In 2001, just as peer-to-peer music sharing platform Napster was being shut down following a landmark legal win on behalf of the Recording Industry Association of America, version 1.0 of iTunes was being released for the first time (just a few months before the inaugural Apple stores would open their doors in Virginia and Southern California), and as Wikipedia – not the first-ever online encyclopedia, but hands-down the most heavily- and frequently-trafficked – was first finding its footing, Larry Lessig was in the process of founding something headline-making of his own, even if he did not know it at the time. 

Hedi Slimane’s debut offerings for Celine have spawned waiting lists in stores, LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault revealed at the group’s annual shareholders meeting on Thursday. The 50-year old creative made his highly-anticipated debut at Celine in January with a collection of typical short-and-tight, rocker-inspired Slimane fare, which was met with over-arching praise for what would certainly be the cause for commercial success, and at the same time, no shortage of reviews soaked which skepticism due to the seeming lack of evolution in aesthetic compared to the nearly-identical wares he shown during his tenure at rival conglomerate Kering-owned Saint Laurent.   

Deloitte’s annual “Global Powers of Luxury Goods” report pin-pointed and ranked the largest personal luxury goods companies in the world by sales for the year ending June 30, 2018. On the list of the world’s largest purveyors of luxury-level garments, accessories, cosmetics and fragrances (i.e., personal luxury goods), LVMH, Estée Lauder, Richemont, Kering, Luxottica Group, Chanel, L’Oréal Luxe, Swatch Group, Chow Tai Fook Jewellery, and PVH Corp, in that order, took the top spots, with minimal variations from last year’s findings.  

It has been awhile since Louis Vuitton’s parent company and Gucci’s owner have engaged in a public sparring match. In fact, it has been since the late 1990’s when LVMH and fellow French luxury goods conglomerate Kering were both vying for control over Gucci. But the burning of the Notre-Dame cathedral on Monday appears to have potentially awakened their competitive streak, in addition to, of course, their well-established culture-enriching efforts and charitable ways.

The utterly explosive growth of Gucci under the direction of quirky creative Alessandro Michele has slowed, but the still-significant demand for Kering’s thriving marquee Italian label helped the Paris-based conglomerate beat revenue forecasts for the first three months of the year and deliver what it is calling “a solid start to 2019.” Reuters notes that Gucci’s 20 percent growth in revenue for Q1 to $2.63 billion – down from 28 percent for 2018’s Q4 – “still beat the pace of rivals, including LVMH’s Louis Vuitton,” which released Q1 results last week.

Neiman Marcus is getting into the resale business. On the heels of a year-long partnership with The RealReal, the Dallas-based department store chain’s parent company, Neiman Marcus Group, is looking for something more permanent, taking a minority stake in Fashionphile, the luxury resale site that rivaled Louis Vuitton and Gucci as one of 2018's “Most Searched Brands.” While the terms of the deal have not been disclosed, Neiman Marcus CEO Geoffroy van Raemdonck told WSJ that the “move is part of a strategy to increase Neiman Marcus’s reach.”  

Rihanna and her father are not quietly settling the $75 million lawsuit that the mega-star filed early this year. According to the complaint that counsel for Rihanna filed in a California federal court in January, the multi-hyphenate Grammy winner (and budding beauty mogul)’s father Ronald Fenty and his business partner, Moses Joktan Perkins, are on the hook for “fraudulently misrepresent[ing] to third parties and the public that their company, Fenty Entertainment, LLC, is affiliated with Rihanna, and has the authority to act on her behalf.” and are “soliciting millions of dollars from unsuspecting third parties” as a result.   

A female student at a college in Minnesota is suing the billionaire behind one of China’s top e-commerce sites, claiming sexual assault, battery, and false imprisonment, among other charges. On the heels of reports that JD.com founder Richard Liu was arrested in Minneapolis in late August in connection with rape allegations, and released a few hours later (and permitted to return to China), Mr. Liu and the $43 billion JD.com have been named as defendants in a new lawsuit filed in a Minnesota state court by the alleged victim, an unrelated Ms. Jingyao Liu. 

Is Nike creating footwear of the future? Try – footware of the future. In addition to debuting a number of “smart” shoes, such as its self-lacing sneakers or the ones that can be tightened or loosened via your smart phone, the Portland-based sportwear giant is working on a clever new branding scheme in which its futuristic offerings will not be called footwear but “footware.”  

In September 2014, Neiman Marcus made headlines with news that it would acquire buzzy fashion e-commerce site mytheresa.com. Under the 7-year watch of buying director and menswear street style god (turned brief Brioni creative director) Justin O’Shea, the then-27-year old Munich-based site blossomed into a thriving, globally-focused endeavor with exclusive brand offerings and a valuation that is now an estimated $1 billion.