Kering

The Kering house CEOs de Meo has personally installed since he took office on 15 September 2025 number exactly three: Francesca Bellettini at Gucci on 17 September 2025, Jean-Marc Duplaix at the newly created Kering Jewelry division in March 2026, and Gianfranco D’Attis at Alexander McQueen on 1 June 2026, effective 3 June. Four further house-level appointments — Stefano Cantino to Gucci, Cédric Charbit to Saint Laurent, Gianfranco Gianangeli to Balenciaga, Federico Arrigoni to Brioni — predate him and belong to the final months of François-Henri Pinault’s solo authority over the group. One seat, Bottega Veneta, remains open as of 12 June 2026. The chronology, read together, is the clearest single document we have of how Luca de Meo intends to run Kering: through a small number of decisive, internally-promoted moves at the houses that matter most to the group’s revenue, and a willingness to leave the others uncovered until he has the right person rather than the available one. ...

BoF VOICES 2026’s December stage at Soho Farmhouse will host five CEOs whose combined companies posted roughly €130bn in 2024 revenue — and three of them (Luca de Meo at Kering, Michelle Gass at Levi Strauss, Geoffroy van Raemdonck at Saks Global) inherited their seats within the past eighteen months as explicit turnaround leaders. The fifth, Sidney Toledano, handed his executive seat at LVMH Fashion Group to Pietro Beccari on 1 January 2026 and now appears in Oxfordshire as Special Advisor to Bernard Arnault rather than as an operator. The line-up announced for the tenth-anniversary edition of BoF VOICES 2026 — 1–4 December 2026 at Soho Farmhouse in the Oxfordshire countryside — is not a celebration of luxury at altitude. It is a panel of operators hired or repositioned to manage what comes after the 2021–2023 boom. ...

When Gianfranco D’Attis took the Alexander McQueen CEO chair on 3 June 2026, he became the fifth chief executive the house has cycled through since Lee Alexander McQueen’s suicide sixteen years earlier — and the fourth hired since Kering bought a controlling stake in December 2000. The appointment, announced 1 June, slotted into the broader Kering portfolio refresh that Luca de Meo had unveiled six weeks earlier in Florence, and into the 2024-2026 sequence of Kering house-CEO appointments that has reshaped the group’s executive bench under both Pinault and de Meo. Alexander McQueen leadership has, in other words, become one of the most-watched succession files in luxury — a house that has not had a CEO last longer than six years since Jonathan Akeroyd left for Versace in 2016, paired with a creative-director chair that turned over for the first time in 2023 after thirteen years under Sarah Burton. ...

Gucci becomes the first luxury fashion house to title-sponsor a Formula 1 team on 27 May 2026, the Luca de Meo era at Kering announcing itself with a 130-character renaming of the Enstone-based constructor to the Gucci Racing Alpine Formula One Team from the 2027 season. The deal answers a question that has hung over luxury for thirty-five years — would a fashion house ever own the topline of a Grand Prix car the way Marlboro and West and Vodafone once did — and it answers in red, green and gold rather than the BWT pink and blue Alpine has worn since 2021. Gucci President and CEO Francesca Bellettini’s statement, “Gucci becomes the first luxury fashion house to serve as Title Partner in Formula 1,” is the screenshottable line. The harder question is what every other house has done in the paddock since 1969, and why none of them did this. ...

The giambattista valli buyback from Artémis, announced by Business of Fashion in May 2026, is the second time in eight years that a Paris fashion house has undone a Pinault-family bet — the first was Stella McCartney rolling back the 2001 Kering joint venture in March 2018. Valli’s reacquisition of his namesake house, Giambattista Valli SAS, from the holding company chaired by François-Henri Pinault closes a nine-year minority-to-majority arc that began with a 2017 stake and a 2021 control move. It is a small deal by Kering or LVMH standards, but it is the second clean unwinding of a founder-house from Artémis since the Stella McCartney departure, and it arrives during the most aggressive founder-buyback cycle in three decades. ...

Luca de Meo’s first eight months as Kering CEO add up to a Capital Markets Day in Florence on April 16, 2026, five different creative-director appointments inherited or made across the portfolio, a Gucci Times Square takeover that BoF on May 24, 2026 called “back under the microscope,” and a three-phase plan called ReconKering that asks investors to wait until end-2030 to see the payoff. This is a Kering portfolio refresh on a scale the group has not attempted since the disposal of the sport-and-lifestyle assets, and it lands as the Kering AGM convenes May 28, 2026 at 3 PM Paris time at 40 rue de Sèvres. The question every house faces is no longer who runs it. It is what shape it should be by the time the Lead phase opens in 2029. ...

Giambattista Valli’s 20 May 2026 designer buyback from Artémis is the third clean designer reclamation since 2018 — and the first to expose how loud the difference is between a family holding (Pinault’s Artémis) and a listed luxury group (Pinault’s Kering). The three cases that actually qualify — Valli in May 2026, Stella McCartney twice (March 2018 from Kering, January 2025 from LVMH), and Phoebe Philo as a permanent founder-majority structure since October 2023 — do not form a wave. They form a small, specific pattern that gets misread every time a designer leaves a group. ...

On Saturday 16 May 2026, Demna staged the gucci cruise 2027 times square show on a runway laid down the centre of Broadway between 46th and 48th Streets, with Gucci taking over roughly fifty surrounding skyscraper-mounted screens to do it. The pre-show video began at 8:30 p.m. local time and intercut nature footage with mock product ads — Gucci Time, Gucci Life, Gucci Acqua, Gucci Gym, Palazzo Gucci Hotel — before Cindy Crawford closed the collection in a black feathered gown and Tom Brady walked it head-to-toe in leather. The show ran behind high black barriers while Midtown traffic, sirens, and honking continued outside. Read against Demna’s first Gucci outing at Memoria seven months earlier, this was the inversion of that 4th-century Milanese basilica: a deliberate move from sacred silence to commercial saturation, staged on the most over-photographed intersection in the world. ...

Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel debut on the Grande Plage in Biarritz on 28 April 2026 was the first cruise show in the Lagerfeld-era format to refuse a global destination — and one week later the house entered the Lyst Index at #1, the first time in the ranking’s history Chanel had appeared on it at all. Read in isolation, the blazy chanel biarritz collection is a 79-look show staged at the 1929 Casino Municipal for two audiences totalling more than 900 guests, with Nicole Kidman in the front row and A$AP Rocky performing at the after-party. Read together with the September 2025 acquisition of 23 Rue Cambon for €118 million ($133 million) and the Q1 2026 Lyst recalibration, it is something else: the most coherent brand-strategy moment any European fashion house has produced in this cycle, and the clearest argument yet that Chanel — privately held, debt-free, and unconstrained by the quarterly drumbeat that governs LVMH and Kering — intends to spend the next decade behaving differently from the conglomerates around it. ...

Kering put Jean-Marc Duplaix in charge of a new jewellery division on 17 March 2026 and gave him four houses, €935 million in 2025 revenue, and one job: catch Cartier. The Kering jewellery division, announced on 16–17 March 2026, consolidates Boucheron, Pomellato, Dodo and Qeelin under a single P&L for the first time, with Group COO Jean-Marc Duplaix appointed CEO of the new structure while keeping his COO duties. Read against the comparator set — Richemont’s Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, LVMH’s Tiffany & Co. and Bulgari — the move is less a brand reorganisation than the second leg of Luca de Meo’s ReconKering plan: turn a sub-billion-euro spread of acquired jewellers into a category platform that can be measured against the two groups that already won the last cycle. ...

Pierpaolo Piccioli’s first Balenciaga collection, presented in Paris in October 2025, is the first time in 28 years that the house’s silhouette has retreated rather than advanced — the Ghesquière-to-Wang-to-Demna line, unbroken since 1997, ended on a runway that looked back to Cristóbal’s 1950s. The piccioli balenciaga debut is the most-watched test of Kering’s ReconKering plan because it is the only one of the group’s three creative-director changes where the new designer arrives without a brief to reset the brand’s commercial spine, only its image. CEO Gianfranco Gianangeli, in post since November 2024, and Deputy CEO Nathalie Raynaud, promoted in 2026, have already done the spine work: the Cagole, the Rodeo, the Bel Air, and the Le City revival did most of the un-streetwearing of Balenciaga before Piccioli arrived. What he inherits is a house whose leather goods are working and whose image needs a new sentence. ...

On 16 April 2026, in Florence, Luca de Meo stood in front of investors for more than three hours and named the plan that will define the next four years at Kering: ReconKering. The Kering Florence strategy 2026 is a three-phase reset — structural fix by end-2026, rebuild to growth by end-2028, reclaim “Next Luxury” leadership by end-2030 — and it lands on four very different desks at once: Gucci under Demna Gvasalia, Bottega Veneta under Matthieu Blazy’s successor moment, Balenciaga in the post-Demna handover, and a beauty business that is no longer Kering’s at all after L’Oréal closed its $4.6 billion acquisition of Kering Beauté on 21 April 2026. This piece reads each of those four landings against the targets de Meo actually committed to in Florence, and against the Q1 2026 numbers that frame them. ...

In the same fortnight that LVMH reported +1% organic growth on €19.1 billion of Q1 2026 revenue, Kering disclosed a -14.3% reported collapse at Gucci, and Hermès shares fell roughly 13% in a single session on 15 April 2026, every one of those houses opened a new furniture, residence or hospitality programme inside Milan Design Week 2026. That contradiction — luxury Q1 2026 design spend rising while quarterly numbers softened — is the question that walked the streets of Brera, Montenapoleone and Corso Venezia between 20 and 26 April. The answer is not denial. It is a deliberate, coordinated rotation: groups including LVMH, Kering, Hermès, Prada Group and OTB are buying long-duration assets — palazzi, foundries, café residencies, twelve-object capsules — at the precise moment that the four-collections-a-year fashion cycle has stopped clearing inventory the way it did in 2021–2023. ...

Kering at Milan Design Week 2026 let its two flagship Italian houses anchor opposite ends of the city in the same week of April — Gucci inside the 4th-century Basilica di San Simpliciano in Brera, Bottega Veneta in a permanent ground-floor gallery at Via San Maurilio 14 in 5Vie — and made no public statement connecting the two. Demna Gvasalia’s Memoria for Gucci and Matthieu Blazy’s Casa for Bottega Veneta opened within walking distance of each other during Milan Design Week 2026, and they were the most considered fashion-into-design statements the week produced. The fact that they came from the same holding company, presented as if they did not, is the story. ...