Company towns full of luxury liquor

Editor’s note: The column below was originally published on May 15th, 2024, almost exactly a year ago. Following recent news of LVMH’s struggles to turn around its booze division—the worst-performing unit in the entire conglomerate these days!—I’m revisiting this piece about its grand/grotesque plans to develop luxury mini-cities, which includes architectural perspective from Kate Wagner of the one and only McMansion Hell.—Dave.

We talk all the time about the various ways the titans of the global booze business influence American culture, civics, and politics. I’d go so far to say it’s a pillar of Fingers’ editorial mandate, in fact. But rarely does The Discourse smile upon us with a story about one of the world’s richest men, the world’s highest-end liquor conglomerate, and the neighborhoods they’re building from whole cloth in global cities increasingly racked by inequality. And yet, here we are.

“It all makes sense when you say we’re urban planners,” LVMH’s head of fashion promised the Wall Street Journal last May for a slick, soft-focus feature on the multinational firm’s sprawling real-estate empire and skyscraping ambitions. “Good urban planning is taking all aspects of life and lifestyle and bringing them together in one place.”

If you, like me, are baffled as to why LVMH—whose luxury fashion portfolio parallels a dozens-deep stable of pricey drinks brands¹ like Dom Pérignon, Ardbeg, and Château d'Yquem—is pushing its agenda into the traditionally public sector of “creating” cities, you’re not alone. It does not, in fact, all make sense on first glance. Luckily, we’ve got one of the sharpest architectural critics of the era to help us parse the consumptive rot lurking just beneath the glittering veneers and soaring rhetoric of privatized urban planning.

“It’s basically just an amusement park for buying shit,” Kate Wagner, the architecture critic at The Nation and the longtime writer of the popular blog McMansion Hell, told Fingers by phone. “Maybe ‘deranged’ is too much of an ‘internet word’ to use… I think it’s uncomfortable.”

Ditto. The upshot on these Epcots of Extreme Wealth™️, as reported mostly uncritically by not one but two WSJ journalists, is as follows (emphasis mine):

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