Tall, trim and rangy, Mr. Arnault has a shy, serious way about him, and his demeanor leans more toward the efficient management consultant that he recently was than, say, that of his older half brother Antoine, who has a supermodel partner, Natalia Vodianova, and a slightly roguish air. His hobbies include running and listening to tech-geek podcasts. He isn’t particularly interested in being hip personally. “Takes too much time,” he said. “You can’t work if you do that.”
He was sitting, as he said so, in view of his baby grand, in his palatial apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, expansive enough to have views of both the Grand Palais and Invalides. The family, and the group, are evident everywhere: In the piles of LVMH coffee-table books and in photos all around, staged and candid (here on a shelf is Mr. Arnault at 13 with his brother Frédéric at their half sister Delphine’s wedding in 2005; except in this case, the wedding photographer was Karl Lagerfeld).
He has lived here, off and on, since his college days, before which the apartment was his brother Antoine’s. It is not the typical college apartment, of course, but then again, the three framed Basquiats above the piano are only posters — “Can’t afford Basquiat yet” — and well, yes, that is a Lichtenstein in the other room, but only a lithograph. “I’m only 26, you know,” he said. “I just sell a few suitcases. So you have to start somewhere.”
Mr. Arnault graduated from Télécom ParisTech, moved on to École Polytechnique, his father’s alma mater, for a master’s, and to internships in business before joining Groupe Arnault, the family holding company. He was seen as a digital reformer, someone in touch with a younger generation — naturally enough, being part of it. So it was that he became the third (and not last) of Mr. Arnault’s children to join the family company, one whose reach is enormous and whose success makes its scions nearly royals in contemporary France. (Arnault père, 69, is the country’s richest man.) Delphine, 43, is the executive vice president of Louis Vuitton; Antoine, 41, is the group’s head of communications and image as well as chairman of Loro Piana and chief executive of Berluti.
