Rafael Carlesso

Rafael Carlesso began writing as a child, filling notebooks with essays and observations of what he saw around him. That instinct, reading the world by writing it down, stayed with him through architecture and running a company, and it became how he reads luxury: the culture before the numbers.

The conviction underneath is that the cultural signal moves first. Much of what the industry recorded as loyalty, in the years of cheap money and the feed, was closer to brand-name borrowing, so the churn that followed reads as a bond revealed as absent rather than one lost. Reuters has cited that reading, on LVMH and the erosion of aspirational pricing trust.

He writes Intelligence Briefs and Reports on earnings, governance, succession and pricing across the major houses, from Kering and LVMH to Brunello Cucinelli and Zegna, alongside essays on the economics of desire and a book in progress on the same question. He has also published a methodology on SSRN for governing AI-generated imagery in luxury, aligned with the EU AI Act.

The same reading works from inside a house as well as outside it, on the narrative a maison holds together for the market, the press and the consumer, where stated value and believed value meet or come apart. Before luxury, he spent a decade where brand met capital, directing pricing governance across a premium real estate portfolio.

Rafael Carlesso writes on the culture and economics of luxury. He is based in Milan.