amazing story
Kors on his own words, extracts from wwd of today:
Kors on his own words, extracts from wwd of today:
“Was I mistreated?” Kors said in an interview. “No. Was I neglected? Yes.
“I never felt as though there was a strategy at LVMH as far as pitting the designers against each other or the brands against each other,” Kors said. “It’s just that I never felt anyone was watching the smaller companies at all, but everybody was spending their time on the two first-born children — Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. In a way, if you’re a nice kid, no one pays attention to you. If you’re a bad kid, you get spoiled.”
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“I feel like Carrie Bradshaw,” Kors said, referring to the “Sex and the City” character who left Paris in the series’ final episode. “I’m not sorry to leave Paris at all. I’ve done a great job, but it’s time to move on and do my own thing.”
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In his six-and-a-half years of working for LVMH, Kors estimated he spent a total of three hours in Arnault’s company, including the two shows and two “how do you dos” when he ran into Arnault at the Dior store in Paris.
“I’ve never been to a meal with him ,” Kors said. “At the time, I didn’t realize that his not being there meant that Celine was not as important. It became apparent to me that Celine was not going to become the priority at LVMH, so why am I going to keep trying to make that happen?”
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“It was also challenging to me from the beginning, as Celine had never been known as a ready-to-wear label. My challenge was to turn Celine into a ready-to-wear business, where we’re really selling clothes and not just T-shirts.”
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“I’ve had to be incredibly flexible,” Kors said. “It was a different time when I got there, when I didn’t understand what Celine was about, like that it was predominantly an Asian business and that they had never wholesaled a collection before. I didn’t know what DFS in Asia looked like. They told me I had 40 Celine doors in Tokyo and it wasn’t for a while that I realized that meant 40 counters. But it has been the greatest learning experience, especially from the point of being able to see the world. I never would have known what was going on in Singapore, or that the European client is a different client than that in America. I learned what it was like to work with a bigger company and how that works, and that let me know what’s in store for me as I build my own company into a bigger business.”
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“I think the biggest thing to remember is that you really end up doing a disservice to a brand when you have a designer who cannot devote 24/7 to it,” Kors said. “I don’t know if it needs to be a box-office name. I would pick for them someone who could be the designer, full-time, who lived in Paris or is willing to move there, and that might not be someone who anyone has ever heard of. In retrospect, I don’t know I believe that any designer in the long term can have an enormously successful business of their own and at the same time work for another company. At some point, you have to make a decision because, otherwise, you’re competing with yourself. And it’s tough to compete with yourself.”