Beccari (Louis Vuitton): 'Fashion, food, art, home: we always want to be there'

Proud of his Italian, or rather, Parma origins, and happy with Parma's promotion to Serie A. Not least because Pietro Beccari, born in 1967, is now president and CEO of the world's best-known and largest high-end brand, but he could (and would) have become a football player, alongside Fabio Cannavaro, for a time a companion on the field and later a brotherly friend. Beccari remains attached to the city where he was born and raised, true, but he is perfectly at home in Paris, as he is when he travels the world, following the example and further extending the vision that two ceos who preceded him, Yves Carcelle and Michael Burke, from whom he says he learnt a great deal about Louis Vuitton, had. But - as is only right - the disciple can be said to be surpassing the masters. Almost forced to do so, we might add, because the high-end is changing fast, the world too. To remain the biggest brand of the world's largest luxury group, Lvmh, Beccari has to enhance everything that belongs to the history of the maison (which began in 1854), but also invent new things or new ways of doing things.

A month after your appointment as ceo, you chose Pharrell Williams as creative director of the men's collections. A bold first move, which a year and a half later proved to be the right one. At the end of 2023, she confirmed Nicolas Ghesquière, who had been creative director of the women's collections for ten years, for another five years. How do you reconcile the two stylistic souls of Louis Vuitton?.

The clothing and accessories collections, the fashion shows we organise in Paris and around the world, the space that ready-to-wear and handbags and small leather goods have in shops show how important these two components of the Vuitton universe are. Nicolas and Pharrell are at the heart of everything and their success is undeniable, just look at the figures. But what makes me most proud is the happy coexistence of these two "creative wizards" in the Vuitton world, the freedom they have to find collaborations with artists and the osmosis we have managed to create with other maisons, letting Nicolas and Pharrell's talent "blow" elsewhere. I am thinking of the jewellery created by Pharrell for Tiffany and, for capsules, the one for women with the young Chinese artist Sun Yitian.

Nice is the image that creativity spreads like the wind within Vuitton. What are the other projects?

We look around and new ideas keep coming to us. We want to improve, to discover unexplored areas, with optimism. I see Vuitton's present and future as a natural and necessary evolution at the same time, stemming from the intrinsic strength and values of the house. There is no category where we cannot identify a Vuitton "road", unleashing internal creative energies and satisfying our customers' desires, or making them discover pleasures big and small, making their lifestyle slightly different or maybe just more fun. Or responding to everyday needs, such as furnishing a home.