designer, the brightest star in our fashion firmament, even if the clothes he shows these days are never produced in large volumes and appear practically nowhere except on one sad rack on the third floor of Bergdorf Goodman”, as Lynn Yaeger wrote in Business of Fashion last year. We can’t help but feel that’s unlikely to change considering the approaches of WHP and G-III.
(Financial Times / Reuters / Bloomberg / WSJ / Business of Fashion)
Dior reassessing pricing
Delphine Arnault, chief executive of Christian Dior Couture, has signalled that the brand will adopt a “cautious” approach to further price increases as it partners with designer Jonathan Anderson on a creative reboot. Dior, like most other LVMH companies and high-end handbag makers, has been aggressively hiking prices for years now at rates well above inflation. (Financial Times)
LVMH’s anti-tax lobbying farce
I’m sometimes asked “why cover luxury, isn’t is all a bit trivial”? This story by the excellent Noëmie Leclercq (her substack is called follow ze money!) in Glitz Paris on how LVMH lobbied to kill France’s corporate surcharge is one reason why I’m interested in the subject.
Bernard Arnault hates paying tax, as he repeatedly says in shareholder meetings, but in addition to his public statements he has carried out an extremely active campaign to lobby against his company paying more of it.
According to LVMH’s declaration to France’s lobbying register, the group spent 2025 trying to influence the “exceptional corporate contribution” tax in the 2026 budget, meeting figures at the Élysée, the finance ministry, the prime minister’s office and parliament, while also implying that it submitted proposed wording to shape the law itself.
LVMH paid €661 million under the surcharge in 2025, with roughly another €100 million at stake in 2026, and it appears to have mounted a full-spectrum lobbying campaign to reduce the bill.
The funny part is that Arnault seems to have lost the fight. The surcharge survived, although the threshold was raised, sparing some smaller companies. So the world’s largest luxury group may have ended up lobbying, in effect, for other companies’ tax breaks.
A quick question for paid subscribers: would you like an interactive infographic of every LVMH acquisition and sale since the company’s formation? We’re working on something new, and I’m looking for a few people to test it out before we launch it. Here’s a preview:
Drop me a line if so.
Swatch and AP launch goes pop
The launch of the limited-edition Royal Pop pocket watch collaboration between Swatch and Audemars Piguet has triggered crowd crushes, fist fights and tear gas deployment at stores across Paris, London, New York and other major cities, forcing multiple closures. It’s a clear PR disaster, crisis and calamity, but Nick Hayek Jr, Swatch’s chief executive, seems to think that any publicity is good publicity, saying on BBC Radio 4, “This should be a positive message, and having crowds at the beginning of the launch of a product should not be a bad news. It should be something that is good news.”
It’s certainly very good news for the teenagers who sit outside the stores every time these “drops” happen, who are hoping to snap one up and flip it straight away for a profit, but it’s much harder to see what exactly Audemars Piguet gets from the deal. Swatch is the world’s biggest watch maker by volume, selling several million watches a year, although much fewer than it did before the Apple Watch launch. It used to classify its brands according to a hierarchy ranging from prestige to “basic”, ranking Swatch in the latter category alongside Flik Flak, a brand “exclusively reserved for children”. Audemars Piguet sells watches in the tens of thousands a year for an average price of around £50,000.
There is an argument that making a pocket watch instead of a wristwatch “protects the sanctity of its primary product”, as Cathaleen Chen writes on BoF, but it has not in any way “democratised a luxury icon”, as she adds, and then there’s the fact that the violent launch will forever taint the pocket watch. It has unquestionably cheapened the appeal of APs.
Ilaria Resta has been CEO of Audemars Piguet for nearly three years following a decades-long career at Procter & Gamble, the pile ‘em high, discount-heavy maker of Pampers, Head & Shoulders, Gilette and Old Spice. This year she described the brand’s strategy as “opening up the watch industry to as many people as possible”. That’s certainly a brave and contrarian approach for a brand known for exclusivity, craft, mystery and plain secrecy. You can’t walk into a shop and buy an AP. So why is Resta letting teenagers who only care about a quick profit touch the brand? As Miss Tweed reported back in May, “it makes little sense”.
(Financial Times / BBC / Bloomberg / New York Times)
In case you missed it, we wrote a 3,000 word deep dive feature on Brunello Cucinelli last week. We have several follow-up stories in the works as a result of this story… stay tuned.
“Can you imagine Ferrari launching a collaboration with Dacia?”
Swiss watch publication Business Montres, known for its “ acid comments on watchmaking news...”, has gone to town on launch, which it describes as “Swatchgate”, quoting furious watch industry analysts over a series of half a dozen posts. It says that the Swiss watchmaker’s team is incompetent, that the Royal Pop is now no better than a Labubu, and describes CEO Nick Hayek’s attempts to rebrand the launch as a success as “taking his customers for fools”. The site estimates that Audemars will have received about 20 per cent of the proceeds of the sales of the Royal Pop, but that it also “becomes jointly liable for Swatch’s troubles and its de facto responsibility in the disaster”.
Aston Martin seeks emergency funding, again
Aston Martin has asked for emergency funding for the eighth time in eight years, with the latest injection again coming from Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, who has now effectively become the serial backstop for a business that cannot sustain itself. The frequency of these rounds raises the obvious question of whether this is a recovery plan or a permanent life-support arrangement.
Daniel Craig supports Chinese luxury car launch
James Bond actor Daniel Craig, formerly a very prominent Aston Martin figurehead, is doing donuts for a Chinese car company BYD’s luxury car launch.
(Autoblog)
The €1 billion French art Ponzi scheme
We hope you’ll read this FT profile of a French art dealer who orchestrated a €1 billion Ponzi scheme, defrauding investors by systematically misrepresenting the value of artworks and exploiting the market’s secrecy. There’s an incredible line in the story: “He needed something on the scale of a lottery win to bail him out — which is exactly what he got. In November 2012, Lhéritier won €170mn in the EuroMillions lottery. ‘A huge relief,’ he said”.
You really should know your luxury customer
The 42 year-old son of Russia’s Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Alexander, reportedly paid millions of euros for trips to the UAE and the Maldives between September 2024 and February 2026, according to a leaked travel records reported by Russian-language service Vot Tak, part of Polish international news network TVP. Visits included Dubai’s Bvlgari Resort on Jumeirah Bay Island, and stays at Waldorf Astoria Ithaafushi in the Maldives. His father is subject to sanctions in the US and Europe. (TVP World)
Diamond desperation
The desperation of the mined diamond industry in the face of steeply declining sales may extend to filing complaints against lab-grown diamond makers. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, which acts on any individual/multinational corporations’ complaint, banned two small jewellery companies from using the term “diamond” to describe their synthetically made stones. (FT)
Read our interview with anonymous short-seller Intern Pierre, who reveals on how he decides which luxury brands are on the way up or down.
The international fake luxury bust report
A round-up of the never ending raids on fake luxury around the world in just the last week…
Korea: Fake Gucci, Ray-Ban products seized following raids. (VNExpress)
Los Angeles: “Authorities say they have uncovered a sprawling counterfeit retail operation hidden in plain sight in downtown Los Angeles, which was stuffed with luxury merchandise worth up to $10 million”. (Patch)
London: “Six arrested as TikTok shop influencers targeted in counterfeit goods crackdown”. (City of London Police)
Vietnam: Vietnam customs seize suspected smuggled iPhones and laptops, Burberry t-shirts, Coach bags and Adidas shoes. (DTI News)
More Dark Luxury links
The FT’s Robert Armstrong tackles luxury: “The pandemic bubble and its aftermath revealed an industry marked by internal contradiction — strategic tensions that ensured an identity crisis would come sooner or later. Unresolved, they will prevent a return to sustained growth”, he writes.
Italy’s fashion chamber stops short of a full ban on fur at Milan Fashion Week, saying it will just “discourage” it with voluntary guidelines. (WWD)
Gucci wants in on F1 sponsorship, following in the tracks of LVMH’s Moet. (Sport Business)
Kering event invitations are now doing a roaring trade being resold on WhatsApp (Glitz Paris)
“Private jet demand shrugs off 28 per cent fuel spike as wealthy fliers keep spending” (TCD)
Why POV shopping videos are a risk for luxury (BoF)