Widely acknowledged as the holy father of Fashion, Bernard Arnault is now the world’s 3rd richest man in 2022, having a net worth of $124 billion. Bernard Arnault is the Chairman and CEO of LVMH (Möet Hennessy Louis Vuitton). Bernard Arnault is an arts lover who fortified Christian Dior and built a billion-dollar luxury brand empire. Let us take a look back at his life, both his victory and his setbacks.
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
By training, Bernard Arnault was an engineer. Bernard Jean Etienne Arnault was born on 5th march, in Roubaix, Northern France. He attended school in Roubaix and Lille before volunteering at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris to learn engineering, graduating in 1971.
ABOUT FAMILY
In 1973, Arnault married Anne Dewavrin, but after thirteen years the couple got separated. Delphine and Antoine are the 2 children of Bernard and Anne. Bernard is now a French and Canadian concert pianist who married in 1990 and with which he has 3 sons: Alexandre, Frankic and Jean, with his 2nd wife, Hélène Mercier. Arnault is a classical amateur pianist, too.
PROFESSIONAL LIFE ODYSSEY
By thirty years, he became the company’s president. As an engineer, he moved to work for Ferret-Savinel, his family’s construction company. Within 3 years, he had renamed the company Férinel and moved the company’s focus to real estate, quickly rising through the ranks to become a director and, by the age of 30, president, succeeding his father.
Getting into the Fashion Industry, In 1984, Arnault left Férinel and bought the near-bankrupt textile company Boussac, stripping the company of all assets except the department store Bon Marché and the fashion house Christian Dior, certainly his best investment, despite its recession at the time.
Stepping in at LVMH, Arnault took over to mediate a tussle between the houses of Möet Hennessy and Louis Vuitton after the 2 businesses merged in 1987. With the support of Irish brewers Guinness, Arnault became the company’s biggest shareholder in just 2 years, presuming control as chairman and CEO.
Shopping Extravaganza, The luxury accession created by Arnault were Céline, Berluti, and Kenzo, parfumeur Guerlain; Loewe; Marc Jacobs and cosmetics department store Sephora; Thomas Pink; Emilio Pucci; and Fendi, DKNY, and French department store La Samaritaine. In Bernard Arnault’s shopping splurge, there had been a few surprises among the luxury brands. When he bought Berluti and Kenzo in 1993, he also purchased the French newspaper La Tribune. After selling it, he bought Les Echos and Le Parisien.
Despite the fact that LVMH was primarily a French company, Bernard desired a large presence in the United States for the company. The LVMH Tower, a 23-story sculpted glass structure on 57th Street in New York, opened in 1999 with a Christian Dior boutique on the ground and 1st floors, as well as a flagship American headquarters.
Gucci – In 1999, Arnault began what has been dubbed “the bloodiest fight in fashion” by the New York Post – a “creeping takeover” bid for Gucci. Gucci retaliated by establishing an employee stock option plan to dilute his stake after his stock reached 34%. Gucci was later sold for $2.92 billion to François Pinault’s. Bernard attempted to take the case to court, but was not successful.
By purchasing British art auction house Phillips, making a failed bid for Sotheby’s, and then purchasing French house Tajan in 2001, Arnault attempted to break the duopoly of Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Within a few years, nonetheless, he backed out of the fight. Yet, the game is far from over: in 2015, he put money into the German online auction site Auctionata.
Arnault put too much money into the dotcom craze. After investing in MP3.com and eBay, he founded Europ@web, a European internet fund, with $91 million of his own money. However, 1 of his major bets, e-tailer Boo.com, went bankrupt just as he was about to float it for $3.3 billion in 2000. Europ@web was quietly relegated to the back burner. It wasn’t all bad: Bernard bought a stake in Netflix in 1999, when it was still a DVD rental company.
LVMH started the Cheval Blanc ski resort in Courchevel in 2006, with a 2 star Michelin restaurant, thanks to the Arnault family’s agony for skiing. The hotel chain now runs resorts in the French West Indies, the Maldives, St Tropez, and, beginning next year, in Paris.
Every billionaire always owns a mega-yacht, but why buy 1 when you can buy an entire yacht company? Princess Yachts and Shipyard Royal Van Lent, which built Arnault’s 101-metre mega-yacht Symphony for $152 million, were purchased by LVMH in 2008 for around $257 million.
With the help of his son Antoine, Arnault decided to start and open the doors of LVMH in 2011. The public can now tour the barrel of LVMH houses, counting the Louis Vuitton ateliers in Asnières and Fendi’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome, during “Les Journées Particulières,” which takes place every October. Last year, 18,000 people came to see it.
KBE – BERNARD ARNAULT
In 2012, Belgium disclosed that Arnault had enforced dual citizenship at a time when Paris was considering imposing a now-defunct 75 percent tax on incomes exceeding $1.13 million. He refuted doing so for tax purposes and decided to withdraw the request a year afterward as “a gesture of my affinity to France and my belief in its long run,” then said that everybody in France should “do one’s part” for the nation.
Owing to LVMH’s ownership of British brands like Thomas Pink and Glenmorangie whisky, Bernard was made a titular Grand Officer of the French Legion of Honour in 2011 and a KBE – Knight Commander of the Most outstanding Order of the British Empire – in 2013 for “services to business and the wider community.”
In 2013, Arnault started the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, which was the brainchild of his daughter Delphine. There were over 6,000 applicants, all of whom had to have released at least 2 collections and competed for a $341,000 grant and LVMH mentorship. LVMH also launched La Maison Des Startups, an accelerator programme for 50 international start-up businesses, last year. Bernard Arnault said in an affirmation that revolution was an “integral part” of his businesses, a few of which were founded centuries ago.
In 2014, LVMH sponsored the Louis Vuitton Foundation, which was created and built as a “transparent cloud” in Paris by Frank Gehry, and includes twelve glass sails. Bernard Arnault is now renovated to make a cultural hub, where concerts and exhibitions can take place, when reopening in 2020, in the nearby disused public building.
In 2014 Bernard agreed to abandon his 23% stake in Hermès, and for 5 years he did not buy any shares in the luxury rival. It finished an acrimonious 4 year attempt to buy the scarf maker under control with proceedings filed by both parties on charges of insider trade, challenging and unfair competition.
In 2017 Bernard announced a deal of $13 trillion to fully acquire Christian Dior and fold it into LVMH, simplifying Arnault’s financial structures and making it the wealthiest European man. Arnault remained Dior’s largest single stock holding owner.
By the end of 2018, the company had purchased $3.2 billion from the luxurious Belmond hotel, train and river cruise company. Belmond is the 1st Hotel to have been built in 1953 and has officially started a portfolio of 46 hotels, restaurants, railway services and riverside cruise experiences more than 40 years ago, with the accession of Hotel Cipriani in Venice.
PRIVATE ISLAND
Richards Branson’s Necker Iceland and Steve Ellison’s owner of the 360-acre Bahamas Island, where neighbours are magician David Cupperfield and actor Johnny Depp. He has 98% of LanaI of Hawaii, Bernard Arnault probably possesses 133 acre of Indigo Island.
A momentous collector with a no. of thousands of modern and fellow, including works by Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, and Pablo Picasso. Bernard Arnault has become a serious work of Art. In the early 1980s, he claimed Monet was the 1st piece he collected.
CONCLUSION
LVMH, the likely largest luxury goods enterprise in the globe, is clearly a broad success. It involves 70 companies, ranging from Clicquot, Dom Pérignon, and Heuer to Bulgari – and including the Fenty Beauty line by Rihanna. Bernard Arnault says that he has been strongly criticised for putting numerous brands together in a single group but every competitor is now trying to imitate the “very rewarding model” for us. To know some Interesting facts about Bernard Arnault click here: .
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