One evening in June, Sidney Toledano, the 56-year-old chief executive of Dior, was having dinner with his wife, Katia, at L’Ami Louis, the sentimental Paris bistro known for its poulet rôti. The place was crowded and hot, and the old French waiters radiated displeasure. A man at a nearby table, a friend of the couple’s, sent over a bottle of Château Latour, and Toledano, who had removed his coat and tie and was beginning to relax, smiled and thanked the man, who was with a fine-boned English blonde in a white cotton dress. Toledano is tall, with a heavy jaw, a large nose, hooded eyes that glow with intimate interest, and a full head of silvery hair.
Editors consider him good-looking, as if this comes as a surprise to them, and because he is candid and outgoing, without the aggressive charm of other fashion executives, they also feel they can trust what he tells them about the state of Dior, which he has run for the past 10 years.
Somewhere in Toledano’s coat pockets was a pack of cigarettes. He smokes less from anxiety, one feels, than from a need to shepherd a thought or a problem to a satisfactory conclusion. Though intuitive, he admits he does not readily grasp the arbitrary rules of creative genius, but is prepared, nonetheless, to wage a quiet, rational war with them until there is a peace. Once, in his student days — Toledano grew up in Casablanca and studied engineering and mathematics at the Ãcole Centrale Paris — he got a zero on an exam because he spent the entire time working on the first question, which, to his amazement, had stumped him. Yet such determination helps explain Toledano’s reputation as a great manager. Not only does he work effectively with Bernard Arnault, who owns Dior and is the chairman of LVMH, Toledano also manages three designers, with three distinct styles and personalities — John Galliano, Dior’s flamboyant creative director; Victoire de Castellane, its designer of fine jewelry; and Kris Van Assche, the successor to Hedi Slimane, who modernized Dior Homme with sleek tailoring and who was recently cut loose. Toledano helped oversee Fendi, which belongs to LVMH, and that meant, of course, he had to deal with Karl Lagerfeld, who took issue with many things at Fendi but never with Toledano’s management.
As Hamilton South, an owner of a P.R. and marketing firm that once worked for Dior, says, “Sidney is one of the few executives who can actually do the right-brain thing and the left-brain thing perfectly. He’s equally comfortable with John and Burt Tansky,” the chief executive of Neiman Marcus. If there is another C.E.O. in a better position to see the fashion world from all its perspectives, it’s hard to think who that would be.
But in the last year, after leading Dior out of the wilderness of the mid-’90s, when the brand was dowdy and overlicensed, and achieving revenues of more than $800 million, Toledano found himself facing several dramas. The most demanding, and ultimately frustrating, of these were the contract talks with Slimane, which ended in March with Slimane’s departure and which Toledano depicted as “a nightmare.” While this was going on, Galliano sent out a spring collection of stupefying blandness in a seemingly peevish response to a corporate request for more wearable suits. It raised questions about who was really in charge. Then, this spring, barely a week after the Slimane news, Steven Robinson, Galliano’s chief assistant, died of a heart attack at age 38. Robinson played a valuable, if complicated, role at Dior. Not only did he help realize Galliano’s ideas, but he also served as a buffer between the designer and Toledano. It seems unthinkable that the C.E.O. of a major fashion house would not have direct contact with its star designer, but early on Toledano accepted that Galliano needed to have people around him. Toledano admits, “Sometimes, yes, it bothers me, because I want to be sure of things.” He adds, “I understand his genius.
I still don’t know him personally.”
Now it was early June. Toledano was to show the first collection by Slimane’s successor, Van Assche. He felt that Dior Homme would not suffer without Slimane — “provided we get a good buzz with Kris,” he says. “If we do the right products, I don’t think it will be a problem.” (At the showing, some editors could not see any virtue in Van Assche’s baggy trousers and wondered, after Slimane’s decisive gestures, at his puppyish sophistication.) Toledano was also involved in plans for Dior’s 60th anniversary and couture extravaganza at Versailles, on July 2, which called for fireworks, Spanish dancers, food and drink for 2,000 guests — at a cost of millions.
The waiter at L’Ami Louis uncorked the wine, and, as plates of escargots began to arrive, the actor Gérard Depardieu entered and took a seat behind Toledano, so that the two men were shoulder to shoulder. Depardieu is built like a house, and his white shirt barely hid his belly. Toledano had the waiter pour the actor a glass of the Latour. As Depardieu buried his nose in the glass and inhaled deeply, Toledano watched him, his arms folded across his chest. Depardieu took a swig and, in a tone that bordered on stinginess, said he thought that it smelled better than it tasted. Toledano regarded him placidly and pointed to the label. Depardieu smiled sheepishly.
One of the qualities that soon becomes apparent about Toledano is how completely at ease he is in his own skin. He is not the least bit arrogant, but, at the same time, very little impresses him. Once, referring to his relationship with Arnault, with whom he speaks almost daily, Toledano said: “He’s a great guy. But I don’t need to tell him that. I’ve never told him that and he’s never said it to me, either.” He loves his job — one of his favorite things is to drop into the Dior flagship on Avenue Montaigne, which he does every Saturday — but he has not been affected by it. In this respect, he says, he is a lot like Galliano. “Being president of this company has not changed who I am,” he says. “Obviously I enjoy a nice office. But in the morning, when I’m having my cup of coffee in the kitchen, I’m in my T-shirt.
I make my coffee myself. We’ve not been influenced by the fashion world.” He has been married to the same woman for 26 years. They have two daughters and a son. He speaks movingly of his upbringing in Morocco, particularly of his 87-year-old father, who fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and, being Jewish, was expelled from Vichy France.
Ralph Toledano, the chief executive of Chloé, who, though not related, has known the family all his life, says, “We never talk about money or power. It was all about being proud of our name — it’s very, very important. And being honest. I think honesty is one of the most important things to Sidney.”
Still, Toledano is very much a figure in the fashion world. If he is seductive and charismatic, as South suggests, it may be because the qualities he possesses — empathy, modesty — are magnified beyond normal range by the pedantry of the fashion business. Even so, there is something particular in his character that goes beyond a mere ability to listen well. As South put it, “You could pick him up tomorrow and drop him into Time Warner, and he would be a rock star the same way he is at Dior. He just has it somehow.”
I think they look great
