Arnaud de Lummen

Arnaud de Lummen is a French lawyer and fashion executive born in Paris on 26 April 1977. He completed an LL.M. at Harvard Law School in 2002 and worked in the Paris offices of Cleary Gottlieb and Debevoise & Plimpton, where his clients included fashion companies such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. His family had controlled the Vionnet name and business rights since the late 1980s.

De Lummen became chief executive of Vionnet in 2005 and organised the first completed fashion restart after the original house’s 1939 closure. He recruited Sophia Kokosalaki as Creative Director in 2006, secured an exclusive early distribution relationship with Barneys New York and oversaw the transition to Marc Audibet as Artistic Advisor in 2007. After Audibet’s departure, Vionnet moved briefly to an anonymous in-house studio before the 2009 ownership change.

His later career has remained connected to dormant and historic luxury names through Luvanis, an investment and revival company associated with projects including Moynat, Poiret and other heritage properties. The Vionnet period established the pattern: revive a recognisable historical identity through legal control, carefully chosen creative leadership, disciplined distribution and a contemporary commercial proposition.

De Lummen’s contribution to fashion is executive and curatorial. At Vionnet he treated a dormant name as a body of design codes that required credible creative authorship, controlled market entry and enough distance from literal reproduction to function as current fashion. The choice of Kokosalaki connected the revival to drape and textile intelligence while allowing a distinct contemporary voice.

Distribution was used as an editorial tool as much as a commercial one. The early Barneys agreement restricted the first renewed collections to a focused retail context, giving the house time to establish product, image and price before wider expansion. This measured approach also kept the historical name from being dispersed across unrelated categories during the first stage of the return.

Across later heritage investments, de Lummen has continued to emphasise the specificity of an old house: its name, archive, signature products, market position and credible route back into use. His Vionnet tenure shows that fashion leadership can operate through appointments, ownership choices and commercial framing even when garment authorship belongs to the designers and studio.