On the Runway | LVMH Gets Even Friendlier With the Youth Vote
LVMH Gets Even Friendlier With the Youth Vote
By Vanessa Friedman
July 3, 2014 5:57 am July 3, 2014 5:57 am
Thomas Tait, the winner of the inaugural LVMH New Designers Prize.Credit Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/Getty Images
After reaching out to the next-generation designer community via the LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize, the richest and most ballyhooed fashion award for start-ups, well, ever (Thomas Tait, a British-Canadian, was the surprise winner), LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton is proving itself truly committed to cultivating the youth vote.
On Wednesday, it unveiled yet another new initiative, L'Institut des Metiers d'Excellence, that the announcement says is a "program of professional training that will allow the LVMH Group to ensure the transmission of its savoir-faire while enhancing the different métiers in the fields of craftsmanship and creation among young generations."
Specifically, LVMH will run official degree programs in conjunction with established schools to create certificates in jewelry arts and techniques and in dressmaking, including the opportunity to apprentice with an LVMH brand. (There also are also plans to extend the program to leather goods, visual merchandising and sales.) Even better, these apprentices will be paid.
In others words: vocational training for luxury goods. Genius, no? I mean, it solves three problems with one blow:
1. It ensures a future employment pool skilled in the heritage craftsmanship increasingly used to set luxury apart from premier fashion, not to mention high street, and which is often seen as a dying art. (Kids want to make apps, not embroideries.) This year, the statement says, "Chaumet and Louis Vuitton will welcome the first selected students" from the jewelry program.
2. It transforms LVMH, which after recent tussles with Hermès over surprise stock purchases (it owns approximately 23 percent of the brand) took some whacks in the court of public opinion, into a benevolent benefactor of youth writ large.
3. It helps the government by addressing the problem of youth unemployment; according to the European Commission's Youth Employment Initiative, up to one million young people in France are not employed or in training. (There are 5.6 million young people unemployed in Europe, so France's youth population represents a pretty big chunk.)
Oh — and there's one more benefit: It's an even more ambitious initiative than that of the LVMH peer Kering, which runs a vocational program called La Scuola della Pelletteria Bottega Veneta in Vincenza, Italy, with Bottega Veneta, as well as a master tailor training program through Brioni.
Seems pretty win-win, dontcha think? Especially if at some point, this generation starts to vote with its wallet.
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