From observing customers firsthand to opening private workshops and pairing traditional craftsmanship with new technology, Arnault has built his approach to luxury leadership around a simple question: what should remain rooted in heritage, and what needs to change?
As CEO of Berluti, Antoine Arnault sometimes entered the brand’s stores as a mystery guest, pretending to browse while listening to customers and watching how they handled products. In a 2014 Forbes interview, he explained that he wanted to observe what customers asked for, how they looked at shoes and how they wore jackets. “I pretend to browse, and I listen,” he said. He described the practice as his own form of market research.
That habit offers an early glimpse into how Arnault approaches leadership. Rather than treating a luxury house as a finished institution, he has repeatedly looked at how customers experience it, how its heritage can be extended and how its identity can remain relevant as expectations change.
Arnault’s career has moved across several parts of LVMH, from technology and communications to individual Maisons and group-level strategy. He founded an internet company in 2000 before joining Louis Vuitton and later becoming its communications director. He became CEO of Berluti in 2011, chairman of Loro Piana in 2013, and CEO and vice chairman of Christian Dior SE in 2022. Since February 2026, he has also been a member of the LVMH Executive Committee, while continuing to oversee image, communication and sustainable development at the group.
The significance of that career path lies in the different leadership problems attached to each role. At Louis Vuitton, Arnault worked in communications. At Berluti, he was responsible for developing a historic shoemaker. At Loro Piana, he worked with a house whose appeal rested heavily on materials and craftsmanship. At the group level, his responsibilities now include communication, image and environmental initiatives. Across those roles, the pattern is less about preserving tradition for its own sake and more about deciding how tradition can continue to work in a changing market.
Starting with the customer
Arnault’s instinct to observe customers directly became particularly visible during his years at Berluti. His store visits at Berluti offer one of the clearest examples of his decision-making process. Rather than relying exclusively on formal research, he described observing customers directly and listening to their reactions inside stores. He paid attention not only to what people bought but also to their questions, the way they examined products and how they wore them.
He also linked those observations to a change he was seeing among male luxury consumers. In the same interview, Arnault said customers had become more attentive to detail and wanted products that could remain relevant beyond a single season. At Berluti, he said he wanted clothing that customers could wear for years rather than products tied closely to one season’s fashion.
His observations reveal how closely he wanted to stay to the customer experience while making decisions about the brand's products and positioning. Arnault was using customer behavior to inform how the house approached product design and longevity. The method shows a preference for staying close to the point where a luxury product meets the customer.
Heritage is an asset, not a museum piece
Arnault’s treatment of heritage is one of the clearest threads through his career. He has approached heritage as something that can support change rather than prevent it.
Berluti became an important test of Arnault’s approach to change. In 2011, he became CEO of the historic shoemaker while Alessandro Sartori was appointed to develop its new direction. Contemporary coverage described plans to move Berluti beyond footwear into a broader menswear house while retaining its established expertise in leather and shoemaking.
Arnault explained the thinking behind that move in an interview with The Guardian in 2012. He said Berluti had a distinctive quality in its shoes and that he wanted to take that character into menswear. The house subsequently moved into ready-to-wear alongside its footwear and leather goods. The underlying leadership decision was about identifying which elements of the brand were non-negotiable and which could evolve. That distinction is particularly important in luxury, where history is part of the value proposition but cannot by itself determine what a contemporary customer wants.
The decision illustrates a specific form of leadership: expanding the expression of an established brand while using its existing capabilities as the foundation. It was not a decision to discard Berluti’s history. It was an attempt to make that history relevant to a wider product proposition.
That balance later became explicit in Arnault’s comments about the house. In 2023, he described a strategic reset at Berluti that involved moving away from a more fashion-driven approach and returning to the house’s roots. Vogue Business reported that the brand had shifted in 2021 to a studio model rather than relying on a single star artistic director.
Choosing the right creative structure
The Berluti example also shows that Arnault’s strategy has involved organizational choices, not only product decisions. The move away from a single star designer toward a studio structure changed how creative responsibility was organized inside the house.
Arnault said the change represented a “return to our roots” and described Berluti as a house rather than a conventional fashion label. That distinction mattered because it placed greater emphasis on the brand’s established identity and craftsmanship when determining its creative direction.
For leadership, the example is notable because the solution was not simply to appoint another prominent individual. The company changed the structure through which creative decisions were made. That provides a concrete example of Arnault treating organizational design as part of brand strategy.
Make the invisible visible
Arnault also changed the way LVMH’s craftsmanship is presented to the public. In 2011, the same year he became Berluti CEO, he launched Les Journées Particulières, an initiative that gives visitors free access to workshops and other locations normally closed to the public. LVMH says the sixth edition, scheduled for Oct. 16-18, 2026, will involve 45 Maisons and 71 venues across 13 countries.
The strategy is straightforward: put the people and places behind the products directly in front of the audience. LVMH says the event is designed to showcase the savoir-faire of its Maisons and the people who embody it.
The format has also grown considerably. LVMH reported that more than 200,000 people attended the 2022 edition. That growth does not establish a direct commercial effect, but it does demonstrate that Arnault turned an internal capability, access to specialist workshops and artisans, into a recurring public platform.
Making communication part of the strategy
Arnault’s communications career at Louis Vuitton provides an earlier example of the same tendency. As the house’s communications director, he was involved in campaigns featuring figures including Mikhail Gorbachev, Catherine Deneuve, Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf and Keith Richards. In 2008, he explained that the selection of unexpected figures was intended to make people stop and pay attention to the campaign.
The leadership approach was to connect the brand with personalities whose stories carried meaning beyond conventional product advertising. The campaign therefore used the people themselves as part of the narrative surrounding Louis Vuitton’s heritage in travel and luggage.
That earlier communications work matters when viewed alongside Arnault’s later roles. Across different responsibilities, he has repeatedly worked on the question of how an established luxury house presents its identity to the outside world.
Put the brand into culture
Before taking on broader leadership responsibilities, Arnault spent years working on communication at Louis Vuitton. His campaigns featured figures including Mikhail Gorbachev, Catherine Deneuve, Andre Agassi, Steffi Graf and Keith Richards.
The choice of personalities was often less predictable than conventional luxury advertising. The objective was to connect the house with people whose own stories carried cultural meaning.
That approach later extended beyond advertising. Arnault was identified by LVMH as an architect of the group’s partnership with the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, which brought several Maisons into one cultural and sporting platform.
Berluti dressed athletes, Chaumet created the medals and Louis Vuitton produced trays and cases associated with the Games.
The partnership demonstrated another side of Arnault’s approach: a luxury group can express its heritage through contemporary cultural moments rather than keeping that heritage confined to traditional luxury settings.
Letting technology support the craft
Arnault’s early career in technology provides another thread in his approach. He founded an internet company focused on domain-name registration in 2000 before joining LVMH. Today, technology is being applied across the group in areas connected with production and customer experience.
At VivaTech 2026, LVMH presented projects involving artificial intelligence and craftsmanship. One Louis Vuitton system analyzes characteristics of leather and generates cutting suggestions that artisans can review before making the final decision. Loro Piana also presented an AI-supported textile project.
That distinction is important to the leadership question. The documented examples involve technology assisting specialist workers rather than removing the final human decision from the process. Whether such systems can expand without compromising quality or craftsmanship will depend on their technical performance and how individual Maisons integrate them.
Putting sustainability into the leadership brief
Since 2020, Arnault has overseen LVMH’s image, communication and sustainable-development initiatives. In 2025, he said the group needed to remain committed to environmental objectives and noted that sustainability considerations had become more integrated into operations.
The group reported a 55% reduction in direct greenhouse-gas emissions, covering Scopes 1 and 2, from its 2019 baseline by the end of 2025. LVMH also reported progress in biodiversity, recycled materials and indirect emissions under its LIFE 360 program.
These figures show the scale of the environmental work, but they do not remove the practical tension between sustainability targets and the requirements of luxury production. Materials, manufacturing processes, and global supply chains remain part of the operating model, leaving leaders to determine how environmental objectives translate into day-to-day decisions.
The strategy behind the style
Arnault’s leadership record is less about a single breakthrough than a sequence of deliberate choices. He observed customers directly at Berluti, expanded a heritage shoemaker into menswear, changed the creative structure at the house, opened private workshops to the public and used major cultural partnerships to put craftsmanship in new settings. His current responsibilities add technology and environmental strategy to that mix.
The common element is the way each initiative starts with an existing asset and asks how it can be presented, developed or organized differently. In Arnault’s case, those assets have included craftsmanship, heritage, customer knowledge, creative talent and the reputation of established Maisons.
His appointment to LVMH’s Executive Committee in February 2026 brings those responsibilities closer to the group’s central leadership structure. The next phase will test how effectively that approach can work as luxury businesses manage faster technological change, environmental demands and evolving expectations without weakening the characteristics that define individual houses.
For Arnault, the leadership challenge is increasingly defined by a difficult equation: how to make heritage useful for the future without turning it into something unrecognizable in the process.
