The short version: LVMH’s fashion and leather goods sales fell 5 per cent on an organic basis in the third quarter, to €8.2 billion, as spending by Chinese customers dropped by a mid-teens percentage. The group still grew 1 per cent overall. For anyone buying luxury, the split inside those numbers matters more than the headline.
LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury group, reported revenue of €18.5 billion for the three months to 30 September in its results release on 12 October, up 1 per cent on an organic basis. Over the first nine months of 2026 revenue was €57.1 billion, up 2 per cent organically. Its biggest division, Fashion & Leather Goods — home to Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Loro Piana and Rimowa — fell 5 per cent organically in the quarter to €8.245 billion, according to TheIndustry.fashion, worse than the 1.6 per cent decline analysts had expected.
The company described its performance as “very solid in an uncertain geopolitical and economic environment” and said it would keep focusing on the desirability of its brands. Cécile Cabanis, LVMH’s chief financial officer, told analysts the group needed to do more but had kept investing in China, Bloomberg reported.
The numbers, division by division
The group total hides a business moving in two directions at once. According to LVMH’s release, organic growth in the third quarter was:
Wines & Spirits, up 6 per cent. Fashion & Leather Goods, down 5 per cent. Perfumes & Cosmetics, up 1 per cent. Watches & Jewelry, up 6 per cent. Selective Retailing, which includes Sephora and Le Bon Marché, up 8 per cent.
Over nine months, fashion and leather goods is down 2 per cent while watches and jewellery is up 8 per cent. The fashion fall is sharper because the second quarter had briefly looked like a turn: the division grew 1 per cent organically in that period, its first gain in two years, TheIndustry.fashion noted.
Geographically, the release said the United States, Europe and Japan grew well while the environment in China was weaker. Cabanis put numbers on it on the earnings call: US sales up 5 per cent, Japan up 6 per cent, Europe up by a mid-single-digit percentage. Bloomberg reported that sales on the Chinese mainland fell by double digits, that Asia excluding Japan was the only region to decline, down 5 per cent, and that spending by Chinese shoppers abroad also fell by a mid-single-digit percentage.
Inside fashion: who held up
The most useful detail came from Cabanis’s description of the brands. She said Christian Dior, Loro Piana and Rimowa outperformed within the division, while Louis Vuitton was slightly below the division average, according to TheIndustry.fashion. She attributed a little more than one point of Louis Vuitton’s growth to a one-off logistics and transport disruption at a freight forwarder, and said a trademark dispute with the Chinese tea chain Molly Tea had probably weighed on the brand early in the quarter, though the effect was hard to measure.
Those are real explanations, and fairly given. They also leave the central fact standing: the group’s flagship fashion brand, and the division that earns the most, went backwards in a quarter when the rest of the group grew.
Why China, and why now
China’s slowdown is not new to the sector. What changed this summer was its depth. Cabanis said the news flow in China over the summer had “weighed on the feel-good factor”, Bloomberg reported, and that a shift in the Chinese consumer backdrop forces the group to sharpen its own efforts. Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Deborah Aitken and Karine Pitton wrote that LVMH’s renewed revenue and earnings gains had become less secure as the slowdown deepened.
Two points stand out. First, the decline is concentrated in fashion and leather: watches and jewellery grew 6 per cent in the same quarter. Second, the shoppers who did spend — in the US, Japan and Europe — kept spending. This is not a collapse in appetite for expensive things. It is a narrower, more selective appetite.
The structural read
It would be convenient to say that the brands built on material and making held up, and the brand built on a monogram did not. Loro Piana, a house sold above all on its materials, outperformed. Rimowa, a luggage maker sold on durability, outperformed. But so did Dior, which is as logo-forward as any house in the group. The honest reading is that the data does not prove a simple craft-beats-logo story, and we will not pretend it does.
What the numbers do support is narrower and, for a buyer, more useful. When the largest single source of new customers slows, a brand’s growth has to come from people who already know what they are paying for. That favours houses with a product argument a customer can state in a sentence, and it exposes growth that relied on new buyers paying for the name. We made a related point when LVMH sold Patou back to its former owner: scale is a distribution advantage, not a product one, and it stops helping when distribution is no longer the constraint.
It also helps explain why Selective Retailing and Watches & Jewelry grew while fashion fell. Both sell objects where the buyer can see what the money buys — a specific formula, a specific stone, a specific metal weight. Fashion and leather, at Louis Vuitton’s price points, asks the buyer to accept more on trust. In a confident quarter, they do. In an anxious one, fewer do.
Set that against Chanel, a private house that we reported in August had put hundreds of millions into making things rather than simply raising prices. Where the money goes inside a luxury business is the clearest signal of what it expects its customers to keep paying for.
A framework: three questions before paying a group price
None of this tells you whether to buy luxury. It does suggest how to judge any single purchase while the largest houses are under pressure.
One. Can you name what the price pays for? A fibre, a construction method, a workshop, a guarantee of repair. If the only answer is the name on the lining, you are paying for the part of the price that is under the most pressure right now.
Two. Would you still want it at 60 per cent of retail on the secondhand market? Resale prices are the market’s own verdict on what a piece is worth once the boutique experience is stripped away. If you would not buy it there, think twice about buying it new.
Three. Who else makes this thing? For almost every leather good and knitwear category the largest groups sell, there is an independent maker or a specialist workshop doing the same work, often with more disclosure about materials. The group label is one option, not the definition of the category.
What this means for you
If you buy luxury, the useful habit this quarter confirms is to buy the object, not the house. The groups will keep investing in desirability; that is their stated strategy. Your job is to decide whether the specific piece in front of you justifies its price on its own terms.
In practice that means spreading your buying across four channels. Vintage and estate sellers, where the best-made pieces from these same houses sit at a fraction of today’s prices. Independent designers and craft workshops, where you can usually ask who made the thing. Accessible luxury brands that publish what their goods are made of. And selective purchases from the major houses, where you can name exactly what you are paying for. The mid-tier mass market, which borrows luxury’s pricing language without its materials, remains the one to skip.
If you own pieces from LVMH’s fashion brands, a single soft quarter changes nothing about what they are worth to you. Resale values follow long-term desirability, not one set of results.
What happens next
Kering and Hermès report their third-quarter figures later in October, Bloomberg noted. Those results will show whether the China slowdown is hitting the whole sector’s fashion business or falling hardest on the largest names.
The quarter’s lesson is a quiet one. The appetite for expensive, well-made things has not gone anywhere; it has simply become more particular about which things, and why.
The next move is yours.
Sources: LVMH third-quarter release · TheIndustry.fashion · Bloomberg via FashionNetwork.com
