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 social feed, was closer to brand-name borrowing. The churn that followed showed that the bond had never existed.

Reuters has quoted him twice on LVMH, on the sale of Marc Jacobs and on its Q2 results. Valor Econômico, Brazil's leading business daily, interviewed him on the luxury first half of 2026. Fibre2Fashion quoted him on Chanel's China strategy. LinkedIn News has cited him three times in 2026, on Chanel, LVMH and Tapestry.

CPP-Luxury published "What LVMH buys, and what it lets go" in October 2026. He writes Intelligence Briefs and Reports on the major houses, from Kering and LVMH to Brunello Cucinelli and Zegna, reading their results, governance, succession and pricing for what they say about desire. The Briefs are open in full on this site. He also writes essays on the economics of desire, and has a book in progress on how brands became the structures through which we build identity and meaning. His research is published on Zenodo and SSRN, including a methodology for governing AI-generated imagery in luxury, aligned with the EU AI Act.

He gives talks and keynotes on how luxury brands build desire, lose it and renew it. The keynote, From Heritage to Algorithm, shows what makes luxury clients choose a brand again, for conferences, leadership teams and business schools, in English and Portuguese.

He is the founder of The AI Desire Index, a public ranking of 180 luxury houses by what AI systems say about them, and of Branded Brands, the atlas of luxury brands.

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 was managing partner of a premium real estate company, where brand met capital and he carried brand, pricing and P&L under commercial risk.

Rafael Carlesso reads where desire is built or lost, from image to price. The financial results only prove it. Based in Milan.