Dozens of houses, one owner. Fashion, leather goods, champagne, watches, jewellery, cosmetics — Bernard Arnault assembled LVMH into the largest luxury group in the world, and for stretches one of the most valuable companies in Europe.

The insight was counterintuitive at the time. Heritage brands could scale far past their artisanal origins without losing the aura that made them expensive, provided somebody managed the tension deliberately. So he put creative directors and disciplined operators in the same room, spent enormous sums on desirability, and kept tight control of distribution. Scarcity is manufactured too.

Luxury is the rare business where scarcity and scale must coexist. Arnault made them serve each other.

Getting there took decades of acquisitions, some of them conducted with a ruthlessness the industry still discusses. Scattered maisons became a coordinated portfolio. The Tiffany & Co purchase was the exclamation mark.

Now the family. Arnault has placed his children across the business, which makes this the most closely watched dynastic handover in global commerce. The open question is whether a machine built to industrialise craft can keep the craft intact once the person who balanced both is gone.

Arnault trained as an engineer at the École Polytechnique and joined his family's construction company, Ferret-Savinel, which he steered into property development. His entry into luxury came in 1984, when he took control of the bankrupt textile group Boussac, whose assets included Christian Dior. He sold most of the rest and kept the fashion house, which is still at the centre of his holdings.

LVMH itself was formed in 1987 by the merger of Moët Hennessy and Louis Vuitton. Arnault built a controlling position over the next two years after a bitter fight with the existing management, and became chairman in 1989. Three decades of acquisitions followed, among them Sephora, Bulgari and, after a contested renegotiation during the pandemic, Tiffany & Co, completed in 2021 for about 15.8 billion dollars.

Not every campaign succeeded. A long attempt to take over Gucci in the late 1990s ended with the brand going to the group now called Kering, and LVMH's gradual build-up of a stake in Hermès ended in 2014 with a settlement under which LVMH handed those shares to its own investors. Those defeats shaped the method that followed: buy houses whose owners are willing to sell, then invest heavily in the product and the shops.