Meet Dior’s new man, who made Kendall Jenner walk on water
Dior taps Fendi’s fountain of youth in bid for luxury’s future
Beccari, CEO of the Italian fur-and-leather purveyor, has been tapped by parent LVMH to take over leadership of Christian Dior Couture in early 2018. Over the past five years, he has moved Fendi to the forefront of luxury branding, offering customers a full-immersion experience ranging from eye-catching stores and a whimsical e-commerce site to a boutique hotel and one of chef Rainer Becker’s trendy Zuma restaurants in the Roman palazzo that houses its flagship store.
The Fendi chief cemented the brand’s ties to the Italian capital, adding the word Roma to the logo and moving into a new headquarters at the long-abandoned Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, a marble block dating to the Mussolini era.
Behind the arched facade, the building houses art exhibitions, fur ateliers and executives suites. The brand sponsors art exhibits and cultural restoration projects, and staged a runway show last year in which Jenner and other models traversed a plexiglass runway atop the Trevi Fountain – a Roman landmark that had been renovated under the brand’s sponsorship.
“Beccari has done an amazing job of taking the craft of the house and using it in a very modern way,” Elizabeth von der Goltz, global buying director at online luxury retailer Net-a-Porter, says. “At Dior, there’s something to be done in terms of modernising their communications – making it more playful.”
New look
Under Sidney Toledano, who’s moving on from his position as Dior CEO to a supervisory role at other LVMH brands, Dior has been one of the steadiest performers in fashion, growing an average of 12 per cent a year since 2000. But the output of chief designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, hired in 2016 as the first woman creative director since Dior’s founding in 1946, has drawn mixed reviews.