And as Mr Polet splays himself side-saddle across a sofa, clasping his hands thoughtfully under his chin, I'm suddenly conscious of the fact that I can't remember when my down-at-heel Marks & Spencer shoes were last polished or my suit dry-cleaned.

Mr Polet's French surname (pronounced 'po-lay') belies his Dutch origins. The name is a rarity in the Netherlands, probably brought to the Low country centuries ago by French Huguenots fleeing Catholic persecution. Mr Polet himself was born in Kuala Lumpur of Dutch parentage and educated in the Netherlands (undergraduate) and Oregon (MBA).

As with so many continental Europeans, he speaks a shaming number of languages: Dutch, of course, English, French, German and Italian. To this American ear, Mr Polet's English alternates between Italian and French-accented flourishes, and he speaks it in articulately formal cadences, as if translating directly from a Romance language.

All of which is probably just as well. It wouldn't do to have the director of the Gucci group of companies speak with a British accent or - God forbid - an American one.

But if Mr Polet looks and sounds the part by the exalted standards of the luxury goods industry, his curriculum vitae is daringly unconventional.

He was appointed head of Gucci last July, after a 26-year career in the fast-moving consumer goods sector with Unilever. It included stints as chairman of Unilever's Malaysian operations from 1989 to 1992 and, in his final position, head of its then US$7.8 billion-a-year worldwide ice cream and frozen foods division.

Fast-moving consumer goods, especially fast-moving ice cream and frozen food, might seem positively antithetical to slow-moving luxury handbags, watches and whatnot. Yet from a management perspective, they in fact have much in common.

In the late 1990s, under the direction of then chairman and chief executive Dominic DeSole and creative director Tom Ford, the Gucci Group embarked on a ravenous eat-or-be-eaten acquisition spree. In the space of four short years, the company acquired eight peers in the luxury goods sector.

These included the operating assets of Switzerland's Severin Montres (since renamed Gucci Timepieces), perfume and cosmetics firm Yves Saint Laurent, Italian luxury shoe firm Sergio Rossi and Paris fashion icon Balenciaga.

Gucci was simultaneously fighting a rearguard action against French rival LVMH, which had been snapping up its shares on the New York and Amsterdam stock exchanges. Three years of litigation later, LVMH was seen off by white night Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, which eventually took Gucci private. The Gucci-LVMH truce was signed on September 10, 2001. A day later the twin towers collapsed in New York City. The good times were officially over.

'I call them the roaring '90s,' Mr Polet says of the period. 'These were truly the days of market growth. Look at all the [luxury] groups ... how they doubled or tripled their turnover. You probably won't see it again. It was a period of high growth and huge competitiveness - you could almost call it a frenzy.'

It was a frenzy that completely transformed Amsterdam-based Gucci (originally established in 1921 in Florence, Italy as a leather crafts shop) from a kind of stand-alone exclusive brand into an empire of exclusive brands - all of which had to be managed in multi-task fashion. It was, in short, something of a nightmare.

'[Luxury companies] became multi-brand groups,' Mr Polet reflects. 'They were building portfolios of brands - competing for which brands to buy. [That] brought another stage: consolidation and people really looking at their strategies. 'My God,' they asked, 'with all these brands, what are we going to do? What is a multi-brand group'?'

Juggling brands is precisely what more established multinationals, such as Unilever, are expert in. Hence, perhaps, part of Mr Polet's appeal to Gucci.

'What I have actually discovered is that the similarities to what I was doing before are much bigger than the differences,' he says of his old job and new one. 'There are three elements which are 100 per cent the same; the majority of my time is actually spent on them.

'First of all is managing brands. Secondly, it's working with and leading teams of people. And third is managing creative projects. Those are the three most important elements.'

'Innovation is always about new things and in any industry there's always innovation,' he adds when pressed to articulate the creative elements involved in managing food brands. 'But whether you innovate in consumer goods or innovate in luxury goods, it's always about creating either new business systems or new products or new brands.'

At this point, Mr Polet, who believes in reincarnation of the professional sort, is reluctant to ruminate further on Unilever. 'The only thing is what I have promised myself - that's why I'm hesitating,' he says. 'I always talk about [Unilever] as my previous life, thanks very much, and I'm now 10 months into my new life.'

He does indeed move in a different world now. And aside from the core issues that all global companies face, the luxury goods sector is possessed - as Deng Xiaoping might have said - of its own special characteristics.

'The rules of the game are slightly different - managing a luxury brand you do differently. One, you manage them for exclusivity, which means that you need to have artificial scarcity.

'Secondly, luxury goods need to be aspirational - it's all about values and emotions. And the element of craftsmanship is the third element. Every product is hand-crafted.'

There can be no outsourcing to the Pearl River Delta for Gucci, whose cachet (and hence high prices) stem in large part from slow-motion European production processes. It's also why wide-scale counterfeiting, which persists in the mainland, is potentially so devastating to luxury brands: it threatens their artificial scarcity. The more Gucci bags one sees on Nathan Road, real or fake, the bigger the damage to the brand.

After taking over at Gucci on July 1 last year, Mr Polet embarked on a seven-week world tour of his company, visiting 163 Gucci stores (or 40 per cent of the total) and meeting, he estimates, about 2,500 company employees.

'The first thing I did, I said to my wife: 'Happy holiday because I'm off',' he recalls. 'I had a few hard disks to fill in my mind as it was for me a new business and a new industry, in a way.'

As group president and chief executive, Mr Polet manages a second tier of chief executives, each of whom manages one of the firm's brands in conjunction with a 'brand team' responsible for design, production, marketing and sales. 'We've assigned roles to each brand,' he says, explaining the results of a strategic planning exercise completed by Gucci in December last year.

'One of the bigger statements that we've made internally is that we've renewed the focus on the Gucci brand [as opposed to its subsidiary brands] and said: 'Look guys, in terms of priority it's 60 per cent of the group's turnover and slightly more of the profit.'

'In terms of priority the Gucci brand comes first,' he adds emphatically.

'We will double the size of the Gucci brand in the coming seven years, increasing its margins at the same time.'

Mr Polet has a track record when it comes to such boasts. His official Gucci bio boasts that while running Unilever's ice cream and frozen foods division, its margins increased about 70 per cent.

He is also excited about Gucci subsidiary Bottega Veneta, the Vicenza, Italy-based leather goods and accessories firm it acquired in 2001. He calls it 'one of the smallest jewels in our crown, but one of the fastest growing ones'.

'It is positioned above Gucci. They advertise with the slogan: When your own initials are enough.'

Mr Polet explains that Bottega Veneta's hottest selling handbag has no logo on the outside. Instead, initials chosen by the purchaser are stitched on the inside. It costs about $30,000 and there is a waiting list.

'It's a product that takes two full days by two women putting the product together,' he brags good-naturedly. 'We sell it in a limited edition ... Now when you own one of those bags - having bought it - you truly own something exclusive and of high quality ... They've hit the sweet spot. It's a well-positioned and very consistently marketed brand.'

Getting a bit carried away, perhaps, I suggest that it sounds like the ultimate brand - not only has it 'transcended itself' (by disappearing from the product) it has also acquired the consumer's own name.

Mr Polet likes the suggestion, but with an important qualification: '[It has] no logo,' he corrects me. 'Of course it is still a brand [Bottega Veneta].'

Of course. But Mr Polet has just unwittingly repeated the title of journalist Naomi Klein's international bestseller, No Logo, which takes to task modern consumer society and its ubiquitous brands.

Klein's book, published five years ago, continues a long-running line of social criticism dating back at least as far as Thorstein Veblen's stinging The Theory of the Leisure Class. Published in 1899, Veblen both castigated - and famously coined - what he termed 'conspicuous consumption'.

It seems like the perfect time to ask Mr Polet one last question. With all its 'values', 'aspirations' and exorbitant prices, isn't the luxury brand business just a little bit - for want of a better word - silly? After all, unlike ice cream and frozen food, you can't eat a handbag.

Mr Polet takes the question on squarely. '[Buying a luxury good] can be a reward,' he says. 'It can also be a statement of: 'Look, I've achieved something in life and so I buy the best quality goods'. Or it's wanting to aspire to a certain world because by buying a brand you buy into that world. All of them are valid reasons [and] I think all of them are legitimate.

'It's a fundamental human behaviour that we all have in ourselves,' he concludes. 'Some go right to the top; some already have that same feel at another [lower] entry point.' Rather like me and my unpolished shoes from Marks & Sparks.

Biography

Robert Polet, 49, was appointed president and chief executive of the Gucci Group in July last year after a 26-year career at Unilever, where he last oversaw its US$7.8 billion-a-year ice cream and frozen food division.

Born of Dutch parents in Kuala Lumpur, he studied business administration at Nijenrode in the Netherlands and later took an MBA at the University of Oregon.

Mr Polet, a polyglot who speaks five languages, is married with two daughters.