Who really is Salma's millionaire husband?
Salma is not the woman behind Pinault. She is right next to her and brings the perfect balance. In an interview, the owner of the great fashion emporium shows her character against his business decisions and against the woman who has also conquered his family.
As powerful as he has become, the first figure the name Pinault evokes is often his father, François Pinault. Even Salma Hayek made this mistake before her first date, in 2006. By then, François-Henri had already been in charge of Artémis, the firm that controls PPR (Pinault-Printemps-Redoute), for three years. "Salma told me, 'What? I'm not going out with a 70-year-old guy,'" recalls Mimma Viglezio, a former Gucci executive who set up that date. "Salma thought I was putting her out with (François) the dad."
AdvertisingIt's easy to make that mistake. In 1999, two giants of the industry, François Pinault, of PPR, and Bernard Arnault, of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, were fighting for control of Gucci. Arnault wanted to add the Italian brand to his luxury portfolio, while Pinault looked to grow outside of Western Europe. At the end of the legal match, Pinault walked out of the ring in debt but victorious, and very famous.
The game of chairs
Four years later, with several of his new luxury brands in deep trouble, François Pinault invited his son to dinner at L'Ami Louis, a French restaurant known for its huge rotisserie chickens. François-Henri had spent most of his career on the far fringes of his father's empire - for a time, he sold pharmaceutical equipment in Africa. Nobody really knew who he was. His father had decided to step aside, it was time for his heir to take over and immediately.
"On Monday morning, when I arrived at the office and said: 'What's going on here?' of PPR located on Avenue Hoche in Paris. And it is that François had arrived earlier and had finally moved from his office to his son's. "It was funny but dramatic and very surreal. I knew it was going to happen but I didn't know that it was going to happen that fast. I was only 40 and my dad, at 66, was in great shape. He had seen a lot of almighty dads though." and what happened to them. I realized how hard this was for him."
Smooth sailing!
In these 10 years, François-Henri, who is now 50, turned his father's emporium on its head, something he achieved with little noise. He got rid of the lumber and electric power businesses, sold most of his stores, and converted an old freight steamer into a fashionable frigate. Among the luxury flags he flies are Bottega Veneta, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Christopher Kane, Brioni and Sergio Rossi.
I ran into François-Henri one night while being shown around the revamped Saint Laurent boutique in the Galeries Lafayette department store. He was there with Paul Deneve, former CEO of Lanvin, hired to run the company in early 2011. Hedi Slimane, who has artistic control of the brand, had conceived the store in a stylized déco, with straight lines and mirrors that they reflected the black and white veined marble.
François-Henri watched everything without comment but asked a saleswoman: "How many times do marbles have to be washed?" "Four or five," he replied. "Does the matte finish of marble require more maintenance than the glossy one?" "Indeed". He then he wanted to see the dressing room. There Slimane called for floor-to-ceiling mirrors everywhere and bright lights. François-Henri wanted to know if it wouldn't be too dazzling, and then suggested, "Maybe it would be good to bring in a make-up artist or movie lighting expert to make sure the light makes the client look good." "We still have work to do," Deneve said meekly.
How to have a Balanced Lifestyle as a Gamer - In the Mind Of A Gamerft. Reject OUT NOW!! Likes and Retweets Ap… https://t.co/oDPO6or9jh
— depeel Sun May 02 16:38:24 +0000 2021
respect for design
The firm that Pinault Sr. left to Pinault Jr. in 2003 had a path full of obstacles. Gucci, led by the flamboyant Tom Ford and Domenico de Sole, was lagging behind, and the other brands that complemented it, YSL and Bottega Veneta, above all, were losing a lot of money. Ford and De Sole's contracts expired in 2004 and Pinault let them go. "That was the worst moment for him in this business because Tom Ford was a star," says Jean-François Palus, his right-hand man at PPR. "But he looked at when Gucci had gone off course and made sure it didn't happen again by undoing everything Gucci had put together. Each brand was once again managed separately from then on and no designer would ever be more bigger than the brand.
One thing François-Henri does not do with his designers is interfere. Once he determines who he wants, he keeps his hands off the merchandise. "It's not for me to say, 'That bag doesn't work,'" he says. Unlike Bernard Arnault, François-Henri does not throw his weight, or his wife's, ahead of him. The rumor at LVMH is that every time Madame Arnault arrives at a store, the executives receive a call from Monsieur Arnault that same afternoon. Meanwhile, a PPR executive comments: 'Salma Hayek is very precise about what she likes and what she doesn't like, but François has never called us to say: 'Salma she told me...'".
behind the fairy tale
These days, the entire Pinault family gets together frequently to spend the weekends at the majestic Châteua de la Mormaire, which Pinault senior owns about 45 minutes from Paris. The neglected dad has become a doting grandpa. "He teaches them swear words," says François-Henri. Every Friday, François-Henri climbs Salma and his five-year-old daughter Valentina into his Lexus hybrid truck. Sometimes François and Mathilde get on board, the two little ones he had with his first wife, Dorothée Lepère, whom he divorced in 2005. François-Henri has another son named Augustin, the product of a brief affair with the model. Nice Evangelist.
The Pinault Hayeks lead a comfortable home life, if that's what the family mansion can be called in a private 19th-century hotel on the Left Bank of the Seine. "It's the first house I had built for myself," says François-Henri. "I had just gotten divorced and loved getting the furniture, the lights, everything." He tells this while we are sitting on the wide white sofa in a living room that looks like a kind of bachelor's den due to its very masculine design (lamps with ceramic bottle bases, one standing that looks like a tree). The adornment above the dining room is a canopy of stacked plastic rings on which Salma expresses her doubts: "I mean, I like it, but it's not the best light to eat in," she says diplomatically. And it's not like he messes around too much. "It's not something I have to do to entertain myself," she says. "I already did when I set up my house in Los Angeles."
Also on a ranch near Mount Rainier in Washington, Salma used to spend more time in the United States but she says she has settled better into her Parisian life.
It is clear that François-Henri is crazy about his wife. He is cool, she is mouthy, which creates a balance that seems to work. This is not always so obvious. The two ended their engagement during 2008 but got back together after a few months. "When I met François I was an activist and not in the fashion world at all," says Salma. "I was confronting him a lot, in a very bad way, really."
He had convinced himself that he would never marry a woman who was not French, but during her wedding in 2009 he toasted Salma because she opened her French mind. If she tends to cling to something now, Salma Hayek says, it's mostly because of her husband. "When I don't like something, I leave. But he taught me to do that. I might look tough but he's braver."
©The New York Times 2013
