WWD : Celine Launches Made-to-Order Crocodile Leather Handbag Line

Celine Launches Made-to-Order Crocodile Leather Handbag Line
The French fashion house is joining the ranks of luxury leather goods makers that are developing increasingly exclusive and rarefied products to cater to well-heeled consumers.

The Nile crocodile leather Triomphe handbag from Celine's haute maroquinerie collection.
COURTESY OF CELINE
PARIS— Celine is launching a line of made-to-order crocodile leather handbags, joining the ranks of luxury leather goods makers that are developing increasingly exclusive and rarefied products to cater to well-heeled consumers.
The Celine haute maroquinerie collection, available beginning in October, will offer its bestselling 16 and Triomphe handbag models in Nile crocodile leather, which comes in 14 shades, including a dusty pink known as Marly and a rich chestnut hue called Riesener. Recognizable for its large scales, the exotic leather has been glazed to a high sheen with an agate stone.
Customers can pick from an assortment of hardware in 18-karat white or yellow gold, including closures that can be customized with diamonds, either in pavé or solitaire settings. In the ultimate example of stealth wealth, the Triomphe closure is offered with a solitaire on the concealed part of the clasp. Initials can be embossed into the goat skin lining.

A selection of hardware for Celine’s haute maroquinerie collection.
COURTESY OF CELINE
The house declined to disclose the price of the handbags, cementing their aura as status items for ultra-high-net-worth individuals.
The numbered bags will be produced by a dedicated artisan at Celine’s Italian leather goods workshop in Radda in Chianti in Tuscany, which overlooks rolling hills and vineyards. The artisan is responsible for the bag’s entire assembly, from the selection of skin to cutting and stitching.
“Each bag is created as a single piece. Leather cutting only occurs once an order has been placed,” the house said in a statement. Each custom-made 16 handbag takes 17 hours to produce, while the Triomphe requires 12 hours of labor.
Artistic director Hedi Slimane has been steadily growing the brand’s high-end offering, even as he courts the TikTok generation with buzzy collection films and $435 cropped tops. In February, he unveiled an ad campaign featuring Blackpink’s Lisa for his haute parfumerie collection, launched in 2019.
And the designer has sprinkled made-to-measure designs, often produced in collaboration with artists, into his ready-to-wear collections.
The 16 was his first design after joining Celine in 2018, and was famously unveiled on the arm of Lady Gaga, making her the first celebrity to wear Slimane’s designs for the brand. The flap on the made-to-order version has a crocodile underside, considered a technical feat because the leather is both delicate and stiff.
The 16 handbag in Nile crocodile leather from Celine’s haute maroquinerie collection.
COURTESY OF CELINE
Each haute maroquinerie bag comes with a mirror bordered in matching leather, and is delivered in a leather-line lacquered eucalyptus wood coffer, with a plaque that can be engraved with the owner’s name.
Parent company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton has been doubling down on exotic skins, despite protests from animal rights campaigners, who want the luxury conglomerate to follow the example of Chanel, which said in 2018 it was halting the use of leathers including crocodile, lizard, snake and stingray.
Louis Vuitton recently inaugurated two leather goods workshops in France that specialize in bags made from exotic skins, while the renovated Dior flagship on Avenue Montaigne has an entire counter dedicated to bags made from rare materials such as crocodile, ostrich and python leather.


Celine said the skins for its haute maroquinerie collection have been sourced from a supplier certified by the International Crocodilian Farmers Association, a nonprofit association created to develop and improve crocodilian farming practices with respect for animal welfare, the environment, people and local communities.
They are treated by a tannery associated with the IFCA that is certified ISO 14001, an industry recognized standard based on environmental management compliance.

WSJ : Twitter Moves to Block Elon Musk From Increasing Stake

Twitter Moves to Block Elon Musk From Increasing Stake

Twitter Inc. TWTR -1.68% moved to prevent Elon Musk from significantly increasing his stake the day after he made a $43 billion unsolicited takeover bid for the social-media company.

The company on Friday adopted a so-called poison pill that makes it difficult for him to increase his stake beyond 15%. The billionaire founder of Tesla Inc. TSLA -3.66% already owns a more than 9% stake that he revealed earlier this month.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Twitter was weighing such a move.

WSJ : U.S. Stock Markets Closed for Good Friday, Asian Indexes Fall

U.S. Stock Markets Closed for Good Friday, Asian Indexes Fall
U.S. indexes finished week with declines as investors worried about persistent inflation, prospects of economic slowdown

Asian indexes fell Friday as U.S. stock markets and others world-wide were closed to finish a trading week shortened by Good Friday and other holidays.

In addition to U.S. stock markets, bond and commodities markets were also closed Friday. Some Asian markets were open. Japan’s Nikkei 225 ended the day down 0.3%, finishing the week up 0.4% to break a two-week losing streak. The Shanghai Composite Index lost 0.4%, ending the week down 1.25%. The People’s Bank of China on Friday relaxed a key bank lending constraint while leaving benchmark interest rates unchanged.

Bitcoin ticked up 0.7% Friday from its Thursday 5 p.m. ET level, recently trading at $40,156.

The three major U.S. stock indexes fell this week. Investors worried about rising inflation, consumer spending and the prospects of an economic slowdown. Earlier this week, data indicated U.S. inflation surged to a new four-decade high of 8.5% in March from the same month a year ago, driven by higher food and energy costs. Those concerns have ramped up pressure on the Federal Reserve to potentially raise interest rates by half a percentage point at its coming meeting.

The Dow industrials fell 269.89 points, or 0.8%, to 34451.23 this week. The S&P 500 lost 95.69 points, or 2.1%, to 4392.59. The technology-focused Nasdaq Composite dropped 359.92 points, or 2.6%, to 13351.08.

This week, earnings season kicked off with quarterly reports from banks and financial-services firms, which often are seen as proxies for the health of the U.S. economy. JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and Wells Fargo fell this week after reporting a drop in profit, raising worries of an economic downturn. Their results were pulled down because of comparisons to bumper profits during the pandemic.

Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley all added less than 1% this week. The KBW Nasdaq bank index fell 2.6% during the same period.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note finished the week at 2.808%, its highest level since December 2018, with investors betting on rising interest rates. Bond yields and prices move in opposite directions.

Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, moved back up to $111.70 a barrel on Thursday after finishing last week at $102.78.

Next week, investors will parse out jobless claims and home sales figures to better understand the direction of the U.S. economy. Bank and financial services earnings continue next week with Bank of America and Charles Schwab. Tesla, AT&T and Baker Hughes are also scheduled to report quarterly results.

FT : Macron urges EU-wide executive pay curbs in campaign battle with Le Pen

Macron urges EU-wide executive pay curbs in campaign battle with Le Pen
French president and far-right rival criticise €19mn package for head of carmaker Stellantis

President Emmanuel Macron has called for an EU-wide framework to cap “abusive” executive pay after anger in France over a €19.1mn package for the head of carmaker Stellantis.

The criticism of the award to Carlos Tavares came as Macron entered the final weekend of the French election campaign seeking to fend off far-right challenger Marine Le Pen, who also condemned the pay for the head of the Franco-Italian company.

Ahead of the April 24 presidential election run-off, the issue of executive pay has crept into a campaign dominated by voter worries over high energy costs and broader cost of living problems.

Unions and shareholders have opposed the payout for Tavares, formerly the head of French Peugeot maker PSA, which merged with Italy’s Fiat Chrysler last year. The Portuguese executive will collect the multimillion-euro package for 2021 despite a majority of investors voting to oppose Stellantis’ pay plan for its senior managers.

Macron called Tavares’ pay package “shocking and excessive” on Friday and said a “fight” to ensure executive pay levels were not abusive should be led at EU level.

“At some stage we have to lay out ceilings and bring in a governance structure at European level that makes things acceptable, otherwise at one point society will explode,” Macron told Franceinfo radio. “People can’t be struggling with the high cost of living and see these kinds of sums.”

“Of course it’s shocking,” Le Pen told BFM TV when asked about the pay package. “It’s even more shocking when it’s bosses of companies that have run into trouble. That happens quite a lot.”

Long labelled as a “president of the rich” by political opponents, Macron, a former banker who came to power in 2017 on a pro-business platform, said he was in favour of wealth creation and “freedoms” for companies but said the Stellantis pay plans were “astronomical”.

He said France could also look at ways to let staff benefit more from company profits through share schemes.

Le Pen has campaigned heavily in recent months on issues such as food inflation and high fuel prices, which have risen further since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her emphasis on the high cost of living, away from her party’s longstanding focus on immigration issues that are still core to her manifesto, has struck a chord with voters.

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Polls put Macron on around 53 per cent of voting intentions in the run-off, with Le Pen tailing him at 47 per cent.

Stellantis is incorporated in the Netherlands, meaning the French government has little sway over its governance rules, although state-owned investment bank Bpifrance, the carmaker’s fourth-biggest shareholder, voted against the pay plan.

PSA and its car loans arm had to be bailed out by the French government in 2012 with state-backed loans following a prolonged market slump, although that was before Tavares, a former Renault executive, joined the group in 2014.

“Stellantis recalls that under the leadership of Carlos Tavares, in less than eight years, Groupe PSA went from a situation of near bankruptcy to the rank of leading company in its sector on a world scale,” the company said in a statement.

The world’s fourth-biggest carmaker, which reported record profits and margins last year, has said it would take the non-binding vote against its plans into account for 2022, although it did not detail how.

FT : Investcorp in exclusive talks with Elliott to buy AC Milan

Investcorp in exclusive talks with Elliott to buy AC Milan
Asset manager seeks deal with US hedge fund that could value Italian club at more than €1bn

Asset manager Investcorp is in exclusive talks to acquire Italian football club AC Milan from US hedge fund Elliott Management in a deal that could value the Serie A team at more than €1bn, according to people briefed about the matter.

Mohammed Alardhi, Investcorp’s executive chair, and Hazem Ben-Gacem, co-chief executive of the firm, had been in discussions with top executives of the hedge fund since April 1, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Elliott decided to enter exclusive talks with Investcorp in recent days, according to the people. They added that the exclusivity period would end in about two weeks.

The hedge fund has been approached by several buyers in recent years but none have led to a transaction. The current discussion could still fall apart or result in a minority stake transaction, people involved in the discussions said.

A sale above €1bn would mark a huge win for Elliott, which took control of AC Milan in 2018 at a fraction of that value after the club’s previous Chinese owner failed to pay back debt to the hedge fund’s credit arm that it used to buy the club a year earlier.

When Elliott took over, AC Milan’s finances were in disarray and its performance on the pitch was disastrous. The team, which had become one of the best in the world under the ownership of controversial media tycoon and Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, had not won Italy’s top league since 2011 and had repeatedly failed to qualify for the Champions League, Europe’s most lucrative club competition.

After five years of restructuring and judicious investment, Elliott has returned AC Milan to Champions League football and the team is top of the Serie A table with a serious chance of winning the title again after an 11-year drought.

Investcorp, which was founded in 1982 as a Gulf-based private equity-focused investor and made its name during the 1980s and 1990s by taking stakes in luxury groups Gucci and Tiffany, plans to continue investing in the club and consolidate its position at the highest level of European football, said a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Over the past decade, the firm has expanded into other alternative assets, including real estate, hedge funds and private debt. In 2016, it acquired the debt management business of 3i, one of Britain’s largest listed private equity groups, for £222mn, which played a key role in transforming the fund into a more globally focused investor.

Investcorp’s assets under management have grown from about $10bn to $42bn since the firm decided to shift its focus from being a primarily Gulf-based group to a global institution with 13 offices around the world.

Investcorp and Elliott declined to comment.