Geoffroy de la Bourdonnaye of Chloé believes the mainland Chinese market is moving toward more understated luxury. I believe there’ll always be a mixture. The understated buyer is emerging probably because of saturation by more extrovert brands—and often, buyers want to get something different, rather than conform. And the top-end luxury brands have […]
Read More… from Chloé chief sees China moving to more understated luxury—or is it?
As I watched actress Liv Ullmann read Liu Xiaobo’s address, ‘I Have No Enemies’, on BBC World, I was quite moved. The address is what the Nobel Prize-winning author and intellectual delivered prior to his sentencing by a Red Chinese court for subversion. What is fascinating is the dignity with which the words […]
Read More… from Even as Liu Xiaobo gets a Nobel prize, Beijing can be smug
During the campaign trail, people tended to ask me if I was left or right. While I cheekily said, ‘Forward,’ many a time (and had at least one imitator), there’s something to be said for abandoning what are, effectively, nineteenth-century constructs. And unless you are DI Alex Drake in Ashes to Ashes, you need […]
Today was a good reminder why we cannot trust a foreign company to look after our parking, and why things need to be brought back under council control. Parking enforcement is not about profit. Karen was unduly issued with a parking ticket in a P5 space after hours. And I received one today. You […]
Read More… from By all means, enforce parking, but it’s not a licence to write fiction
My friend and colleague at the Medinge Group, Ava Hakim, passed on a few papers from her day job at IBM. The first is the latest edition of a biennial global CEO survey, while the second asks the next generation of leaders—Generation Y. The aim: to find out what these groups think about the challenges […]
Read More… from What we need from leaders in the new decade: creativity leads the list
I learned the sad news that Norman Macrae, CBE, 旭日章, passed away on June 11, just shy of his 87th birthday. Norman was one of the great visionaries and forecasters of the 20th century, and served as deputy chief editor of The Economist till his retirement in 1988. Among his forecasts was the […]
I haven’t missed the sale of Volvo to Geely, but it wasn’t as momentous as the rebirth of Saab. We knew the deal was coming and the rest were formalities. The company has said there will be no Geelys badged as Volvos and vice versa. It recognizes the Volvo brand is too valuable to […]
Read More… from Volvo Cars, a unit of Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co.