Amid all of the images and videos that emerged of the riots that took place in France over the weekend, the most shocking are those of the clock tower collapsing in Limoges after its 19th-century town hall was set alight.
Close behind, however, are the shots of looters storming the gates of luxury brands like Celine, Hermes, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent, breaking through the plate-glass windows that act as a scrim between the outside world and the hushed interiors that cater to the ultrarich, smashing their sparkling vitrines and looting their goods.
Of the estimated more than 3,000 shops that have been affected by the spiralling protests, including grocery stores, pharmacies and family-run operations, it is the luxury destruction that has caught much of the attention, and the imagination, of the watching world.
Whenever demonstrations are coupled with looting, they set off a conversation about wider, often inchoate, expressions of anger over inequality, not just in France but across the world.
And though it would be easy to see this as yet another blip in a long history of using luxury products as a stand-in for social and economic injustice (one that stretches back to the French Revolution), it is also a response to a peculiarly contemporary reality the luxury industry itself has created.
The current situation is, after all, the third instance of physical attacks against luxury brands in the last eight years in the city that has styled itself the capital of luxury.
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In 2023, during the movement against government pension reform, protesters stormed the doors of the LVMH headquarters on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, waving sparklers and ultimately burning an effigy of Bernard Arnault, the billionaire owner of the group (and that year briefly the richest man in the world).
In 2019, Dior and Chanel shops on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, among other luxury emporiums, were looted during demonstrations by the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), and boarded-up storefronts became a familiar sight.
According to Serge Carreira, the director of the emerging brands initiative at the Federation De La Haute Couture and an affiliated professor at the school of management and impact at Sciences Po, “France has always cultivated a love-hate relationship with luxury – proud of its global influence, suspicious of its morality and blaming its unequal essence.”
In some ways, it is exactly that influence, so assiduously cultivated by the brands themselves, that is now backfiring.
Luxury has used social media and its own cultural cachet to make itself ubiquitous in the lives of even those who can’t afford its products.
Thanks to celebrity ambassadors, the transformation of fashion shows into entertainment and the red carpet into a marketing opportunity, everybody knows Dior, even if they will never buy a Dior. Ditto Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Burberry and more.
Ironically, the weekend protests coincided with LVMH’s Journees Particulieres, or Open Days, an initiative in which many of the group’s brands welcome the public into their ateliers and workshops, to share how the products are made and invite consumers into their otherwise closed world.
But paradoxically, as these brands have held themselves up as the epitome of aspiration and taste, they have also raised their prices to such levels that they are out of reach for almost everyone.
They are emotionally and psychologically seductive but practically unattainable.
As a result, “most of the younger generation feels excluded from this world”, Carreira said.
He added: “There is no more dream, just envy and rage.”
Those feelings found their expression in physical annihilation. By destroying the display windows of the opulent stores, Carreira said, the protesters are destroying a system that dangles only the promise of inclusion.
“They escape the norm and reach a form of materialistic fulfillment,” he said.
By appropriating the products themselves, many of which have ended up on the luxury resale and black markets, the looters seized some of what had been otherwise denied them and literally brought it out to the street.
In this context, rather than being symbols of artisanship and patrimony, as luxury brands tend to describe themselves and their offerings, their goods become emblems of excess and capitalist rot.
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As far as what will happen next, Dior, Celine and Hermes either did not respond to requests for comment, declined to comment on what happened with their stores or did not say what measures they had taken to protect them.
Ralph Lauren did not respond to emails.
An internal note sent to LVMH employees on Oct 19 by Antoine Arnault, the group head of communications and sustainability, and seen by The New York Times, noted that the group had “taken the appropriate measures to ensure everyone’s safety and the continuity of our operations” (reportedly, private security has been hired).
He also thanked the artisans, virtuosos and all members of the group's teams, calling them “finest ambassadors”.
As curfews are imposed in France and cities gear up for another round of protests (at the time of writing), the government is promising increased security.
“I believe Avenue Montaigne and Rue Du Faubourg Saint-Honore will be Fort Knox next weekend and any other day of protest in the next weeks,” Carreira said.
Billionaires famously love a bunker, but do the brands that serve them really want to be stuck inside? – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
