Luca-De-Meo

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...