Lvmh

For the first time in La Biennale di Venezia’s 130-year history, the institution has named an Exclusive Partner — Bvlgari, on a 2026–2030 contract that spans three editions of the Art Biennale and anchors a purpose-built Spazio Esedra pavilion in the Giardini and a Fondazione Bvlgari collateral show in the Marciana’s Salone Sansovino. This is what the Bvlgari Venice Biennale partnership actually is: not a sponsorship line in a catalogue, but a title invented for the occasion, written into the institution’s architecture of patronage so that the LVMH-owned Roman jeweller occupies a tier above every other corporate name attached to the 61st International Art Exhibition. No monetary figure has been disclosed, and we are not going to invent one. ...

On 14 May 2026, LVMH sold Marc Jacobs to an $850M joint venture between WHP Global and G-III Apparel Group, ending a 29-year ownership that began the same year Marc Jacobs was named creative director of Louis Vuitton. The deal closes a chapter of LVMH divestitures that has, since 2020, quietly reshaped the group around three categories — leather goods, jewellery, wines and spirits — while pushing American designer brands, English shirtmakers, and minority creative-founder stakes out of the portfolio. The story is not the Marc Jacobs sale on its own. The story is the pattern: LVMH bought Tiffany, backed Phoebe Philo, and lined itself up for Giorgio Armani while shedding Off-White, Thomas Pink, Stella McCartney, and now Marc Jacobs in roughly eighteen months. ...

Armani’s 15% stake is the largest contested block of independent Italian luxury since LVMH bought Fendi in 2003, and three luxury suitors are now in the room: LVMH, L’Oréal and EssilorLuxottica. Business of Fashion reported on 10 May 2026 that Giorgio Armani Group CEO Giuseppe Marsocci is preparing to appoint two financial advisers to run the sale of an initial 15% stake to a preferred luxury group within 18 months, the window written into Giorgio Armani’s own succession plan before his death on 4 September 2025. The buyer of that first 15% has an option to take its position up to 54.9% over three to five years. The Giorgio Armani Foundation, the founder’s instrument of control, retains at least 30% indefinitely. Those are the numbers that shape every move the three named suitors are about to make. ...

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. ...

When Frédéric Arnault walked into Loro Piana on 1 June 2025, he inherited a 101-year-old cashmere house that had — three months earlier — already committed to opening a four-floor 19th-century townhouse on Via Solferino in Milan as its cultural and commercial centre of gravity. The appointment was announced on 13 March 2025; the maison he took over was no longer the discreet Quarona-born fibre supplier his father Bernard Arnault had bought a controlling stake in for roughly $2.6 billion in July 2013. Under Damien Bertrand’s four years as CEO and Antoine Arnault’s continuing chairmanship, Loro Piana had been pushed — quietly, methodically — out of the wool sheds and into the rooms where furniture, ceramics and curated mid-century objects sit alongside double-ply cashmere. By the time Casa Brera opened during Milan Design Week 2026, the question facing the youngest of LVMH’s heirs was no longer whether Loro Piana could become a fashion-into-design house. It was whether a 31-year-old engineer who had run watches for five years could hold that pivot together while his father’s group posted a -2% organic quarter in Fashion & Leather Goods. ...

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. ...