What Kering’s New CEO Reveals About the Future of Luxury — and Art
In The Business of Fashion, Luca Solca offers a sharp, unsentimental letter to Luca De Meo, the newly appointed CEO of Kering, who arrives from the automotive industry into the turbulent waters of luxury fashion. Having steered Renault’s strategic turnaround through his now-celebrated “Renaulution” plan, De Meo is expected to apply a similar mix of industrial discipline and visionary risk to Kering — a group currently burdened by high debt, lagging brand performance (especially Gucci’s 25% sales drop), and investor skepticism.
Solca outlines a clear roadmap: fix the balance sheet and fix the governance. Luxury, he argues, is no longer just about aesthetics or legacy; it is about strategic clarity, investor trust, and operational resilience. De Meo’s outsider status may well be his strength — but only if he can translate systemic thinking into cultural intuition.
This shift — from cars to couture, from torque to texture — resonates far beyond luxury conglomerates. It reveals a deeper, quieter movement already reshaping the art world: the end of disciplinary comfort zones. When a fashion empire taps an industrialist to reimagine its soul, we are reminded that leadership today is no longer about specialization, but about sensibility — the capacity to navigate complexity, to listen across silos, and to reframe decline as potential.
In the art ecosystem, too, we see institutions fatigued by old models: biennials recycling the same curators, galleries struggling to justify their overheads, museums trapped between blockbusters and bankruptcy. What if, like Kering, they looked beyond their own industry for answers? What if curators were selected not only for taste, but for systemic intelligence? What if the next museum director came not from academia, but from gaming, climate strategy, or logistics?
De Meo’s appointment invites us to imagine a new kind of cultural stewardship — one that does not fear friction between worlds, but draws strength from it. After all, the great works of art, like the great turnarounds in business, often begin with a single bold reframe.
A Letter to Kering’s New CEO- Luca Solca
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