THE CURATED LIFE
SIDNEY TOLEDANO, president and CEO of Dior, likes to tell this story about his boss, Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH, the parent company of Dior. “Monsieur Arnault took a cab one day in New York, and he was chatting with the cab driver,” Toledano says. “The driver knew about Monsieur Dior, even if he did not know the name of the president of the French Republic.” To Toledano, the story explains how the famed Paris couturier is more than a mere fashion house.
Just how much more becomes apparent when one visits the new store Toledano opened on London’s Bond Street in June. “We decided to represent the whole world of Dior: Baby Dior, homeware, menswear. So we put everything under one roof, like we have on the Avenue Montaigne, but with more space because we wanted to have more VIP rooms. Because for our kind of products, people love to be served for two or three hours.”