While LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton‘s Bernard Arnault remains fashion’s richest billionaire by far, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega is closing the gap.
“The dynamics among the richest are an impressively precise allegory for the polarization the fashion industry has been going through for years,” management consultant Achim Berg writes in a new report analyzing Forbes’ rich lists between 2000 and 2024. “Luxury and value players are dominating in terms of numbers of billionaires and the net worth they are generating, while the premium and midmarket segment is squeezed.”
Indeed, as shares of LVMH falter amid a global slump in the luxury sector, Ortega has gained $20 billion in wealth over the past six months as Inditex and its flagship Zara brand go from strength to strength.
Berg, who recently wound up a 24-year career at McKinsey & Company to become an independent luxury adviser, found that the net worth of fashion billionaires grew from a 4 percent share in 2000 to 10 percent in 2024, considering the overall wealth of the top 200.
Achim Berg
Courtesy of Future of Fashion
His analysis ranks fashion as the “third biggest wealth-creating industry” after technology, and finance and investment. Fashion billionaires boasted an average worth of $44 billion this year, compared to $31.8 billion for other industries.
Indeed, the number of fashion billionaires among the top 200 increased to 14 people with a total net worth of $617 billion in the 2024 ranking, versus nine people with a total net worth of $51 billion in 2000.
Arnault’s worth stood at $233 billion last March, Ortega’s at $103 billion, with Fast Retailing’s Tadashi Yanai in a distant third at $43 billion euros. (However, as of October, Arnault’s net worth fell to $155 billion, while Ortega’s rose to $123 billion, Berg’s analysis shows.)
Other fashion billionaires who have seen their net worth rise “fairly consistently since 2000” include Nike cofounder and chairman emeritus Phil Knight; Alain and Gérard Wertheimer, majority shareholders of Chanel; François Pinault, founder of luxury group Kering, and Stefan Persson, whose father founded H&M and who remains the Swedish company’s largest shareholder.
Berg noted that Europe’s fashion billionaires represent 81 percent of accumulated net worth this year, with Asia and North America each accounting for only 9 percent.
Kate Moss x Zara is one of Inditex’s latest high-profile collaborations, which has fed the brand’s heat and reach.
Courtesy of Zara/Mert & Marcus
Notable Asian billionaires include Sky Xu, founder of Shein, who was new to the 2024 top 200 list, while North America’s richest included Michael Rubin, founder and CEO of Fanatics.
Citing HSBC data, Berg noted that in the luxury space, outsized profits were strongly driven by “bizarre price hikes” since just the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing on average 52 percent since 2019.
Meanwhile, an innovative business model at Inditex allowed the Spanish retailer to create “a group of thriving brands,” which also includes Massimo Dutti, Bershka and Pull & Bear.
In an interview, Berg elaborated on the study and his industry outlook:
WWD: Steep price increases in luxury, what HSBC calls “greedflation,” have shrunk the customer base by about 50 million, according to Bain & Co. estimates. Do you think the extreme wealth accumulated by today’s fashion titans could be another turnoff for customers already lukewarm on fashion?
Achim Berg: In the last decade, the luxury industry has grown massively in size. It has become a part of normality, and as a consequence, I think it’s broadly accepted that the families behind those businesses in luxury have done quite well.
I think we hear much more about the tech billionaires, who are more in the limelight. It’s probably because the personal lifestyle of many of the [fashion] billionaires on the list are not very public, or considered particularly extravagant or flamboyant. Nobody knows what Mr. Ortega is doing, for example.
WWD: The staggering value and wealth created since 2000 came despite multiple global crises. In your view, how resilient are the various levels of fashion: luxury, midlevel and mass?
A.B.: Value creation happens in all different segments, but there is an over-proportionate share in luxury and in sports. The midmarket was a very difficult place for many, but obviously not for Inditex.
Even 10, 15 years ago, Inditex had a business model with shorter lead times, less stock, and a more innovative way of allocating stock. And it seems that this competitive advantage is still true today.
You could argue that Shein has a kind of next-level innovation which is reflected in the very fast growth of the business and also the reported profitability. It’s a business innovation where you directly connect manufacturers to customers and ship directly from the production countries.
I think it’s also fair to say that among the luxury players, LVMH Group and other investments from the Arnault family have brought massive value creation. They have built a model of more than 75 different brands that seem to reinforce themselves in the way they go to market, in the way they develop management talent, but also in the way they successfully acquire and develop brands.
WWD: How do you account for Europe — which has far smaller economies than the U.S. and China — producing the lion’s share of today’s fashion billionaires?
A.B.: If we talk about top-end luxury, that only exists in France and Italy, it’s not even a broader European phenomenon.
I discussed that recently with a luxury executive, and he told me that it’s the combination of the royal court and the love for arts and a flamboyant lifestyle that have created that culture for luxury. And while other European nations had courts, the Germans were too Prussian to really indulge in luxury and I think for the Scandinavians, it’s a similar story. That probably explains why the luxury wealth creation is mainly a French and Italian phenomenon.
WWD: One of the old adages in American fashion was that if you dress the people who take a limousine to work, you’ll take the subway, whereas if you dress the people who take the subway to work, you’ll be chauffeured in a limousine. Is this no longer true?
A.B.: I think you can generate outstanding wealth in any price segment and in any product category. But what we see from the study is that luxury is a fully established industry that is benefiting from the growth of the middle class, and a certain excitement for hedonism. In today’s world, also through social media, I think achievements get celebrated with a lot of luxury goods and a luxury lifestyle.
WWD: Do you detect any common threads among fashion’s top billionaires?
A.B.: There’s definitely something around innovation of the business model… It’s not just amazing execution.
Most of the businesses are dominated by families, and in that sense, they have a more long-term view. In luxury, you need to take a long-term view, because you need very high investments. You need to build the brand, and you have high capex needs for stores, and for your own production.
WWD: Are you at all surprised the digital and e-commerce revolutions did not produce more billionaires — or is this reflected in the rankings?
A..B: I’m not. With the rise of inflation and the increase in interest rates in 2022, we had a massive re-evaluation of the industry and the share prices for many of the very highly valued digital players dropped by 80 to 90 percent and they have only partially recovered from that.
Many of these digital businesses were targeting growth and market share and not bottom line. And that has changed since August 2022 because now a lot of those businesses need to be profitable in order to to get a higher valuation.
WWD: Any predictions for how wealth creation in fashion and the rankings might evolve in 2025?
A.B.: We’ve seen significant resilience in the last 24 years, which makes me believe that those businesses will continue to be resilient with whatever challenges we will have in the next years. And if we compare [fashion billionaires] to the performance of tech investors or tech entrepreneurs, we’ve seen that they even outperformed them on some of the KPIs and the scale.
People will continue to get dressed. Luxury has a reckoning at the moment, which in my view is not only cyclical, but also partially structural. But the long-term outlook for luxury is very positive because middle classes will continue to grow, and rewarding oneself or loved ones for achievements will continue. Therefore I cannot see that luxury would go out of fashion.
