As promised, last Tuesday the LVMH group published its financial results for the first quarter of 2024. There were no surprises: while luxury demand slows down, the group's overall sales increased by 3%, and those of the division fashionable 2%. Although LVMH does not give individual figures, its CFO Jean-Jacques Guiony revealed that Louis Vuitton and Loro Piana have performed somewhat better than the rest; and that Dior, which held its Pre-Fall 2024 show in New York on the same day, was something worse.
Fans of Taylor Swift, who released The Tortured Poets Department yesterday, are not the only ones who have been assaulted by her ghosts this week. The lackluster results of the conglomerate have caused rumors to once again climb up the façade of 22 Avenue Montaigne, recovering the idea that John Galliano could work for LVMH again, and some already see him in the firm that bears his name. (If we take into account that Karl Lagerfeld worked for decades at the same time for Chanel and Fendi, it is reasonable to think that the Briton would not have to leave the position of creative director of Maison Margiela to become creative director of John Galliano).
Let Galliano's professional story have a third act at LVMH, charted publicly for the first time by Dana Thomas, author of Gods and Kings. Rise and Fall by Alexander McQueen and John Galliano (Superflua), has taken different forms, until reaching the circle (or circles) that would close all the circles. In other words: for Galliano to once again become creative director of Givenchy, where he began his rise in 1995; or that Galliano will once again become creative director of Dior, where he was fired in 2011 after videos of his violent and anti-Semitic attacks on the terrace of La Perle became public. More unexpected script twists have been seen.
From rumors that fly up the walls to whispers heard around the corners: Are the Wertheimers, owners of Chanel, planning to purchase the Prada Group through their family office Mousse Partners? The possibility of such a thing, pointed out by the newspaper Il Giornale last January, would guarantee the future of Prada after Miuccia Prada. The group has a market capitalization of 20 million dollars, to which should be added the figure that the designer and her husband Patrizio Bertelli consider fair and necessary.
Meanwhile, the firm has shown these days how well agreements between luxury brands and athletes work: 24 hours after the appearance of basketball superstar Caitlin Clark dressed in Prada at the WNBA Draft, Launchmetrics estimated it at $419,000 the MIV or Media Impact Value, the platform's metric to calculate the value of engagement, the response on social networks. The photo posted by Prada alone generated $95,000 in MIV.
The audience loves to hate what they once loved, and these days the three videos that make up the series The Disastrous Demise of Kylie Cosmetics created by Nick Reardon have more than 10 million views on TikTok. In them, the content creator assures that Kylie Jenner is close to going bankrupt and, although it is an exaggeration, there is a part of the information that is true: her makeup is no longer selling as it was. Jenner launched Kylie Cosmetics more than a decade ago, and in these years, her life (she has gone from being the youngest of the Kardashian clan to being a mother of two children) and her appearance have changed a lot.
Nobody believes anymore that they can look like her just by using her products (something similar to what has happened to Jennifer Lopez with her line of creams), and she herself assured in an interview with The New York Times that she is in the process to “simplify” your image. The solution to this crisis may lie in perfume: After a double-digit drop in sales for most of the last year, online purchases of Kylie Cosmetics increased nearly 300% last month following the launch of the Cosmic fragrance , according to Earnest Analytics. Success is always a matter of smell.
