LVMH Opens Doors to Berluti, Dior, Kenzo, Tiffany & Co., Louis Vuitton – WWD

PARIS — LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s doors opened to all once again.

After a four-year hiatus, the world’s largest luxury group’s heritage days returned worldwide from Oct. 14 to 16, adding new houses and events along the way. It’s the fifth edition of the Journées Particulières, which give a peek into its storied ateliers, allowing guests the chance to interact with craftspeople in all things luxury, from Champagne to fine jewelry.

“It is quite moving,” said Antoine Arnault, head of communication and image at LVMH, of the return to in-person events. He conceived of the days to showcase the houses’ inner workings over a decade ago and decided against holding a virtual event during the pandemic in anticipation of the day its ateliers could once again welcome visitors in person.

“Its all about sensory experience, and you don’t really get that on a screen,” he said. This year, a total of 93 locations in 15 countries from across 57 of the company’s maisons were opened, some for the first time, including Tiffany & Co.’s jewelry design and innovation workshop in New York City and Berluti’s bespoke tailoring workshop in Paris.

Tickets to visit those never-open-to-the-public places, along with visits to Dior and Louis Vuitton, were fully reserved in just three seconds. The rest of the 200,000 spots available were gone within six minutes. With the free reservation system full (“It’s one of the rare times where we we don’t sell anything,” joked Arnault), guests lined up as early as 5 a.m. each day for an inside glimpse into the brands.

For Arnault, the popularity of the event is the payoff of a gamble he took a decade ago. “It was a real challenge and bet when I had the idea and launched it,” he said. The first event welcomed 100,000 guests — now the three-day event has doubled in size. “It’s a gratifying success that my intuition was right. Since then it’s not easier because we at LVMH like to challenge ourselves and always try to do a little bit better, a little bit more and have a little bit of a challenging objective.”

This year’s event took six to eight months of planning, he said.

It’s a testament to the strength of the brands and their place in French — and global — culture. “We must do something right in terms of expressing the values, expressing where they’re from and what they stand for,” he said.

Arnault’s dance card for the event’s calendar was full. He began midweek with a pre-launch reception to open the newest Fendi atelier in Capannuccia, Tuscany, and visits to Berluti and Loro Piana ateliers in Italy.

The official launch took place on Oct. 13 at a splashy cocktail party at the conglomerate’s headquarters on Avenue Montaigne. Bernard Arnault, chairman and chief executive officer of LVMH, joined his son for a brief press conference, both wearing turtlenecks under their suits, which have become de rigeur as luxury brands turn down the thermostat amid a looming energy shortage in Europe.

The two men gamely skirted a question about their favorite LVMH brand, and posed for a photo with dozens of artisans from Chaumet, Berluti, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Broderies Vermont and Moynat, most of them dressed in white lab coats.

Then it was off to a marathon of events, including the Vuitton atelier in Asnières, a trip to the Champagne region to visit Moët & Chandon, Krug, and Veuve Clicquot, plus 25 other sites across Paris. “I don’t think I’m missing a single one,” Antoine Arnault said.

One of the highlights of the Paris locations was Chaumet’s newly revamped hotel particulier on Place Vendôme. It was opened to the public for the first time since undergoing a revamp in 2020.

Guests were welcomed in the opulent Salon Chopin with pianist Ionah Maiatsky tickling the ivories, before house archivist Michael Lepage led the group through a grand dining room done up in Chaumet’s signature deep blue by architect Patricia Grosdemange. A “fantasy dinner party” of sorts was set in grand Belle Époque style, including place settings for Edith Wharton, Gertrude Vanderbilt, Gustave Eiffel and Olga and Pablo Picasso — all of whom were clients of the house.

The grand display room was next, where the Radziwill tiara, famous for its seven diamond drops, and the Bourbon-Parma tiara were on display for the first time. The tour took in the archives full of leather-bound books and old correspondence, as well as a magical shadow puppet show before being welcomed into the workshop by manager Benoit Verhulle. He walked guests through the creation process with various craftspeople.

Original tools of wood and iron stood in the sleek white atelier, a stark contrast to today’s scientific microscopes and computer screens, which ensure precise measurements. Craftspeople put each piece together like a puzzle, and they demonstrated how they remake an object several times through paper, wax castings, and various metal versions before constructing the final piece.

Necklaces take one year to finish; tiaras, two. “The story of creation is part of the value,” said craftsman Didier Larue, as he explained the intricate steps for an extravagant headpiece for a private client. Other pieces were being prepped for the 2024 collections.

A group of university students walked by, part of LVMH’s outreach to young people in an effort to get them more interested in crafts as it faces a near constant shortage of skilled workers. The heritage days serve as a calling card of sorts.

“For our business to continue to grow, to be successful in a way that it can contribute to society, we need those younger generations to get interested in these metiers de les mains, these manual jobs, that are super interesting and probably not valorized enough,” said Arnault. “It’s not the first objective, but if it can be a collateral advantage, we’d love that.” He noted that some students who attended the first edition in 2011 now work for LVMH, crafting shoes and leather goods in its workshops.

LVMH’s sales have continued to soar, despite global economic headwinds. The company reported double-digit growth across divisions in results last week. Arnault credited the company’s heritage for allowing it to move forward.

“Our real strength is the fact that we have a very long-term horizon. Of course, we have to publish [financial results] every three months. However, we don’t decide our strategy in function of the next three months, but over the next three, five, 10, sometimes 30 years. It’s really something that you can feel inside the companies — there’s no short-term stress.” He framed it in terms of U.S.-based Tiffany & Co., which LVMH bought in 2021.

“They were always a bit out of breath because they always had to explain what they were going to do in the next quarter, and then justify what they did in the previous quarter. That’s not how we function, it’s really not very healthy for a company that should have time ahead to implement strategies,” he said. “The good thing about a group like ours is we have long horizon and we have the means to get these strategies implemented.”

Amid other LVMH brands taking part in the event, Kenzo welcomed close to 400 visitors to its Rue Vivienne headquarters. They were treated to a spacious, museum-caliber exhibition drawing links between the late founder, Kenzo Takada, and Nigo, the current artistic director, who has thrust the brand’s painterly florals, lively checks, layering, hats and Asian-inspired silhouettes into the present day.

Guided tours offered a close look at rare archival designs, including a clutch of short, padded kimonos from a 1983 collection and a one-of-a-kind, couture-quality wedding dress from a 1982 show that the founder composed from a stash of antique ribbons.

More than 60 outfits were displayed alongside show invitations, contact sheets, vintage magazine covers, fabric samples and video footage of a 1972 show at the then-derelict Gare D’Orsay.

Visitors learned about the founder’s fondness for cotton and hand-painted prints, including a poppy motif that Nigo reprised and remixed for his debut collection for fall 2022.

Kenzo’s headquarters house a ready-to-wear atelier numbering 15 people, with another 27 or so in the studio, who are apprised of the latest vintage acquisitions in order to glean inspiration from the prints and innovative cutting.

This year, which marks Sephora’s second time participating in Les Journées Particulières, the prestige beauty retailer flung open the doors of its headquarters in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

In the lobby there, visitors could explore an exhibition showcasing the company’s history and DNA, while a video playing overhead featured Sephora founder Dominique Mandonnaud.

Down a level, attendees could take part in one of three half-hour masterclasses, created by Sephora University, which were centered on either makeup, skin and hair care or fragrance. A spotlight was shone on Sephora’s private-label collection and the retailer’s cherrypicked selection of “Good For” products. These come in four categories: “good for recycling,” “a better planet,” “vegan” and “you.”

Sephora also showcased products slated for the end-of-year holiday period.

On iPads, it was possible virtually to personalize one of the brand’s four iconic products with various designs. The finished creations were then projected onto a big, rectangular screen. Sephora’s creative director will choose the three most imaginative ideas, and each will win a prize.

Simultaneously, Sephora organized happenings in some of its flagships in Paris, in the Champs-Élysées, Opéra and Saint-Michel neighborhoods. Others took place in Milan’s Corso Vittorio Emmanuele; Barcelona’s El Triangle; New York’s Fifth Avenue, and in Asia, Nanjing Road in Shanghai and Singapore’s Raffles City.

Each activation was designed for attendees to learn about Sephora’s background and have beauty advisers answer questions via guided tours and masterclasses.

It was the first time Tiffany’ s jewelry workshop in New York City was open to the public as part of the LVMH initiative. Housed in an office tower on West 23rd Street, it has a corporate aesthetic that Robert Downey Jr.’s “Iron Man” character would appreciate: modernist interiors; multiple monitors to magnify the work underway, and sleek stainless-steel machinery for molding, prototyping and other specific tasks. Visitors started their tours in a holding area, where the brand’s Knot and Lock jewelry was displayed.

Dana Naberezny, vice president and chief Innovation officer of the jewelry design and innovation workshop, or JDIW, noted it was created in 2018 and consists of a team of engineers, CAD designers, master craftspeople and quality professional. Prototyping and function are the focus for JDIW workers, whose objective is to turn designs into a reality with the best mechanisms. Once accomplished, manufacturers make them for the stores.

About 650 people secured time slots online to visit the workshop. Considering that part of Tiffany’s appeal has always been its mystique, there must surely have been debate about how much to show during the public tours or whether to participate. Naberezny offered, “You’re seeing existing products when you walk through here. I have a joke, ‘What happens in the JDIW, stays in the JDIW.’ We want to keep surprising customers so we’re not showing the newest of the new. But we are giving them that look at what we do and how we work. It’s a blend, right? It’s [a matter of] how do we make it really special for individuals to really understand Tiffany while also saving some surprises for later in the year.”

Passing through an engineering lab, a two-armed robot was testing the closure of a T1 bangle — a test that is done thousands and thousands of times to ensure it can withstand the normal wear-and-tear of a customer so that it can be passed on from one generation to the next.

As a reminder of the company’s heritage, which dates back to 1837, a wall in the main work space features Pop Art-ish lighting of a signature Tiffany box, an “&” and other emblems of the brand’s DNA. Next was the intriguing 3D Printing Lab, which stays a few degrees cooler than other areas to maintain the consistency of the wax that is used for prototypes of Knot bracelets and rings, and other articulated items for wear-testing and other functions.

Visitors were privy to the custom embellished sunglasses that Tiffany partnered on with Pharrell Williams earlier this year and the hefty necklace that Beyoncé Knowles sported in the latest ad campaign. Other tour attractions were the bejeweled pendants that are part of the NFTiffs.

Nearing the end of the tour, a few rows of people were immersed in their craftsmanship, whether that was molding a wax figure of Louis Comfort Tiffany or setting diamonds in one of Tiffany’s Schlumberger Sixteen Stone Ring.

“It’s a different kind of curiosity. It’s maybe less commercial,” added Arnault, of the guests who visit the ateliers to see a little bit of magic being made. “Of course, I preach for my companies, but I’m an advocate of continuing to dream.”

— With contributions from Miles Socha and Jennifer Weil in Paris, and Rosemary Feitelberg in New York.