The backstage scene before Stella McCartney’s spring fashion show is part highfalutin glamour, part Romper Room: the designer’s young brood racing around as models shuttle from the makeup stations to their individual racks. In strides French retail and luxury titan François-Henri Pinault, who makes a beeline for McCartney, embracing her like a family member, patting the head of her three-year-old son, Miller, and tickling the chin of her nine-month-old son, Beckett. “Did you see the Chapman brothers’ mural?” McCartney asks, referring to the backdrop for her runway, a colorful felt playground scene by Dinos and Jake, best known for their sculptures depicting hell and other horrors. Pinault’s smile wilts into a puzzled expression. “I’ll have to show it to your father,” she offers, referring to billionaire François Pinault, who owns a staggering collection of modern and contemporary art.
Pinault flanked by Luc Besson and Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the green team behind the PPR-sponsored film, Home.
McCartney’s backdrop for her fashion show a year ago was much more up the younger Pinault’s alley: a lush, vertical garden by green-haired botanist Patrick Blanc that was later donated to a housing project in the gritty, have-not Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The gesture encapsulated what seems likely to define the legacy of François-Henri, 46, who has quietly put social and environmental issues at the top of his agenda as chairman and chief executive officer at PPR, the French conglomerate that controls Gucci Group and retail chains such as Fnac and Conforama.
When Pinault established PPR’s Corporate Social Responsibility Department last year, his company was the first on Paris’s CAC 40 to appoint a director of CSR who reports directly to the CEO and who is a member of its executive committee. It was a powerful statement about social and eco responsibility, and he has incorporated it into PPR’s code of business practices, covering everything from employment diversity and fair-trade suppliers to reducing carbon dioxide emissions and building greener stores. Like other fashion and retail players, PPR trumpets its latest shops and styles—but the firm also emphasizes its smaller-format La Redoute catalogs printed on paper from sustainably harvested trees and its new charters with the European Works Council, an employees’ advocacy group, to promote the employment of disabled people and aid senior citizens. If McCartney is the sustainable movement’s It girl, Pinault is the It boss.
“A business that ignores these issues, I don’t see how it can be relevant in its economic activity,” Pinault insists during an interview in a wood-paneled conference room at PPR’s headquarters. “It’s a reality that if we continue the same practices vis-à-vis the environment, we will have a catastrophe. Everyone must react. There are about 90,000 people who work in this group. If they come to their senses, 90,000 people can bring awareness to their families: That could represent 200,000 or 300,000 people.”
