LVMH's first new fashion house in 32 years was a bet on Rihanna — it closed in 19 months

In May 2019 LVMH, the world's largest luxury group, announced it was creating a fashion house from scratch around Rihanna — the first original brand it had launched since Christian Lacroix in 1987, and the first time a woman of colour headed one of its houses. Bernard Arnault called her a true entrepreneur, a real CEO and a terrific leader. The bet rested on the lesson of Fenty Beauty, the cosmetics line the pair had started in 2017, which sold north of $100 million within weeks of launch.

Fenty the fashion house was a different animal from the beauty line. Rihanna held the titles of founder, chief executive and artistic director; a Paris team designed and Italian factories produced; and the house ran on eight ready-to-wear collections a year, with pieces priced from $300 hoodies to $900 sandals. It launched with enormous fanfare — but a fashion house needs a distribution machine, a wholesale network and years of scale, none of which a start-up celebrity label could conjure on demand.

In February 2021, less than two years in, LVMH and Rihanna jointly announced the house was being put on hold, pending better conditions. The pandemic had kept Rihanna in Los Angeles, estranged from the design team in Paris and the production sites in Italy — and the trade press was blunt about the maths: creating eight collections a year and running a start-up remotely proved too onerous. The statement offered no numbers, and LVMH has never disclosed what the house cost.

The pause was surgical. LVMH said it would concentrate on Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin and Savage X Fenty — the businesses with real distribution — and the same week L Catterton, the LVMH-backed fund, put $115 million into the lingerie line. The face was never the problem; the structure was. The first house LVMH had built from scratch in 32 years lasted 19 months, while the beauty empire built on the same name kept growing.