Fight FOR SUCCESSION: They all perform for the world’s richest man’s empire

Around a lingering lunch with a friend just off the Champs-Elysees, Bernard Arnault, head of the £354 billion LVMH luxury goods empire — and by some length now the world’s richest person — was questioned which of his young children he saw as his possible successor. 

The inscrutable Arnault fixed his acquaintance with an apologetic smile and, spreading his palms, replied: ‘Well, I have five . . .’ right before his voice tailed off. 

And in current a long time, that enigmatic reaction has been the closest the guy dubbed ‘a wolf in cashmere’ has appear to addressing a most enthralling and glamorous inheritance saga that has kept the chic salons of Paris aflame with gossip. Will it be his 45-12 months-aged son Antoine, extended assumed to be the frontrunner? Or his eldest child Delphine, 47, who has just been promoted over her brother’s head? 

Arnault’s eldest youngster Delphine (pictured), 47, has just been promoted more than her brother’s head

What helps make this Succession-style story so intriguing — as with the fictional tale of the Roy media dynasty in the backstabbing Tv set drama — is that all 5 children from Arnault’s two marriages are utilized in the relatives business enterprise. 

A ruthless wheeler-dealer and tough employee, he has normally expected his offspring to be the very same. Antoine, elevated to vice-chairman and billed with jogging the keeping organization that controls the haute couture-to-champagne conglomerate, would seem to be to be the organic successor to his father. 

Handsome, outgoing and married to a Russian supermodel, Natalia Vodianova — aka Supernova, who was previously married to property-owning London aristocrat Justin Portman — it was poker-taking part in Antoine who has always appeared the most confident in the environment of large-finish vogue and luxury marques. 

Among its several brand names, the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy group — LVMH — controls jewellers Tiffany and Bulgari, watchmaker Tag Heuer, the unique Chateau d’Yquem Bordeaux winery and style labels Givenchy, Fendi, Celine, Stella McCartney and the most significant prize of all, Christian Dior. 

Arnault likes to retain the marketplaces — and rivals — guessing at his intentions as a lot as loved ones users. It is his unpredictability as nicely as his buccaneering design that final month noticed his individual prosperity eclipse that of Elon Musk, beforehand the world’s richest person. 

His decision the other working day to unveil his only daughter, Delphine, as head of Dior, LVMH’s second-premier model, not only provoked gasps at board amount in France’s snooty couture market but fired the starting off pistol on the world’s most irresistible (and probably most risky) contest to see which of the Arnault offspring succeeds to turn into not just the new king — or queen — of style but potentially the richest particular person on the planet. 

Antoine, elevated to vice-chairman and billed with jogging the keeping business that controls the haute couture-to-champagne conglomerate, would seem to be the all-natural successor to his father

No surprise there is lip-smacking anticipation at what Luca Solca, an analyst at Wall Avenue investment decision agency Bernstein, suggests threatens to be a ‘Darwinian contest’ among Arnault’s kids. 

Arnault v Arnault? Surely not in this close-knit loved ones, which traces its gilded roots again to Bernard’s outstanding choice to diversify his father’s strong but unexceptional building firm into textiles.

As a result of corporate acquisitions, he at some point took manage of Christian Dior, laying off 9,000 workers and earning the nickname ‘The Terminator’. 

Several years of enlargement adopted, with at any time more famed names procured — such as Kenzo, Marc Jacobs, Loewe, Loro Piana and the perfumer Guerlain, to identify but a couple — and when there ended up once in a while hostile company takeover upsets, the Arnault title reigned supreme. 

Now he has set one of his young children in cost of an legendary LVMH manufacturer for the initially time, the landscape has instantly changed. 

The timing has been fortuitous — for Delphine. As Paris Vogue Week unveiled a single eye-popping development soon after yet another, she has been just about just about everywhere. 

Just days after her unveiling, she was front row — obviously — at the Dior runway show, alongside David Beckham, his youngest son Cruz, actor Eddie Redmayne and his publicist wife Hannah, the Twilight star Robert Pattinson and product Karlie Kloss.

CEO of LVMH Bernard Arnault (R) and Helene Arnault pictured together 

Was this an early statement of intent from Dior’s new CEO that she way too, thank you pretty much, is just as considerably at relieve as her brother amongst the movie star elite? Observers may search askance at the family’s tremendous function ethic, but it appears to be created into their DNA. 

Antoine was 14 when his youthful brother Alexandre was born, but he sent him a notice reading: ‘Dear Alexandre, I hope that your beginning went perfectly, and that you are all appropriate. I recommend you to begin doing work proper absent for the reason that normally . . .’ 

Antoine printed this unfinished take note on his Instagram account very last 12 months. How severe was it and what does it convey to us about sibling rivalry and loved ones ambition? No a person is stating. 

So for now, or at the very least till her father decides his up coming shift, all eyes are on divorced Delphine — in excess of 6ft tall in her LV heels — who has inherited her father’s air of inscrutability. 

It was prompt past 7 days that investors ‘do not have a superior really feel for her’. Others cattily explained her unexpected elevation to main executive of Dior as ‘a very little current from Daddy’. 

But designers and vogue men and women alert towards underestimating her. Like her father, Delphine has a behavior of paying out surprise visits to the company’s outlets immediately after several hours. 

Also, like him, she has an eye for a strike higher-finish handbag, a person of LVMH’s core merchandise (she continue to has a single she received for her 18th birthday). When employees at the flagship Vuitton retail store in Paris have been finalising a collaboration with Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama before this month, Delphine labored right until close to midnight examining and high-quality-tuning the window shows. 

She has also inherited her father’s organic authority and directness, skills she needed when dealing with the fallout from the John Galliano scandal in 2011. 

The British designer was caught on digital camera insulting a group of Italian women of all ages with anti-Semitic slurs all through a drunken rant in a cafe. 

In the uproar that adopted — Galliano was filmed telling a lady he assumed was Jewish that he loved Hitler and that her mothers and fathers ought to have been ‘gassed’ — he was suspended and afterwards fired as Dior’s innovative director. 

A senior figure at LVMH advised the Mail pointedly: ‘Monsieur Arnault has four sons but Delphine is the golden boy or girl correct now.’ 

Parisians are loving the thought of the unexpected marketing of the willowy blonde for its parallels with HBO series Succession, in which the only daughter of tycoon Logan Roy, Shiv, is surprised when she becomes favourite to consider more than the empire. 

But Arnault, the patriarch, has constructed a dynasty a lot more glamorous and infinitely richer than the fictitious Roys. 

Arnault lives in a 12-bedroom 18th-century pile not considerably from the Arc de Triomphe. His fortune is documented to top rated £170 billion. He has a chateau at Rambouillet in the Ile-de-France area, where he weekends with his 2nd spouse, Canada-born classical pianist Helene Mercier. 

They preserve a menagerie of animals which include chickens, sheep, donkeys and canines. There is also a villa close to St Tropez and a personal island in the Bahamas. There are other properties in New York, Miami and St Barts in the French West Indies. 

Just one by one, all his young children have joined the business enterprise, wherever they get the job done in different divisions of their father’s empire including Frederic, 28, who operates Tag Heuer

Arnault also owns the Nyn Park estate in Hertfordshire and when the family ski in the Alps at modern Courchevel, they continue to be at their have deluxe resort, the five-star Cheval Blanc. 

A single by just one, all his kids have joined the enterprise, in which they work in numerous divisions of their father’s empire. 

The youngest, by wife variety two, basically adopted in the footsteps of Antoine and Delphine. As perfectly as the aforementioned Alexandre, now 30, who is communications manager at Tiffany, there is Frederic, 28, who runs Tag Heuer and Jean, 24, the marketing head of Louis Vuitton watches. 

As with all the Arnault clan, Delphine has faced accusations that she is just a different item of nepotism — a lot more crudely a ‘nepo-baby’ — whose profession has benefited in no smaller way from family connections. These small children dominate French marketplace, over and above LVMH and cosmetics business L’Oreal. 

Various significant firms, which includes telecoms giant Bouygues and the Pinault family’s Kering group — proprietor of Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga — are operate by dynasties. 

There is usually a diploma of resentment in opposition to these types of family members, not minimum simply because of their shut one-way links to serving French presidents. Nicolas Sarkozy invited Bernard Arnault to be his ideal male when he made product Carla Bruni his 3rd wife at the Elysee Palace in 2008. 

And Sarko was among the visitors when Delphine married her first spouse, Italian wine heir Alessandro Gancia, in 2005. 

Antoine was 14 when his younger brother Alexandre (pictured) was born

Galliano made the gown and Karl Lagerfeld took the pictures. But the union did not final and the few ended up divorced 5 several years afterwards. 

All the exact same, Delphine’s political antennae appear to be as acutely adjusted as her father’s. She is a close mate of President Macron’s wife Brigitte, who is dressed by Louis Vuitton, though ‘she always returns the apparel after use’. 

And the Macron link goes back again significantly farther. The president’s wife taught Arnault’s two youngest sons French at the Franklin lycee in Paris. 

It was when she was educating at another Franklin lycee, in Amiens, northern France, that Brigitte was stated to have seduced the younger Emmanuel Macron. 

Like her father, Delphine also life in luxurious design and style. Her primary dwelling, where by she life with her husband or wife, tech billionaire Xavier Niel, and their two young children is a duplicate of the Petit Trianon at Versailles, finish with swimming pool and extensive gardens. 

There is also a £16 million summertime residence on the French Riviera. The primary Petit Trianon is the neoclassical mansion that King Louis XVI gave to his Queen Marie Antoinette as a 19th birthday present and which she turned into her retreat.

(L-R) Frederic Arnault, Delphine Arnault and Jean Arnault attend the Louis Vuitton Womenswear Spring/Summer season 2022 clearly show

Pampered gals like Delphine Arnault are routinely likened to the sick-fated Marie Antoinette in treacherous style circles — but in fact there is no comparison.

Delphine is whip-intelligent. Soon after small business faculty in distinctly unfashionable Lille, France’s coalmining district, she researched in the U.S. and at the London School of Economics and worked for management consultants McKinsey in advance of signing up for her father’s business, exactly where she begun in shoes at Dior and then graduated to leather-based goods. 

In modern many years, she has had a hand in using the services of creative administrators who have wowed the manner crowd: Raf Simons at Dior and Jonathan Anderson at Loewe. 

Delphine seldom provides interviews, but in a moment of introspection she when admitted it was fortunate that the relatives empire was about vogue, fragrance and cosmetics: ‘If my father experienced owned a tyre organization, I really do not know what I would have finished,’ she mentioned. 

Like her father, she shares a enthusiasm for art gathering. She sits on the board of the hip Gagosian gallery together with Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, a relatives buddy. Is all this heading to be adequate for this most exquisite of crowns to be hers? 

In accordance to spouse and children buddies, Delphine is her father’s daughter. ‘There is a distinctive bond — she is his only daughter and the eldest,’ says Sidney Toledano, from whom she learnt the luxurious ropes. 

‘She has a sturdy temperament and can be direct with him.’ 

For all the Succession-style manoeuvring, 1 question stays: does Bernard Arnault, who will be 74 in March, truly want to stand apart? 

Last 12 months, company bylaws elevated the company’s retirement age from 75 to 80. 

So what about his successor? As he instructed that lunchtime friend of the competing promises of his kids: ‘They all have a little something of me.’ Delphine, in the meantime, will be hoping she has just that tiny little bit far more.