Robert Williams

Kering has unveiled a multi-pronged strategy overhaul aimed at reviving sales and profitability across its brands. CEO Luca de Meo outlined manufacturing synergies, threw cold water on the group’s Valentino acquisition and shared some stealthy forecasts for Gucci’s growth as part of a sweeping strategy overhaul. Will it work? BoF’s Robert Williams (@robert.williams.writes ) does the analysis in this week’s High Margin newsletter. Read more and subscribe at the #linkinbio 📷 @kering_official , @gucci , spotlight/launchmetrics.com

Luxury bosses like Kering’s Luca de Meo are increasingly focused on tracking long-term “desirability” rather than short-term growth — adopting a term that's long been a favourite of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault. But ‘desirability’ is an intangible quality that's tricky to measure. Broadly speaking it refers to how many customers are aware of and desirous of a brand, and how intensely. AI is making it easier to poll the sentiment of online buzz, or to carry out and analyse customer surveys at scale. Companies can mix these data points up with operational metrics like full-price sell-through to create a “formula” for desirability. In the latest High Margin newsletter, Robert Williams (@robert.williams.writes ) explores the business of desire — and why it matters now, as luxury’s priorities shift. Read more and subscribe at the #linkinbio 📷 Spotlight/Launchmetrics.com

“We are living through the great blowing up of everyone’s spot,” said Robert Williams (@robert.williams.writes ) in BoF's latest High Margin luxury newsletter. The breakneck pace at which brands, products and styling cues are being spread via TikTok is both a blessing and a curse for luxury fashion: Products are more culturally legible than ever, but quickly lose their ability to signal status. Of course, going mainstream is nothing new. Should brands double down on legibility, or run the opposite direction? Read more at the #linkinbio

What's haute couture for? At Chanel and Dior, Matthieu Blazy and Jonathan Anderson both took their first steps in a particularly tricky genre this week, with each taking their own approach to balancing image-making, experimentation, preserving savoir faire and pleasing ultra-wealthy clients. Chanel was a masterclass in lightness and restraint. Dior's show was conceptual, theatrical, and probably trickier to wear—but still embedded some fresh ideas for how the house commercialises couture. Read more in BoF’s High Margin luxury newsletter by Robert Williams (@robert.williams.writes ) #linkinbio 📷 @chanelofficial , @dior

LVMH’s two biggest brands took radically different approaches this menswear season, tapping into fast-evolving ideas about taste and status. At @LouisVuitton , the "Loro Piana" effect was palpable as the brand's reconfigured leadership sent out a collection full of polite, timeless clothes which seemed to be addressing a fantasy of discreet, private wealth. @Dior went an entirely different direction with teased-out party wigs, sequinned tank tops and opulent Orientalist capes. The show’s narrative—about punks cosplaying as aristocrats while the aristocrats cosplay as punks—tapped into the ambient confusion about what “good taste,” luxury and status even mean today. Read more on the latest from Paris menswear week in BoF’s High Margin luxury newsletter by Robert Williams (@robert.williams.writes ) #linkinbio 📷 Spotlight/Launchmetrics.com

The materials at Chanel ss26 by @matthieu_blazy . Insane fashion witchcraft bringing this brand back to life. The tweed is beads or its trompe l’œil printed gabardine or knobby knotted yarn. Or its tweed but all natural , matte - no more flecks of petroleum lurex. The shredded silk embellishments throughout . We saw innovation narrative and JOY- bravo.

@Versace ’s invitation came in the form of an urgent love letter quoting Keats — an intriguing signal that the brand and its new creative director might defy expectations for a low-key, transitional debut. Soon, a presentation that had been downgraded over the summer from a full-on runway show to an “intimate event” became one of the season’s hottest tickets as Dario Vitale (@dario___vitale ) prepared to reveal his first collection for the iconic Italian brand. Louche installations including a bed made up with messy sheets, a slip-dress draped over a post-modern glass lamp and an unfinished game of computer solitaire were backdropped by the collection of religious paintings — harkening back to founder Gianni Versace’s libertine sensibility and fascination with Catholic and baroque aesthetics. “In this house, just like if you go to Gianni’s apartment in Via Gesu, it’s hard to tell what’s really ancient and what’s not. This idea of falso storico [faux historical] is such a topic to me because at a certain point you don’t really know: Is this new? Does it still look good?” Vitale said. The collection spanned crumpled cocktail dresses to skin-tight onesies to university-inflected sportswear — broadening its scope from the skimpy mermaid dresses of recent seasons to something more varied and more grounded in everyday life. Read the full report by Robert Williams (@robert.williams.writes ) #linkinbio 📷 @versace 🎥 @robert.williams.writes

CHIC DOGS BOOK SIGNING at LE BON MARCHÉ SATURDAY 3.8 4-6PM A few months ago I had the pleasure of writing the introductory text for Assouline’s new book about CHIC DOGS in art, history, fashion and pop culture. The book is very cute, very big and very full of dogs—beautiful dogs, pretentious dogs, art dogs, royal dogs, movie dogs. Chic dogs! I will be signing copies this Saturday afternoon at Le Bon Marché in Paris — come say hi DOGS WELCOME

“I’m so tired of everyone constantly equating modernity with simplicity,” @Schiaparelli ’s creative director Daniel Roseberry wrote in a note to guests Monday morning. Schiaparelli—hardly a bastion of minimalism at its most streamlined—opened Paris Haute Couture Week with a runway show that was more extravagant and baroque than ever. The palette—inspired by a collection of antique French ribbons, with ecru, coffee, peacock greens and chocolate buttercream—was a highlight. The collection featured an unabashed layering on of craft specialties, from embroidered padding to sculptural bustiers, to mother of pearl, ostrich feather and strass embellishments. “I guess my eyes were yearning for something very worked,” Roseberry said. “Our clients aren’t looking for anything too “real.” The show was positioned as a positive reinterpretation of the myth of Icarus—suggesting couture should embrace the urge—even the duty to push its craft and fantasy further each season, flying always closer to the sun. Kendall Jenner walked the show in a nude bustier with exaggerated hip pads and embroidered silk train. ✍️ @robert.williams.writes 🎥 @robert.williams.writes

On Sunday, @Jacquemus returned to Paris Fashion Week after five years of showing his collections off-calendar and mostly out of town. An intimate runway show in an Art Deco landmark—the penthouse apartment of architect Auguste Perret—saw the brand seek to burnish its luxury credentials. A black-and-white feather ensemble was supplied by Lemarié; an opera coat embroidered in gold brocade. Bags were rendered in intrecciato or ostrich leather. Throughout the show, references to early French couturiers like Paul Poiret were cross-pollinated with nods to early Hollywood, filtered through Jacquemus’ pop sensibility. Some more theatrically ladylike, retro-inflected looks might have made more sense at a distance. Inches from editors’ noses, one had to wonder why a brand which had staked its fortunes on breezy, contemporary sensuality would arrive at a white dress via dozens of darts hugging the model’s curves from thigh to bosom. Other looks injected a welcome dose of humour: Irina Shayk’s furry polka dots, or a silk tunic and skirt printed all over with Warhol-meets-couture bananas. Celebrities in attendance included #PamelaAnderson, #Tyla, #AudreyTautou, #KimHongJoong and #CarlaBruni. ✍️ @robert.williams.writes 🎥 @robert.williams.writes 📷 @jacquemus

Times have been tough for high-end fashion brands, and Stone Island is no exception, but chief executive Robert Triefus is feeling buoyant. Triefus has had to strike the right tone in order to fuel greater, more consistent visibility without disrupting the community-driven momentum the brand has long enjoyed: the customer tribes who wear Stone Island’s compass motif as a badge of honor — from Milan’s MTV-era spendthrift “paninari” in the 1980s, to football hooligans in the UK to American hip-hop fans during peak Drake — have all cultivated a counter-cultural allure for the brand. The brand’s first celebrity campaigns — lensed by David Sims and fronted by actor Jason Statham, musician Liam Gallagher, basketball pro Jalen Green, and DJ Peggy Gou (the brand’s first woman ambassador) — are the result of a lengthy effort “to understand who were the members of the community that could be most effective and authentic in allowing the credentials of the brand to be more visible,” Triefus says. Read the full story by Robert Williams (@robert.williams.writes ) about how Stone Island is balancing celebrity-fronted global campaigns and flagship stores in luxury shopping hubs with efforts to preserve tribal appeal. #linkinbio 📷 David Sims