At LuisaViaRoma’s new flagship store in New York City, the Italian luxury retailer has a wide variety of dresses and eveningwear, but one thing you won’t find: streetwear.
Despite LuisaViaRoma deputy CEO Bradley Carbone’s background in streetwear at Complex and Adidas, LuisaViaRoma is consciously leaning toward a different type of luxury, one that’s more elevated, quieter and subtler than the logo-driven trends of the last decade.
Glossy+ hosted an executive roundtable at its flagship store on Thursday night, with Carbone speaking with Glossy’s editor-in-chief, Jill Manoff, about what he sees as the future of luxury and how LuisaViaRoma is meeting the moment. Here are some highlights from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
On the move away from streetwear
Carbone: “Kanye really took the streetwear movement into luxury and moved forward with it. He opened the door for Pharrell and Louis Vuitton, and this whole era up until probably 2022, where luxury and streetwear combined into one. Now, our positioning is much more true luxury. We are focused on the big legacy fashion houses and the emerging houses that are focused on the quality of construction and the quality of fabric. The whole industry is kind of moving away from this big logo streetwear phase. It’s a reversion to quality, a reversion to the core tenets of what luxury is. That’s where we position ourselves and what we call true luxury.”
Carbone: “Versace is probably one of the brands that got hit the worst by the streetwear-ification of luxury. They were seeing the money roll in and thought they were super smart and went really hard on big graphics and a reduction in quality and increase of prices. And they really felt the downdraft when they got caught out. But now they’re being acquired by Prada, which may potentially revamp them and pull them back. Eventually, people will be done wearing all black and navy blue, and they’ll be ready for fun and colorful prints. But hopefully we get some beautiful colors and prints for a while and logomania gives us another 10 years or so before it comes back.”
On LuisaViaRoma’s U.S. growth potential and store expansions
Carbone: “One of the top Google searches for LuisaViaRoma in the U.S. is, ‘Is LuisaViaRoma a real store?’ That’s bad, but it’s also good. Because we look at our numbers and see the U.S. is our top market, and New York is our top region within the United States. So if people are asking if we’re real, that means we have a huge opportunity with people searching for us. There’s a huge addressable market and a huge audience for us to educate and grow into.”
Carbone: “It’s always a question with retail of: Do you open a physical store or not? Opening in New York is a true statement, because it’s so expensive. You open a store in New York from a position of strength. You show that you are a player on the world stage. You can go on Zillow and look at the rents for some of the luxury monobrand stores downtown. That’s the reality of the position of strength you need to be in to open in New York. But it’s a branding moment, a marketing moment, and you use your stores to reach your audience, to educate them and create a flywheel between your physical and digital business.”
On tariffs
Carbone: “For us and everyone, no one is sure how to handle the situation. We really don’t know what the true effects will be in the long term, and we can’t make projections because the news changes every day. In the past two weeks, we’ve had ups and downs. In the immediate, we’ve seen a huge slowdown in shipping deliveries. And that’s extremely concerning because we have refined our supply chain to have packages in hand. If you’re ordering directly, you’re getting your delivery within five to 10 business days. In the store, it’s two to four. In the past 10 days, it’s extended out to two or three weeks. Our hope is that this will start to normalize. We have a team in Italy working on the supply chain and understanding the new environment. For tariffs, specifically for brands, even if one piece of a garment is made in China, it’s getting delayed.”
On VIP customers
Carbone: “We have a program called LVR Privilege, which is both digital and physical. It’s a loyalty program, and there are rewards based on shopping, etc. But we stopped short of this super heavy-handed VIC [Very Important Customer] approach. I read an article about these women who spend so much at Chanel that they get invited to the runway shows, and they sit in the front row. At a certain point, it gets a little cringey and very transactional. Even the women are over it. In this article, they had been going to shows for two years and have kind of had enough. You want the customer experience to feel magical and not gross, not super transactional in that way.”
