Paris, that most presentable of capitals, is being polished before it hosts the Summer Games. Around the Champs-Élysées, where some of the benches date to the 1850s, the seats are getting a new layer of paint before an estimated 15 million visitors arrive to scuff them up again. High on the steps of the National Assembly, I watch as workers fuss with temporary statues of Olympians, lowering them into place with cranes. France no longer has a monarch or a royal family, but some say it gets close in the form of Bernard Arnault, owner of the luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH, and his five children, each of whom oversee a part of their father’s empire. The Arnaults and LVMH are closely involved in the coming Games, major sponsors who mean to tempt those millions of visitors (and upwards of 1 billion more viewing on TV) with fine handbags and belts, fragrances and jewels, a whiff of LVMH’s trademark savoir faire. A former editor of Vogue France, Carine Roitfeld, has agreed to collaborate with LVMH and the Arnaults, designing tuxedos for opening night. Just outside Paris, in a private workshop run by Louis Vuitton, one of LVMH’s luxury brands, artisans are making trunks to house the tournament’s medals.
A gentle bock-bock-bock of mallet on wood serves as a hypnotic soundtrack to the work. It’s late in March: less than four months to go before the Games begin. Despite the deadline, production is measured and stately. Wearing smocks or cardigans, wielding slide rules, chisels, scalpels, hairdryers, and rattling boxes of tacks, the artisans here have the cool of craftspeople who’ve been asked to respond to all sorts of whims over time. Vuitton became an immortal name in France through the manufacture of brass-cornered trunks, trunks adapted to meet the demands and dreams of wealthy customers, trunks designed to cradle: handbags, watch collections, writing desks, even the World Cup. During the tour, I’m told they won’t build anything for the storage of corpses (they’re sometimes asked to) or for weapons (except for the occasional hunting rifle), but there have been trunks designed to become walk-in golf lockers, trunks that contain foldaway beds.
The trunk being built this day for the medals will be tall and wardrobe-like, clad in monogrammed canvas, its interior lined with black leather. Passing into the part of the workshop where it’s being made, I’m met by smells of wood chip, glue—and over at the workbench where they will sew on the fat leather handles…is that honey? Someone explains. The thread they’re using is slathered by hand with beeswax. I watch the slow assembly of a single padded drawer, inside which a set of gold, silver, and bronze medals will rest. The padding looks as comfortable as my seat on the inbound Paris train. As for the medals themselves, they were made to designs drawn up by an LVMH-owned jeweler, Chaumet, each to contain a lug of iron extracted from the Eiffel Tower.
All of this is exceptional, this convergence of luxury and a sprawling, sweaty event like the Olympics. At Tokyo 2020, medals were carried about on recycled trays that strongly resembled those molded plastic dishes for coins you find on public buses. When Princess Anne unveiled the medals for London 2012, she did so out of a tired-looking briefcase. Olympic sponsors tend to have a utilitarian flavor: banks, beers, e-commerce, pharma, sportswear. One sponsor of Beijing 2008 was the State Grid. Paris 2024 has felt different from the start. Last year, when LVMH announced what was termed a “creative partnership” with the Paris Games, the news was presented by Bernard Arnault’s son Antoine, who stood in front of very tall windows with an unimpeded view of the Eiffel Tower behind him, the Parisian sky sulky and dramatic.
In the very busy months since, LVMH has lent in-house talent to vivify these Olympic and Paralympic Games—while also reportedly contributing around $160 million to the organizers’ budget. Every Olympics ends up telling a story about their host nation, whether by intention or not. Beijing 2008 was China’s fist on the table: We’re here, we matter. London 2012 was about the British tremulously (and, as it turned out, fatefully) rediscovering a jingoistic pride long subdued. Under the stewardship of LVMH and the Arnaults, we can expect Paris 2024 to live in history as the better-dressed Olympics, the cork-popping, leather-lined, beeswax-scented Olympics. But what will LVMH and the Arnaults receive in return for the loan of their eye, their taste, that industrious bock-bock-bock of their artisans?
With the opening ceremony fast approaching, I have coaxed my way close to the company in order to see some of the workings of its Olympics operation. I want to understand what happens when the particular sensibilities of high-end retail and high-end sport come together with a crunch. Of course, there have been flirtations between these two distinct worlds in the past. Back at the 1992 Barcelona Summer Games, for instance, the designer Issey Miyake helped kit out Lithuanian athletes in pleated silver tracksuits. Later, at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, Eiko Ishioka outfitted competitors from numerous nations. Ralph Lauren has helped equip the American team since 2008. But never has the collision between coveted luxury goods and enviable athletic talent been so pronounced. Nor, perhaps, has it ever been more intriguing.
Roitfeld came into this clueless, she tells me. Never a flag-waving patriot, the magazine editor turned stylist says she was invited to an appointment with LVMH and one of its brands, Berluti, without knowing she was being eyed as a possible outfitter of Team France. “It was like a blind date,” says Roitfeld, who decided to put aside a general distaste for uniforms and lend her help. She came up with an idea for a navy tuxedo jacket that athletes of any size could wear over an open-necked shirt. She explains that there is an element that’s fundamental to the French mode of dress (indeed, the French mode of being) known as décontracté, which, as Roitfeld translates it, is a brilliant paradox: “Not too much. Not enough.”
Cool and disheveled herself in a boxy white T-shirt, half sitting, half lying on a couch as she talks, Roitfeld shows me a photo of some smiling young athletes wearing the finished suits and shoes. Their lapels are vertically striped with the red, white, and blue of the tricolor flag, but otherwise these fencers, boxers, and climbers could be bound for sundown cocktails instead of a grand sporting extravaganza. Roitfeld says that throughout her creative process she kept Antoine in mind as a model Parisian, someone whose vibe she hoped to capture in the finished uniform. “You have to think about someone,” she says, “and I thought about the chic of Antoine.” Come the opening ceremonies, members of Team France will know they are being dressed by LVMH, and, maybe less so, that they are wearing the distilled essence of an Arnault.
I first catch sight of Antoine himself at a cocktail party. A behind-closed-doors event, it is staged in one of the many buildings around the capital that is owned or occupied by LVMH. A set of medals has been lent by Olympic organizers so that staff can get a closer look. Jazz plays. Glasses of LVMH’s own Moët are passed around. Scented candles, Vuitton-made, burn at a rate of what I estimate to be a buck a minute. Antoine, “very long and very skinny,” as Roitfeld describes her friend, has a bowl of dark hair and wide, sympathetic eyebrows. I watch him circulate before he steps away to lean on an antique pool table, quietly rehearsing the lines of a speech.
Antoine often acts as spokesperson on behalf of the larger family: 75-year-old figurehead Bernard and siblings Delphine, the 49-year-old CEO of Dior, and Alexandre, 32, Frédéric, 28, and Jean, 25, who occupy senior positions at Tiffany & Co., LVMH, and Louis Vuitton Watches, respectively. As well as overseeing the Olympics partnership, the 47-year-old Antoine has various senior roles around the corporation, including running the family holding company Christian Dior SE. According to LVMH’s 2023 annual report, the family cumulatively controls over 48 percent of the company’s capital. By all appearances, Bernard has been careful about dividing the empire; as he gets older, an understated succession drama, more regal and royal than acid and Roy-ish, has been brewing. Nevertheless, the children are said to work together with remarkable comity. On an earnings call in 2022, when Bernard was asked by an investor if he had plans to retire, he told an oblique joke about his friend Roger Federer. The gap between their tennis games, Bernard implied, might close a little if he had more time to practice. But no. Most informed observers do not seem to expect Bernard to step down anytime soon.
At the cocktail party, an aide lowers the volume on the jazz. Before he speaks, Antoine has a moment by himself with the Olympic medals, pulling out gray spectacles from his pocket and inspecting them closely. He nods in apparent satisfaction. There’s applause as he gets up on a low stage to speak. Officially, this is an LVMH event, but we all know we are guests of Antoine and the Arnaults. The company is the family; the family is the company; “indivisible,” as the French newspaper Le Monde has put it, of Bernard and his corporation. Antoine commends the Games, which he describes as powerful and strong, immune, he seems to suggest, to a certain type of negativity, what he calls “this very French mindset of wanting to look at everything that could go wrong.” As he speaks of LVMH’s countering culture of positivity, of a company in constant forward motion, I think of its history—its scarcely believable financial successes over the past 20 or 30 years.
Back in 1984, Bernard was only another anonymous entrepreneur when he bought a conglomerate that included the textile group Boussac Saint-Frères, which at the time owned Christian Dior. With stunning chutzpah, he soon wrested control of other luxury brands, including the merged firms of Louis Vuitton and Moët Hennessy. Under the acronymic embrace of LVMH, Louis Vuitton became unstoppably profitable over subsequent decades, thanks in part to China’s growing affluent middle class. The pandemic over these last few years, ruinous in so many ways, gave the whole luxury industry a queasy charge. People spent a lot of money on luxury goods, including on goods from Louis Vuitton. By 2023 that brand had grown to account for something like half of LVMH’s earnings, according to the Financial Times. The same year, it was reported that LVMH had become the first European company to be valued at $500 billion. In charge of a preposterously valuable company, Bernard has become a sort of de facto head of state. In March of this year, he was awarded the highest honor available in France, the Grand-Croix de la Légion d’Honneur. Around the same time, he was enshrined by Forbes as the richest person in the world, his personal fortune estimated at over $200 billion.
What role could LVMH’s embrace of an Olympics play in the future of his soaring company, and in the legacy that Bernard leaves for himself in Paris? About a decade ago, he endowed Paris with an art museum, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and stuffed it with masterpieces and site-specific commissions from the likes of Ellsworth Kelly and Katharina Grosse. Nearby, LVMH’s renovation of a new cultural center is underway. “I’m not sure he has an ego,” I’m told by a former LVMH executive who worked with Bernard and his family for many years. “What makes me think he wants to be durable in history is that he’s invested in art…. It’s invaluable. It’s everlasting. And in the end, these people, maybe deep inside, they want not themselves but their achievements to be invaluable and everlasting.”
It would seem the deal to help fund an Olympics is far more ambitious than some personal vanity play. LVMH has grown to awesome, continental significance by expanding rather than narrowing its focus—a surprising and perhaps even revolutionary shift given that the luxury business has long been presumed to run on exclusivity. It’s an effort carefully overseen by a CEO with an exacting eye for detail and a proven track record for anticipating the shape and movement of the global luxury business that he helped create. One former executive speaks of Bernard as someone who will visit boutiques to inspect the arrangement of stock on the shelves, a CEO who keeps an eye on ad campaigns (“the narrative, the mood”), and who comes across as above all else a determined pioneer of expansion. “For the last five or six years, Mr. Arnault’s vision has been to diversify LVMH into categories where experiences matter: hospitality, restaurants, cafés, art galleries, culture—and, recently, sports.”
On a hellishly crammed weekday this spring, Antoine offers me his own perspective on the Olympics project. He answers my questions about the Games via email between a quarterly earnings announcement, an annual shareholders meeting, and the public unveiling of those team tuxedos that were designed with him in mind. These are busy days for the family, but the Arnaults have always inspired respect for the efficient way they get things done. They are mathematicians, musicians, tennis players, metaphorical jugglers. The younger siblings, Alexandre and Frédéric, like their father, graduated from France’s selective École Polytechnique, while Jean received degrees from MIT and Imperial College London. About this “wonder family,” as they were once called by Paris Match, you sense that if they really, really put their mind to it, they could enter the discus or the rhythmic gymnastic competitions this summer and place.
I ask Antoine about a particularly difficult juggle. As an important sponsor of the Paris Games, LVMH will be promoting rare and expensive luxury goods—goods that by design are not for everyone—at an event that prides itself on being closed to no one. Antoine says this way of thinking is stereotypical, by which I infer, he means wrong: “On the contrary, I believe that our sector and the Olympics have a lot in common. Not everyone can purchase a handbag from one of our [boutiques]. However, many people dream of owning one. The same goes for the Olympics. Not everyone can run the 100 meter in less than 10 seconds. However, many people dream of such a feat.”
Elite competitors have to be attentive to detail, he says. They have to be passionate pursuers of excellence. Naturally, LVMH wouldn’t mind being associated in people’s minds with those values. I ask Antoine if he feels an affinity with the competitors themselves. After all, the Arnaults are often praised for their strong work ethic, their intensity of focus. One former executive at LVMH tells me of the family: “Everything they do is so precisely prepared and usually superbly executed.” Antoine told a reporter at Vogue earlier this year that being a part of a prominent family means never being allowed to make mistakes. Any Olympian, trying to peak for one minute or one hour in the middle of a four-year cycle, must empathize.
“It would be presumptuous to offer [the athletes] advice,” says Antoine, who sees clear parallels between Olympic competitors and many of the experts his family employs, the craftspeople such as those I watched at work on the Louis Vuitton assembly line. There was a master sewer I met. He’d spent 40 years at Vuitton: Like a magician, he could thread a needle without looking, without even using the needle’s eye; he just ran its sharp tip through the middle of the thread in one brisk, blind motion. Antoine describes dexterity like this as “excellence of movement, after hundreds and thousands of repetitions,” an Olympian-level feat. “We’re not trying to make these Games luxurious or elegant, we’re trying to make them creative and bring our expertise to bear,” he says. “Creativity and experience are the cornerstones.” Of course, there will be your standard sponsor’s perks, chief among them opportunities for advertising at captive audiences. “We had to be able to offer products like Champagne. But this partnership goes much further.”
Last year, in a story about the family, The Wall Street Journal offered some insight into how the Arnaults make decisions, noting that they do so together as a unit, at a monthly lunch at LVMH headquarters. Dad brings a list of discussion topics on his iPad. The kids take turns to give their views. The lunch lasts exactly 90 minutes. So the Journal wrote. I ask Antoine if he can remember the meeting when the idea for a partnership with the Olympics first arose for discussion. “We did not just wake up one morning thinking of Paris 2024,” he says, pointing out that his family supported the city’s initial hosting bid almost a decade ago. “Admittedly, we weren’t in the news at the time, but we were an early supporter.” Still: LVMH didn’t reveal itself as a main sponsor until this time last year. “People were waiting for us to unveil our partnership as the [most] internationally recognized French company, and I understand that.” They took their time, he says, to get the terms of the partnership right.
There is a greening statue of Napoleon on the Place Vendôme that seems to be lifting its left foot toward the LVMH boutiques that dominate the southeast corner of this tiled shopping square. It looks to me as if the Little Corporal is ready to hop off his column and wander over to browse the bags and wallets in Louis Vuitton, the purses and raincoats in Dior…. These two jewels of an empire, Vuitton and Dior, seem to me to act as lures to bring shoppers across the square toward lesser known sellers that are also owned by LVMH, including Chaumet, the jeweler. A former executive at LVMH believes that during tenancy deals with shopping malls around the world, the enormous appeal of brands like Louis Vuitton and Dior can act as powerful bargaining tools. Another former executive tells me that while a brand like Vuitton might help other brands in the group secure better locations, the dynamic is more like a wolf pack, coordinating, sharing intelligence. LVMH’s partnership with Paris 2024 has, it would seem, elements of this strategy. Vuitton will hand--manufacture the trunks, including those that contain the Olympic torches. Dior is supposedly lending grace to the opening ceremony. Following behind these superbrands, it is the lower--profile Chaumet that will forge the medals. It’s Berluti bringing the tuxedos. Select collaborators from LVMH’s cosmetics retailer, Sephora, will carry the torch on its miles-long journey up to the French capital. “That’s the power of LVMH,” I’m told by one former executive, who believes that the superbrands nourish the less well-known brands in the portfolio. I mention how conspicuous LVMH’s presence is in Paris, even at the level of the bus stop ad. The executive laughs and says, seemingly joking but not joking, that Paris bus stops are “like a subsidiary of LVMH.” Or, as, Christian Billinger, an investor in LVMH, puts it to me: “The city is tattooed with this company. And Paris is a city that doesn’t like digital pollution, doesn’t like branding, doesn’t embrace corporatism. Which makes LVMH’s presence even more remarkable.” There will only be more of that presence come Olympics opening day, when millions are expected to visit, and billions more watch on from home.
Antoine concludes that the coming Games “will not be a poster for our brands,” nothing as garish as that. Instead, he insists, “They will be a showcase for our savoir faire.”
Parisians grow up with a sense of savoir faire in their bones. Or so I’m assured by Roitfeld, who explains, “When you are Parisian you always live with savoir faire, we have savoir faire everywhere, in the architecture, in the painting, in the fashion, you know?” The phrase refers to an almost cosmic sense of poise. But boy, does a spectacle like the Olympics have a way of testing poise. Roitfeld has been a witness to the bubbling anxiety. “Parisians are very angry, because the city is going to be more and more difficult to live in.”
I asked the master stitcher on the Vuitton assembly line whether he would be attending any of the Olympic events as a spectator. He replied he would try to leave the city instead. One former executive at LVMH tells me he will also flee before the Games begin, leaving Paris earlier this summer than he usually does. Just under half of Parisians, polled last fall, feel hostile to what’s coming.
Hosting the Summer Games in a busy, buzzing, living city will always be a difficult trick to pull off. Through July and August, great chunks of central Paris will shut to normal traffic. Prices will roughly double on the aging Metro. Earlier this year, staff at the Eiffel Tower went on strike, closing the capital’s crowning attraction for almost a week. Some perceived it as a warning shot. The government has since offered bonuses to state employees who agree to keep working through the crucial months of an Olympic summer.
The river Seine was meant to be rid of its floating waste and toxins so that Olympic triathletes could dive in on the opening weeks; but the promise was so ambitious, organizers recently conceded, that if the river is still too dirty, the swimming bit of the triathlon might be postponed or even abandoned.
Despite the influx of visitors, there isn’t blanket optimism about the fortunes of the city’s retailers this summer. One former executive at the group tells me he doesn’t expect to see a big increase in sales resulting from Olympic crowds. On an earnings call in April, an analyst at HSBC asked the CFO of LVMH, Jean-Jacques Guiony, about the impact the Games might have on sales. “It’s not a major boost to the business,” Guiony said of the Olympics. According to reporting in Le Monde, Guiony’s colleague at LVMH, the secretary-general Marc-Antoine Jamet, became upset when the city decided to pedestrianize the Rue de Rivoli: a decision that prevents coaches full of tourists from pulling up right outside an LVMH-owned department store.
As a powerful corporate player in the French economy, LVMH can sometimes make appeals to the French public when it feels misunderstood, even unduly criticized. After protesters briefly invaded LVMH’s headquarters last year, an ad ran that summer in a French newspaper, pointing out how many people were employed by the luxury industry. At the cocktail party I attended, Antoine used his speech to push back against some of the criticism leveled at his family’s company. He quoted a paragraph from the newspaper Mediapart (“I can’t help myself,” he said) in which it was pointed out that LVMH, in its patronage of individual French athletes, had picked only the best of the best. But what was LVMH expected to do, asked Antoine, associate itself “aux derniers de la course,” with those who finish last in the race?
The French are conditioned by history to feel especially keenly the difference between those finishing last and those winning the race. It will test all of the Arnaults’ savoir faire to get this part of the gambit right. I ask Antoine whether he thinks LVMH’s very public involvement in an egalitarian--minded event like the Olympics will help soothe tensions in his country, particularly around wealth inequality. “LVMH is one of France’s top private employers, both directly and indirectly,” he says, going on to talk about the corporation’s reputation at home and abroad as a signifier of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. “Along with many others, we are helping to ensure that [these] Games take place in the best possible conditions, with great pride and joy. That’s all that matters.”
Something else might be accomplished, too. Nick Kostov, a Wall Street Journal reporter who works the luxury beat from the paper’s Parisian bureau, has become a leading Arnault-ologist. “Luxury firms do not typically get involved in the Olympics,” he points out. “But there is a super--important reason why LVMH is involving itself. Because they need to show they are good, corporate contributors.”
Beside the corporate HQ on Avenue Montaigne, inside a structure of white stone that’s occupied by Dior, there is a discreet private apartment—the Suite Dior—that customers can move into for days at a time, shopping after-hours if they wish to. Nearby, at the Pont Neuf, LVMH reportedly spent millions last summer transforming the bridge into the elaborate stage for Pharrell Williams’s debut show as head of menswear at Louis Vuitton—a show attended by, among others, Zendaya, Lewis Hamilton, LeBron James, Rihanna, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The bedroom within a boutique. The busy bridge turned invite-only for a night. These are the misty upper peaks of LVMH’s massive empire, experiences that even exceed the reach of plenty of wealthy customers. Under other ownership this might have been the entire business model, speaking to and selling to the elite. A number of LVMH’s rivals in the luxury--goods game seem to do just that. However, the Arnaults have adopted a different strategy in recent years, and one of the reasons LVMH has grown lately is that it has opened up various points of entry for consumers at different levels. There are expensive things to buy, but also there are less rarefied ways to engage with the brands; from a tube of lipstick to a bite of lunch.
At the north end of the Pont Neuf, the company has opened a Louis Vuitton café. Across the road, there’s an LVMH-owned hotel. Sandwiched in between is the Samaritaine, a vast Art Deco department store that had been in disrepair for years before LVMH took it on as a salvage project. The Samaritaine sells products of all kinds—from brands inside and outside the LVMH family. But it’s the goods made by the LVMH brands that appear to me to occupy the choicest real estate, in sight of stair bends and in places of heavy footfall. During my visit, I noticed a clever funneling that tends to go on in these boutiques, the expensive belt or wallet near the door, the more expensive shoe or purse further in, the lovelier, pricier garment further still. As LVMH has grown, so has the wider end of its funnel. LVMH recently launched 22 Montaigne Entertainment, its foray in the film, TV, and audio business. And soon, the Olympics, perhaps the widest the funnel has opened yet.
On a sunny afternoon, I arrive to the northwest outskirts of Paris, where LVMH operates a leisure park for Parisians and tourists, an attraction complete with roller coaster and petting zoo. The suggestion seems to be that the luxury brands under this conglomerate’s stewardship should no longer be regarded as elite or off-limits, instead, as mainstream entities. The Summer Games will be the grandest display of that strategy yet, and both rivals and boosters of this company, industry commentators and investors, will be observing the implications closely.
Billinger, the LVMH investor, sees “an excursion into what you would expect from a fast-moving consumer goods company. Are they evolving into a Nike, almost?” He poses a hypothetical risk that I put to Antoine. Are Dior and Vuitton at risk of overexposure this summer? “We are a family of entrepreneurs,” Antoine answers, smoothly. “Where you see risks, we see opportunities.”
From the roller coaster in the leisure park, I can see the Eiffel Tower, under which athletes will soon muster for beach volleyball. Later I cross over the cobbles of the Place de la Concorde, where BMX’ers will soon jump tricks and basketball players will dunk on one another, three-v-three. I follow the curve of the Seine that will soon test runners in the middle phase of the marathon. It is a city getting ready, a city that has been and will keep being shaped by one family of entrepreneurs. I walk the length of the Champs-Élysées, passing number 101, a large Louis Vuitton boutique over which flies a tricolor flag adapted to include the brand’s famous monogram, and I end up at a couple of giant landmarks at the boulevard’s western tip. One is l’Arc de Triomphe, an established wonder of the world. The other is shinier, newer, somehow just as mesmerizing: a new Louis Vuitton structure being built at number 103.
While construction of the mysterious new project is underway, the site has been shrouded in imitation canvas and brass to make it resemble a massive Vuitton trunk. Silvery L’s and V’s on the side have been scaled to the size of phone booths. The corner pieces are taller than the tourists who step away to get the thing in one picture. Come July and August you’ll certainly see the trunk in aerial shots of the city. It is the Arnaults’ final, most brilliant coup of an Olympic summer, a rising luxury box, wide as a block, an invitation and an invocation to partake.
Tom Lamont is a frequent contributor to GQ and author of the novel ‘Going Home,’ which will be published next year by Knopf.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of GQ with the title “Let the Luxury Games Begin”
