There are departures made with a fanfare, and others in slippers; on an August evening, while everyone is head-first at the beach. Jean-Baptiste Voisin, the strategy director for the master for nineteen years a longevity that even IT-bags never achieve has therefore packed his bags without any fuss. Nineteen years at the strategic helm of a luxury empire is no small feat: either the man was a dead weight brilliantly tolerated, or he did a good job under the orders of a captain who always keeps his hand on the rudder and likes good executors who remain executors. We will lean toward the second option, not out of charity but out of common sense.
The situation could be summarized as follows: historical executives are like family furniture. You think they are indestructible, bolted to the floor, unmovable until the day the master of the house decides to remodel the living room. And when the master of the house owns dozens of houses, in the literal sense as well as the Vuitton sense, the makeover can happen quickly.
La Fontaine, who knew a thing or two about courts and courtiers, had already said it all regarding these hushed power games: in the fable, no matter how much seniority the earthenware pot has, it is always the iron pot that decides the journey. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” except, it seems, when you can pass it on to your children, one by one, smoothly, in the summer, while the press is napping at Nikki Beach.
In short, Alexander the Great is returning. Four years spent in New York at Tiffany’s, without bankrupting the house, unlike a certain paternal American dream that remains in memory that one flashier, more gilded, less discreet. Alexandre, for his part, practiced his scales away from the clan’s gaze, and his return has the effect of a shockwave among the siblings: the favorite is coming back to the fold, “we are going to kill the fatted calf.” And as in all families, there is always a favorite, like the fable of the unequally loved sons of the same father. The cultured will understand.
An empire never dies completely all at once. It dilutes, quietly, in the hands of those who inherit, generation after generation, like a fashion house that changes its silhouette without ever closing shop. To leave, said the poet, is to die a little, or “a tire” (un pneu), as the case may be. With a strategy director dismissed on the sly, on a summer evening, it is also that: the empire which, very gently, slides toward its children and deflates, year after year, just as any tire you forget to check dies a little.