One of the world’s richest men Bernard Arnault, CEO of luxury conglomerate LVMH, was spotted at President Trump’s inauguration with two of his children, daughter Delphine and son Alexandre, as the business world speculates about the billionaire’s succession plan.
Arnault has been on a roll adding his children to the company board, harking back to the moves of media titan Logan Roy in HBO’s sensation Succession. Alexandre Arnault, 32, and Frédéric Arnault, 29, are the latest of the patriarch’s children to join the company’s dynastic lineup, after shareholders approved their nominations last April.
They join the ranks of their other three siblings in expanding control in LVMH’s empire—including the fresh-faced Jean Arnault, the head of Louis Vuitton’s watch division, who was born in 1998.
Who is Bernard Arnault and family?
The Arnault family carries with it a certain luster: They have monthly lunches at LVMH’s Paris headquarters to talk about the future of the family business. Bernard Arnault, who is worth $183 billion, has famously boasted that his children have to earn their place in the company. Apparently, all of his offspring are already deserving of their roles, which include Frédéric Arnault helming the LVMH conglomerate’s entire watch division, and Alexandre Arnault being the EVP of product, communications, and industrial at Tiffany & Co.
LVMH’s efforts to keep the business in family hands comes amid a tumultuous time for the luxury industry. But despite industrywide hardships, LVMH has been resilient, reporting record revenue in the first nine months of 2024. The company is valued at $354 billion.
LVMH and Louis Vuitton did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Who is Jean Arnault?
Jean Arnault, though he does not hold a position on the company’s board, has been involved in the family business since 2017, when he was a Louis Vuitton sales associate. After stints at McLaren Racing and Morgan Stanley—as well as a master’s degree from MIT in financial mathematics—the youngest LVMH scion returned to the company as the director of marketing and development for the watches division in August 2021, before taking the helm about a year later.
Created 20 years ago, Louis Vuitton’s watch division was meant to change the narrative of watch collectors not taking luxury jewelry brands seriously. Though Louis Vuitton originally sold more affordable luxury watches in larger volumes, Jean Arnault has made significant changes to the brand’s business model in his short tenure, including limiting the Louis Vuitton stores that stock watches as well as retiring a number of watches from the brand’s collection. In 2023 he relaunched the brand’s Tambour line and crafted just one watch in the model made of the rare metal tantalum. The brand also made 10 watches in collaboration with Rexhep Rexhepi with an eye-popping price tag of $497,000.
Arnault’s changes mean that a Louis Vuitton watch will cost $20,000 on average, a fivefold hike from today. These choices differentiate it from LVMH’s other watch brands, including legacy brands TAG Heuer, Hublot, and Zenith, and represent a focus on profound craftsmanship and exclusivity above all else—even profit.
“We’re not going to make a ton of money with this,” Arnault told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not going to be highly profitable at all, but it’s really about making sure that we switch the message completely.”
Gen Z luxury market
Despite tapping a twenty-something to run its watch division, Louis Vuitton’s ambition for its watches has not yet struck a chord with the Gen Z demographic Arnault fits into. LVMH may be weathering the luxury slowdown storm as a whole, but its watches and jewelry division reported a 5% dip in the first nine months of 2024 to $7.8 billion.
Gen Z consumers have largely turned away from luxury goods, due to their disinterest in prestige and status in favor of sustainability. Others fear that the economy will force them to cut back on discretionary spending.
“If a recession happens, then I will 100% buy less or maybe even stop buying altogether,” luxury lifestyle influencer Jeffrey Huang, 28, told Reuters.
The stakes run higher for luxury brands to appeal to this picky audience, as Gen Z accounts for 20% of the luxury market and climbing.
Growing a young consumer base
However, there is a pocket of young people who share the old guard’s interest in watches. Though the vast majority of Gen Z may not be status-obsessed, social media has proliferated information about collector watches and spawned aesthetic-centric trends like the “mob wife”—derived from The Sopranos, where antihero Tony Soprano’s wife, Carmela, is often seen with gold-clad wrists.
“Today we see a younger and younger demographic that is much more informed than their counterparts used to be,” watch collector Anish Bhatt told Fortune. “They’re much more knowledgeable, they understand the value of watches, [and] they also understand the status that it gives them.”
LVMH has tried to grow its Gen Z audience beyond the niche watch collectors. In 2021 it took over a 60% stake in Off-White LLC, the trademark of designer Virgil Abloh—the artistic director of Louis Vuitton men’s and a beacon for Gen Z audiences, who died later that year. A year later, LVMH and venture capital firm Antler gave Heat, a streetwear mystery box company beloved by Gen Z, $5 million in seed funding to expand its reach.
While the company experiments with capturing the attention of youth, Jean Arnault is keeping with a philosophy as traditional and conservative as the watch-collecting industry as a whole: Luxury watches remain almost exclusively for the ultrawealthy.
Whether Arnault’s vision aligns with the direction of the conglomerate and resonates with consumers remains to be seen. But as in the iconic television show the Arnault family resembles, there’s risk that even the prestigious family name won’t guarantee Jean Arnault’s ascendance.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on April 22, 2024. Hallie Steiner contributed updates on Jan. 21, 2025.
