Bernard Arnault, the world’s richest man, has picked his eldest child, Delphine Arnault, to run the luxury fashion house Christian Dior. Christian Dior is the second biggest brand in the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton luxury conglomerate. With her elevation, she will be the Chief Executive Officer and chairperson at Dior but will have to leave her previous position as a director and executive vice president of Louis Vuitton at LVMH. She will be replacing Pietro Beccari, who will head over to run Louis Vuitton.
The 47-year-old businesswoman has been serving in the group for over two decades now. She studied at the London School of Economics and the EDHEC Business School in Lille, and began her career with McKinsey & Company.
In 2000, she joined LVMH and got on the board of directors after a few years, becoming the youngest person and the first woman to do so. Her first stint at the company involved working under John Galliano, Dior's creative director at the time.
It was Delphine who minimised the fallout when Galliano went on an anti-Semitic and racist rant in 2011. Galliano was sacked almost immediately and Delphine was responsible for elevating his replacement, Raf Simons. She was credited with ensuring that Louis Vuitton was the fashion conglomerate’s biggest brand as she was responsible for all product-related activities.
“Under Delphine’s leadership, the desirability of Louis Vuitton products advanced significantly, enabling the brand to regularly set new sales records. Her keen insights and incomparable experience will be decisive assets in driving the ongoing development of Christian Dior,” her father Bernard Arnault said during the management reshuffle.
Despite ostensibly being the heiress to the fashion empire, Delphine’s management style is self described as “quite calm”. She has a hands-on approach to management, which includes regular visits to stores and meetings with designers. “It’s very difficult to manage a company and, at the same time, be very creative. I find that it’s our responsibility as leaders of a group to help them,” she told Financial Times in an interview.
Delphine is mostly a private person. After a highly publicised wedding in 2005 to Alessandro Vallarino Gancia, heir to the Italian winemaker Gancia, Delphine has chosen to stay away from the eyes of the media. The couple divorced in 2010 and Delphine has been with French billionaire Xavier Niel since. She and Niel have two children together.
