So here we are, presented with yet another temple of luxury, erected like a manifesto of ostentatious grandeur, with its seven levels piled up like the vanities of a world already overfed. A design gallery, two culinary spaces, an interior studio… it reads like a catalog of desires packaged in marble and glass. Paris, once again summoned as a postcard backdrop, finds itself ordered to host this transatlantic hybrid: half American dream bunker, half French palace of illusions.

And already, the specialized media wave their censers: “success,” “innovation,” “international clientele”… As if the philosopher’s stone of high-end retail had just been discovered. But what revelation is there, other than the repetition of the same equation? Money, staging, a hint of lifestyle, and the illusion of endless refinement. One almost regrets that the Lord Himself did not do this with La Samaritaine.

Cash is king for “the King of Tunis” — the educated will understand — with the aim of “redrawing the perception of luxury.” What arrogance! Luxury, by its very essence, eludes those who try to redefine it through excess and hamburger restaurants. Paris had no need for this flashy laboratory to know what luxury truly is: a breath of couture, a glint of crystal, a perfume of eternity. Here, it is locked up in a machinery of concepts, a carousel of “Lifestyle” calibrated to seduce both hurried tourists and lovers of ostentation.

Make no mistake: this contemporary luxury no longer seeks to sublimate, but to occupy space, saturate the gaze, multiply experiences like trophies stacked on a shelf. A hybrid place, you say? No: a cathedral of simulacrum, where the exceptional is sold by the slice, like a supermarket product “made in polished marble.”

FM