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Big deals and Hollywood: where fashion marketing is headed next

The co-founder of communications group The Independents on its latest acquisitions and feeding the fashion entertainment machine

Public relations maven Karla Otto and events guru Isabelle Chouvet set out to build “the biggest luxury brand management agency in the world” when they merged their two companies, Karla Otto and K2, in 2017, to create communications group The Independents. Seven years later, with 15 agencies under their belt, that remains their guiding star.

“It has always been the goal,” asserts Chouvet, who is CEO of the group, from her home in Paris. A backdrop of earthy wall panels reminiscent of those in Japan, where K2 was founded back in 2002, are visible on our video call. When we speak in August, there’s an industry-wide summer lull, but Chouvet isn’t taking the opportunity to slow down. “We have more acquisitions coming.”

A week earlier, The Independents added Bureau Béatrice — a Dubai-based creative agency that uses technology to create immersive experiences for luxury brands including Prada, Bulgari and L’Oréal — to its roster. Now, it’s announcing another addition: Kitten Production, a creative production agency that works with its clients, including Louis Vuitton, Saint Laurent and Jacquemus, to execute marketing campaigns and produce video and digital content.

Diversification is top of Chouvet’s mind. The Independents brought in $600mn in revenues in 2023, which Chouvet attributes to the group’s widespread reach, meaning it is not reliant on a single market or channel. That’s all the more pertinent amid a luxury downturn and a turbulent macro-environment that have caused other big players to experience a setback in growth.

From creative consultancy Sunshine to events production firm Bureau Betak (among the companies now part of The Independents), Chouvet sees the group as “an orchestra of specialists” at a time when brands need to be more strategic in how they engage with customers. Each acquisition brings the founder of the business on board as a partner at a holding level. “We want them to stay, to be motivated and to share the success together,” says Olivier Chouvet, co-founder of K2 and The Independents, also Isabelle’s husband.

The Independents’ recent spree is made possible by the $580mn it raised across 2023 from investors TowerBrook Capital Partners and Banijay Group, as well as debt financing. But it’s not the only communications firm to invest in its operations through strategic acquisitions. In June last year, The Lede Company, the public relations firm representing stars including Rihanna, acquired Paris-based agency Olivier Bourgis Communication and Marketing. Two months later, France’s billionaire Pinault family bought a majority stake in Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency from private equity firm TPG in the largest-ever transaction for the family’s holding company Artémis.

The level of dealmaking reflects heightened competition in the industry, as companies of all sizes seek to create cultural relevance, which in turn can help build brand equity and sales. It’s difficult for smaller agencies to offer such a wide scope of services globally. There’s also less margin for error, warns Isabelle Chouvet. “You cannot make any mistakes, knowing that now everything is published in a second,” she says, referring to the watchdog culture that has emerged online, where brands can easily be called out on social media for any mis-steps.

The next big opportunity for brands is leveraging the convergence between fashion and entertainment, Chouvet believes. It’s evident in the evolving role of celebrities, who are not only dressed by brands as they sit front row at fashion shows or appear as ambassadors in campaigns, but are now involved in aspects such as design — and, in some cases, have even launched their own labels.

The development is mutually beneficial for brands, which have been racing to lock in exclusive contracts with the next big name. Talent management is not an area that The Independents dabbles in yet, but it’s “something that we’ve been discussing a lot over the past few months”, says Chouvet. “Partnerships between brands and talent are at the centre of lots of things we’re doing.”

New formats blurring product with entertainment are gaining ground. In 2021, Sunshine co-created the Balmain TV series Fracture on Channel 4, the channel’s first-ever branded entertainment drama. While product placements on the big screen are nothing new, financing or partnering with the film and TV industries to create more of a cinematic experience marks a change in luxury marketing strategy.

In recent years, Chanel has supported several films, including the Lady Diana biopic Spencer (starring Kristen Stewart, a longtime ambassador of the house) and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, through financing or providing costumes and make-up. In April 2023, Kering-owned Saint Laurent became the first luxury brand to establish a movie subsidiary; for two years running it has shown its film productions at Cannes. (Kering became an official partner of the film festival in 2015.) LVMH also wants a slice of the pie; in February, it announced the launch of 22 Montaigne Entertainment, a division aimed at developing film, TV and audio productions across its luxury brand portfolio.

“The brands that are going to win are brands that become entertainment companies, because entertainment is amorphous, mouldable and can have any kind of creative output,” believes Jenna Barnet, CEO of Sunshine. She adds that “every brand has that potential, but right now, many still function as aggregators of customers, not aggregators of audience. They’re not yet programming constant cultural output.”

Where do fashion weeks fit into all this? They remain a vital industry event but have become a smaller part of The Independents’ overall business as the group diversifies, says Chouvet. She recommends identifying other key moments on the cultural calendar and leaning into partnerships with communities that have traditionally been overlooked and underserved.

Some luxury brands are finding success in developing marketing templates which they can recreate, but which cannot necessarily be replicated by others (for example, travelling social club Prada Mode or contemporary salon Miu Miu Club). While such events require just as much investment as a traditional fashion show — if not more — “The audiences you derive from that are deeper, richer, stickier and want to spend more time with you,” says Barnet.

The key is to think beyond an event or a marketing initiative in isolation, says Guillaume Troncy, co-CEO of Bureau Betak since September 2021. “When [founder] Alexandre [de Betak] started back in the ’90s, fashion shows didn’t have this kind of creative direction, they were very industry-focused,” he recalls. Now, with influencer partnerships and social media clout in the mix, there are “different layers” to consider. “You cannot only cater to the 500 people coming, but you need to cater to the massive audience outside of it” — those who may be tuning in digitally from anywhere in the world, he says.

The next development for The Independents will be the opening later this year of an office in New York, which will act as a central meeting hub for all its agencies (they currently operate from their individual offices). Olivier Chouvet hopes the new space will “reinforce” creativity and inclusivity. “The priority is for our brands to be international and for our approach to be global, because you need to be able to go with the customer everywhere they are, at the same time,” he explains. “We need to be agile. When I wake up every morning, I want to make sure that each agency is moving at the speed of culture — and how fast is that?”

Perhaps Troncy sums it up best, describing the group’s goal to “create something memorable that travels the world and ignites conversations around the brand”. The best marketing, he concludes, is “a reflection of society”.

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UK water firms face tough market for new debt after Thames crisis

Companies can expect higher borrowing costs as investors demand larger premium

Investors are demanding a higher premium to take on the debt of Britain’s most highly rated water companies in the wake of the crisis at Thames Water.

Companies with stronger credit ratings, including Welsh Water, United Utilities and Anglian Water, have marketed or issued new sterling debt this week in the first significant wave of issuance since the parent company of Thames defaulted on its debt earlier this year.

But investors have demanded a cheaper price for water bonds, raising corporate borrowing costs and renewing concerns that the industry will need to divert a higher proportion of its customer bills to servicing the interest on its collective £64bn debt mountain. The industry last week warned that its borrowing costs would be pushed higher as a result of Ofwat’s planned new regulatory regime to 2030.

Prices of UK water company debt have been under pressure as the crisis at Thames, which serves 16mn customers in London and surrounding regions, has unfolded this year. Over the summer Thames defaulted on its debt and the company has been trying to raise fresh equity, having warned it only has enough cash to survive until May.

On Tuesday, Welsh Water priced a £600mn 20-year lower-ranking bond at 1.38 percentage points over UK gilts. Although the spread and size were both helped after Welsh received more than £1.2bn of demand, that was a more expensive level than comparable energy utilities. Water companies’ debt has previously tended to be issued at a lower yield over gilts than the bonds of energy companies such as National Grid and SSE.

In marketing documents directed at investors, Welsh Water conceded that “the increased scrutiny regarding the performance and financial resilience of Thames Water and other water and sewerage companies . . . could each affect investor confidence in the UK water sector.”

The same day, Anglian Water mandated BNP Paribas, HSBC and SMBC to market its own 20-year sterling green bond, with debt investors privately expecting the utility to have to pay a similar premium. The company said it was also exploring a 15 to 20-year inflation linked bond.

“Issuers don’t know when the next Thames headline’s going to come out. So when you see a period of kind of ‘benign’ markets in the water sector, we’re going to see issuers try to take advantage of that,” said Jonathan Owen, a portfolio manager at TwentyFour Asset Management.

The higher premiums being sought underscore the tougher analysis that water companies have faced since last December, when investors began to probe the financial health of Thames, the UK’s largest water distributor.

In July Thames’ credit rating was slashed to “junk” status by Moody’s and S&P, leaving it in breach of its licensing conditions, which state that it must maintain two investment grade ratings. The same month Severn Trent tapped the debt market but the final spread pricing of a £350mn bond was roughly a 20 basis-point premium compared with its outstanding debt, despite its stronger credit profile.

“Before December last year, you would expect [the strongest] water companies to trade inside National Grid by five to 10 basis points; in April that blew to 20 wider,” said Owen. “We had further struggles in the sector when Severn came to market and that gap widened to 40 [basis points].”

In a further sign of the industry’s nervousness, this week United Utilities opted to increase the size of its existing bond by £150mn. While this method of raising new debt — known as a “tap” — restricts the scale of debt a company can raise, investors said it can also help borrowers stay under the radar when raising cash.

Industry lobby group Water UK warned last week that Ofwat’s recent draft proposals would likely make it impossible for the sector to attract the investment needed and reduce the UK’s attractiveness to international investors.

The industry had set out plans to invest £105bn over the next five years but Ofwat had proposed cutting this by £17bn.

‘Like Saint-Tropez 50 years ago’: western France’s little-known island escape

Two new boutique hotels have added a sprinkle of chic to the sleepy, serene, Île d’Yeu

The first whisper of the secret island came to me from Domitille Brion, the Paris-based co-founder of fashion brand Soeur. In between discussing fabrics and silhouettes, she revealed that she drew inspiration from an enchanting island called the Île d’Yeu.

Was this lost in pronunciation? Had I misheard her say Île de Ré? No, there really is a little 23 sq km idyll off the Vendée coast in western France that only my most Francophile friends had heard of — and even they hadn’t actually been.

With two new boutique hotels opening in the past two years, Les Hautes Mers and La Mission, it seemed Île d’Yeu could be my perfect under-the-radar French island. Authentic, yet with a sprinkle of chic. Somewhere to enjoy secluded beaches and also get a decent Negroni. 

So I was intrigued to spend four days there as part of a summer road trip with my family. It lies 17km from the mainland, and while the wealthy or impatient can arrive by helicopter or light aircraft, we opted for the 30-minute catamaran ride from Fromentine, a little port about 75 minutes’ drive south-west of Nantes. (There’s also an hour-long route in summer from Saint-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie, further down the coast).

We left the car on the mainland and travelled as foot passengers — there are car ferries, but they are infrequent, more expensive and, given the island is only 10km long and 4km wide, most people get around on bikes. As always, when discovering somewhere new, the boat trip afforded me half an hour of frantically anticipating whether it would really be a hidden pearl or just holiday grit.

My first impression of Port-Joinville, the main town on Île d’Yeu, where the ferry docks, was more of a working harbour than I expected. Fishermen unloading their catch, lively market stalls, crêperies and cafés, and a seemingly chaotic road with cyclists weaving in and out of honking traffic. Pretty enough, but was this the picture-postcard utopia I had envisaged?

However, as we arrived at our hotel, La Mission, my tendency to prematurely catastrophise the latest holiday choice melted away. Opened in May by the Hôteliers Impertinents group, which owns several hotels in Paris, it’s located in charming Saint-Sauveur, in the middle of the island, one of its three main villages. Think narrow streets lined with whitewashed houses featuring terracotta roof tiles and colourful shutters.

The hotel — a former garrison dating from the time of Napoleon III — retains its traditional style. Arranged like a cloister, the 22 bedrooms, restaurant and Nuxe spa are set around a swimming pool and gardens with kiwi and passion fruit vines, lending a truly relaxing, sanctuary-like atmosphere. The decor taps into that eclectic aesthetic of wicker furniture and stripes seen in hotels from Mama Shelter to the Experimental Group, but this is a calmer, more classic version. 

On our first evening there was a DJ playing gentle electropop in the garden, while islanders and hotel guests converged to sip cocktails around the pétanque pistes. My 11-year-old and I sat in a deckchair, him reading Murdle and me wondering why Frenchmen have such good hair.

At dinner, it was an equally stylish scene: well-heeled multigenerational families with quiet children spurning the kids’ menu and eating locally fished albacore tuna ceviche without spilling it on their pristine white linen. Chic millennials on a hotel date night wearing where-did-they-get-that hippy blouses that I later discovered were from the market in Saint-Sauveur. I even spotted two style mavens from the Paris fashion world gliding into the restaurant, including a former French Vogue writer.

According to Michel Delloye, co-founder of Les Hôteliers Impertinents, the island is “like Saint-Tropez 50 years ago or Cap Ferret 20 years ago. Many private homeowners come from around the world to reconnect with this authenticity — the King of Belgium has his own house here, and there is a small community of Wall Street financiers and famous actors.”

After a lazy start, the next morning it was time to get on the hotel’s bicycles and explore: my two older children and I selected Instagrammable white Dutch bikes. For my husband and our five-year-old — who is about as stable on a bike as a panda on a unicycle — an electric tandem.

I’m a snowflake cyclist. I don’t do rush-hour jeopardy or those English country lanes where vans whizz past within millimetres. Fortunately, it turned out that the seemingly hectic scene around Port-Joinville was just one seafront road, with its own local logic, and the rest of the island offers the kind of carefree freewheeling depicted in Jules et Jim. There are a few main roads used by cars, but most are vintage Citroën 2CVs and Renault 4s, and there are numerous car-free tracks. 

Also absent are Lycra-clad road hogs. Instead, think teens in stripy tops playing French pop as they ride, and flâneur-ish hands-free cyclists (one hand holding a cigarette, the other gesticulating). 

And what a rush — in August! — to find deserted paths leading to near-empty beaches. On our first morning, we headed for the wild and rocky south coast (known as the côte sauvage), down lanes edged by hedgerows of ferns, blackberries and sloes, over twisted tree roots on sandy tracks where leaning pine trees created aromatic arches, and along moorland teeming with butterflies fluttering through crisp air scented with honeysuckle, gorse and salt. The island is largely flat, but after some Sisyphean attempts to get up a slight gradient, I found myself being pushed along by a septuagenarian local while her friends smirked at this undignified spectacle.

Plage des Soux was my favourite beach, a hidden cove of golden sand and clear waters more similar to those in Devon or Cornwall than the wide beaches and slightly khaki sea of the Vendée mainland. Plage des Sabias was similarly appealing, though less wild, with sailing yachts and fishing huts a picturesque addition. It sits near the Vieux Château, a striking fortress from the Middle Ages perched on the rocks.

Such historic sites crop up all over the island. There’s the Grand Phare, a lighthouse once powered by oil lamps, then rebuilt in 1951 after being destroyed in the second world war, and the beautifully spare white chapel of La Meule, built in the 11th century and overlooking the harbour village of the same name. In another league of antiquity are the dolmens, simple rock constructions dating from prehistoric times and boasting jolly names such as the Pierre du pain et du beurre (the bread and butter stone). 

That evening I visited the chapel and watched the sunset from the high, illuminated rocks at the end of La Meule’s harbour wall. This dusk bike ride was a particular delight, the only sounds the murmur of conversation from one waterside bar, the clicking of my bicycle spokes, the call of circling swallows and church bells. The silence of golden hour. 

And so the slow rhythm of our stay continued: criss-crossing the island in our little bicycle convoy, breaking off to eat or swim in the reassuringly refreshing Atlantic. Highlights included a long alfresco lunch of lobster rolls and chocolate lava cake with pine sap milk pudding at Les Hautes Mers — a 25-room hotel a few steps from the Plage St Aubin that was opened by the Paris-based Domaines de Fontenille group in 2022. And dinner at La Ferme d’Émilie, a bucolic restaurant on an organic farm, serving dishes with fruit and vegetables picked that morning.

In the market of Saint-Sauveur we shopped for picnic ingredients and artisanal fripperies, from soap to vintage dresses. Stalls snake down a narrow street framed by bars and restaurants, such as À l’abri des Coups de Mer — a ’70s time warp with giant ceiling fans, tiled bar and net curtains, filled with laid-back locals in their bleu de travail workers’ jackets — and the Dilettante wine bar, which sells a delicious organic sparkling white of the same name. We stocked up on baguettes, goat’s cheese and hefty coeur de boeuf tomatoes with sculptural ridges, and a giant strawberry tart from the island’s Mousnier bakery.

If Île de Re is Disney France, this is more of an art-house film, steeped in character. Much of the island feels untouched by time, preserved somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 1970s. Such serenity is a rare find, not least in a place I could easily reach from the UK without flying. Many people attribute the timeless atmosphere to the fact that there is no bridge, unlike those built to connect the mainland with the nearby Île de Noirmoutier in 1971, and the Île de Re in 1988.

“It’s still a little bit secret, even in France,” says Morgane Couchet, manager of Les Hautes Mers. “As soon as you arrive at the ferry terminal in Fromentine and take the boat, you’re completely escaping.” Wealthy Parisians who come to switch off make up a large portion of the summer population. When August is over, their departure makes it sleepier still.

But for now, I’m inclined to agree with Michel Delloye that the new, more sophisticated hotels are meeting a demand, rather than ironing out the island’s character. Over at the market in Saint-Sauveur, I talked to a stallholder who reminisced about how in the 1960s her grandfather bought a house here with no running water. She says the island is getting more popular but its slow pace endures: “There is nothing on the beach, no rows of parasols, you don’t have to buy anything, no commodities, it’s an escape from ‘bourgeois-ville’.” Splendid isolation indeed.

AI data boom mints Australia’s latest billionaire after $16bn Blackstone deal

Cricket fan Robin Khuda came to country from Bangladesh and built AirTrunk into pan-Asian business

Robin Khuda was an 18-year-old looking to continue his accountancy training when he moved from Bangladesh to Australia a quarter of a century ago.

Today his own balance sheet has never looked healthier. AirTrunk, a data centre company that Khuda founded nine years ago, was sold to Blackstone this week in a A$24bn (US$16bn) deal after a bidding war that produced one of the largest takeovers of an Australian company.

The acquisition cements Khuda as one of a select group of Australian tech billionaires and caps a quick rise for AirTrunk, a pan-Asian business that has soared in value as the growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing creates fortunes from digital infrastructure.

Macquarie, the Sydney-based asset manager, acquired an 88 per cent stake in 2020 that valued the data centre company at A$3bn. It was linked with a potential A$10bn float last year but was instead put up for sale this year as demand from private equity and infrastructure funds for data centre assets continued to grow.

Khuda and other staff have also sold part of their 12 per cent stake as part of the Blackstone deal, but the 44-year-old will stay on as chief executive and is expected to retain a stake of about 5 per cent.

“In under a decade, we’ve built the largest platform in the region, with data centres in all major markets operating as essential digital infrastructure underpinning the digital economy,” he said in a statement. “For AirTrunk, this is just the beginning.”

The deal would also represent a “watershed” for the burgeoning Asian start-up scene in Australia, raising its profile with investors, said Sandeep Varma, chief executive of Saari Collective, a media company that has worked with Khuda.

Khuda, who studied accounting at the University of Technology Sydney after arriving in Australia, worked in the telecoms and cloud computing businesses for companies including Singtel and Fujitsu before becoming chief financial officer of Pipe Networks, a business looking to build a subsea fibre cable between Sydney and Guam.

He then became finance director of NextDC, a data centre company now valued at almost A$10bn on Australia’s stock exchange. Overseeing its listing brought Khuda into the orbit of investors but tested his willingness to work for someone else rather than strike out on his own.

Matthew Haupt of Wilson Asset Management, a NextDC shareholder at the time, said it was clear Khuda had his eye on bigger things. “You could tell he had a desire to succeed. It almost felt like a transitional role. He had that drive,” he said. “Even so, it’s hard to believe he’s got to where he has.”

In 2014, Khuda was appointed as chief executive of telecoms payments company Mint Wireless but lasted only six months before the struggling company’s co-founder retook the reins.

It was the catalyst for Khuda to go out on his own by founding AirTrunk, but he failed to get financing within Australia, leading him to dip into his personal pension to fund salaries, according to one former colleague. His first contracts were aggressively priced, according to one person with knowledge of the company’s earliest days.

Varma noted that Khuda’s previous jobs had steeped him in the industry. “He gained insight into the problem he was trying to solve. He positioned himself to become a rocket ship,” Varma said.

The former colleague said Khuda, a cricket fan who also supports the Sydney Swans football team, had shown loyalty to staff, known as “AirTrunkers”, and established a top floor office in northern Sydney, with impressive harbour views and free food for employees.

AirTrunk’s strategy under Khuda was to look beyond Australia and build giant data centres across Asia capable of supporting large technology companies such as Microsoft.

Its empire of 11 so-called hyperscale data centres stretches across markets including Malaysia, Japan and India, where forecasts of rapid growth in AI and cloud computing have attracted the likes of Macquarie and now Blackstone.

The private equity group, which already has a $55bn portfolio of data centres, said after striking the deal that it expected a further $1tn of capital expenditure on data centres outside the US in the next five years.

Khuda was one of 18 Australian business leaders who attended a roundtable discussion with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited the country in 2023 — when he set out the case for how digital infrastructure was needed to underpin the rapid digitisation of Asian economies.

The vision to grow a regional company reflected Khuda’s perspective as an outsider in Australia, where the entire population of 27mn is the equivalent of a large city in Asia, said Varma of Saari Collective.

“Of course he realised he could take this bigger,” he said. “He had the ambition to serve all those people and could see a pathway to do something that others [in the sector] weren’t doing.”

Khuda marked the Blackstone deal with a post on LinkedIn, which noted that he had built a company with 350 staff and “not a single salesperson”, and said he would work with AirTrunk’s new owners to make it a A$100bn plus business. “We’ve only just begun,” he wrote.

Nippon Steel’s political tug-of-war

US Steel chief executive David Burritt threw an unexpected hail-mary pass on Wednesday as he tried to breathe life into one of the worst-timed deals of the past decade.

Burritt, who is attempting to keep the company’s $14.9bn sale to Nippon Steel alive, warned thousands of jobs in the election battleground state of Pennsylvania would be put at risk if the takeover wasn’t approved.

“We want elected leaders and other key decision makers to recognise the benefits of the deal as well as the unavoidable consequences if the deal fails,” he said.

It’s a risky gambit to make a nearly $15bn deal an election issue and one that could easily backfire. Pennsylvania, as most Americans know, could very well decide the US election this November.

Both vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump have come out against the deal, which also faces intense opposition from the United Steelworkers, one of the most powerful unions in the US.

Harris on Monday said the Pittsburgh-based company should remain “American owned and American operated” while on the campaign trail. Trump has said he would “immediately” block the deal if he wins.

The takeover has been in purgatory since it was announced last December, and it’s unclear how Burritt’s push this week changes the calculus for either the Harris or Trump campaigns.

But a potentially fatal blow arrived later Wednesday, with the FT reporting that President Joe Biden intended to block the acquisition after concluding it posed a national security risk that couldn’t be overcome, said several people familiar with the matter.

That’s surely a painful development for both companies (and the small army of advisers who have toiled away on the merger for months). Nippon Steel was advised by Citigroup, while US Steel was advised by Goldman Sachs and Barclays.

Lucrative advisory fees for the banks are at risk (even as the law firms involved are likely billing large sums for the work they’re doing on the US national security review).

It’s unclear who advised Burritt to raise the stakes with politicians — he threw a rally outside one of US Steel’s plants on Wednesday — but he has gotten some poor guidance already.

Deal documents show one of US Steel’s advisers, the Washington-based powerhouse Covington & Burling, told the company it “did not anticipate that any of those transactions would implicate unresolvable national security concerns based on the identity of the counterparties”.

Old Masters glorify Paris mansion at reopened Musée Jacquemart-André

‘Masterpieces from the Borghese Gallery’ unites a Roman cardinal’s Renaissance collection with French patrons’ rococo taste

In a scintillating start to Paris’s autumn season, one superb collection welcomes another, legendary one: the Musée Jacquemart-André reopens, more opulent than ever after a year’s refurbishment, to host Masterpieces from the Borghese Gallery. It’s a heady meeting: two villa museums evolved from the private homes and art of visionary collectors, each preserving its distinctive taste.

The Parisian collection was extravagantly nostalgic: packing their Boulevard Haussmann mansion with pictures and precious objects from the Renaissance to the rococo, Second Empire banker Édouard André and society painter Nélie Jacquemart created a gilded refuge from 19th-century industrialisation and turmoil.

Cardinal Scipione Borghese’s collection, by contrast, was dazzlingly of its time: in the early 17th century he sought the best contemporary and recent art to adorn his Villa Pinciana, the “villa of delights” which became Rome’s Borghese Gallery.

Highlights sent to Paris celebrate the Borghese’s full dramatic, aesthetic and emotional range. The cool watchful blonde “Lady with Unicorn”, Raphael’s enigmatic answer to the “Mona Lisa”, surveys us from her loggia. Bernini’s self-portrait, black eyes flashing, seethes with restless ambition. Titian’s “Scourged Christ”, indomitable, violated, heroic, based on the Belvedere Torso, emerges in half-light to fix his executioners with a look of terrible defiance.

Annibale Carracci depicts a huge, sinewy “Samson in Chains” at an instant of tension and resolve, about to burst free, illuminated by a divine glow in his dark prison. And the earth moves in Veronese’s tilting, fluid “St John the Baptist Preaching”: layers of shifting perspectives around the powerful diagonal figure show his listeners responding, startled, challenged, intrigued, in different tones.

All were artists favoured by Scipione, who amassed his collection with the notorious Borghese ruthlessness. He acquired the show’s seductive opening stunner, Caravaggio’s “Boy with Basket of Fruit”, by contriving criminal charges against its owner, painter-collector Giuseppe Cesari, who avoided jail by “donating” his works to the Borghese family. It is a fantastically worldly picture, Caravaggio’s pouting décolleté playboy hugging blushing peaches, spilling pomegranates, fat figs — fruits depicted, with almost sinister realism, tipping into over-ripeness, withering leaves a summons to enjoy life’s fleeting pleasures.

The story of Scipione’s rarefied collection plays in dialogue with the adventures of André and Jacquemart, as ruthless in their way. From a villa in Mira in the Veneto in 1893, they snagged and dismantled, to local horror, Tiepolo’s monumental yet light and airy fresco “Henri III being welcomed to the Contarini Villa”, depicting courtiers greeting the French king in Venice. Reassembled atop the gold and white marble double helix staircase in the Jacquemart’s exhilarating Winter Garden, it gives every visitor today the frisson of a royal welcome.

In their dining room — now the museum’s café — the couple installed a Tiepolo ceiling fresco: comic spectators, some masked, dangling hats and parasols, lean over trompe l’oeil balconies to ogle us, the crowds, below; the starring character is a monkey about to tumble out of the picture into our space. Throughout the museum an 18th-century decorative spirit — Boucher, Fragonard — presides, interrupted by velvet-lined galleries of Florentine and Venetian painting. Renaissance trophies dot luxuriant interiors: Donatello’s playful “Spiritelli” candle holders, Bernini’s chiselled bronze of wise, frail reformer-pope Gregory XV, sharp eyes gazing at us and into eternity.

Now Gregory is joined from Rome by Bernini’s marble portrait of his Borghese predecessor, Paul V, austere, commanding, blankly staring from pupil-less eyes, compelling too in virtuoso tactile details of skin and fabric. This was commissioned by Scipione, who grasped the precocious teenage Bernini’s importance when he sculpted the shaggy beast feeding an infant Jupiter, “The Goat Amalthea”, also visiting Paris. Flatteringly, Amalthea symbolised the cornucopia of Borghese largesse, ushering in a new Roman golden age.

Refined and astute, Scipione generously patronised the early Baroque artists who were his contemporaries. Grace within tension characterises his choices: Giovanni Baglione’s “Judith and Holofernes”, the slayer’s sinuous beauty set against her victim’s brutal body; Guido Reni’s “Moses Breaking the Tablets of the Law”, the patriarch’s furious gestures matched by leaden skies, his open, screaming mouth blood red like the lustrous cloak rippling elegantly across the picture.

But it was Scipione’s quest for the most sophisticated 16th-century masterpieces which really make the collection stellar. From the Medici, he acquired Brescianino’s pearly-pink-grey “Venus and Two Cupids”, the goddess, between flesh and stone, framed statue-like in a niche and admiring her reflection in a conch shell, referencing her sea birth, as well as Jacopo Zucchi’s erotic jewel-adorned nudes “Cupid and Psyche”. Spotlit by Psyche’s lamp in a crimson-curtained interior, this is full of historical allusions: Cupid reclines in the pose of Michelangelo’s “River God”; the lovers’ bed is engraved with a figure from his “Night”, executed to decorate Medici tombs.

In the exhibition’s most exquisite room, “Amour et Éros”, these hang with one of the earliest, finest copies of Leonardo’s lost “Leda”, the nude held in the swan’s winged embrace, watching their cherubic twins and an unhatched egg hidden in the grass, and with Scipione’s great Titian, “Venus Blindfolding Cupid”. This late arcane picture is painted in rapid loose strokes which break up forms but at a distance blend texture, figures and ground in intense gold-reds. Venus holds the yellow ribbon around Cupid’s head delicately, neither tightening nor loosening it, the restraint possibly an allegory for conjugal love balancing sensuality and order.

A lesser-known delight in this room is another “Leda”, Ghirlandaio’s fleshy Mannerist heroine seen from the back as she twists uncertainly towards us, attracted to though wary of the insistent, insolent swan.

Masterpieces from the Borghese plunges you into the mindset of privileged Borghese Rome, its dovetailed classical and religious learning, yet there are moments which feel utterly in the present. At the opening, Bassano’s vibrant multicoloured “Last Supper” pulls you into a feast of timeless, even irreverent characters: Saint John dozing at the table, disciples casually quarrelling, a cat sneaking in, a dog comfortably curled up. The expressions and gestures in Giulio Romano’s “Madonna and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist”, taking place in a bedroom, are so lively and natural that the scene conjures any young mother negotiating demands of a baby and toddler, with pet dog patiently waiting.

A tremendous portrait gallery showcases charismatic young men. Antonello da Messina’s has a warm, ironic smile, features strongly sculpted; Parmigianino’s is a disquieted, strict youth in black; and, most affecting, Lorenzo Lotto’s dark-eyed, bearded widower, with two wedding rings, holds a tiny skull, his melancholy expression imploring, introspective, mysterious. You could meet any of them now as you emerge from this absorbing exhibition into Le Nélie café (expect queues), where Tiepolo’s monkey is still laughing, and the sky on the ceiling is always blue.