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 through years of commercial responsibility, and it became how he reads luxury: desire before the numbers.

The conviction underneath is that desire 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 quoted that reading twice on LVMH, on the Marc Jacobs disposal and on its Q2 results. LinkedIn News has cited it twice in 2026, on Chanel and LVMH.

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 reading always lands on the same object: 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 worked in premium real estate, where brand met capital and he carried brand, pricing and P&L under commercial risk.

Rafael Carlesso reads where desire is built or lost, and writes the strategy that builds it. From Milan.