I'm a lucky man. I'm French, and I'm Greek. French through my mother, Greek through my father. Two cultures that have given the world so much, and that share, perhaps, one thing in common: they made beauty a near-vital necessity. Two heritages that explain this twin pull — toward modernity on one hand, toward the long view on the other. Luxury is my mother tongue. And, no doubt, my first love.
Twenty years of paying attention to it, of watching it, of studying it, of putting my enthusiasm at the service of the women and men who make it have taught me one thing: this industry runs backwards. Raising prices increases desire. Scarcity is the product itself. A bag handmade in eighteen hours. A price you don't quite understand, and that's precisely why you want it. Luxury is a system of rituals and myths, an exigence carried to its peak. And, at its core, an affront to mediocrity.
Behind that choice, a more stubborn conviction: beauty will save the world. Dostoyevsky said it through the mouth of a prince. I believe it's true, in the literal sense. Luxury is the superfluous. And the superfluous is everything — proof that life exceeds function. Saint Laurent knew it: he saw creators as fire-bringers, in Rimbaud's sense, those who tear something incandescent from somewhere else and hand it to others.
Tech, for its part, is a modality of the era. A culture that infuses our lives more than ever. And the tools we use every day shape the way we apprehend the world. Nietzsche experienced this firsthand: when his eyesight failed, he adopted a typewriter. His friend Köselitz immediately noticed the change — his prose grew drier, more aphoristic. Nietzsche himself wrote: « Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts. » In his celebrated 2008 essay Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas Carr made it his thesis. That was eighteen years ago, and he was right.
AI agents won't just change the channels of luxury. They'll change the very grammar of desire. And luxury has always lived off that grammar.
Because there is one moment luxury has always controlled with care: the mediation between desire and the act of buying. The master saddle-maker of the Faubourg, the Chanel sales advisor who recognises your face from ten metres away — the entire grammar of luxury rests on this mastery of the in-between. Today, when a client asks an agent which bag to buy for a dinner, they no longer cross the threshold of a Maison: they consult a judge. An agent doesn't sell. It prescribes. It doesn't embody a Maison, it arbitrates between Houses.
That's the dilemma I've come to put on the table.
Today's agents are LLMs: token predictors, encyclopedias without bodies, brilliant but blind to the physical world. In March 2026, Yann LeCun showed that a 15-million-parameter architecture, trained on a single GPU, can simulate physical causality better than a model a thousand times larger. The engine is going to change. AMI Lab and its world models are the next chapter — funded to the tune of $3.5 billion and released in open source.
Infrastructure matters more than the model. What Houses build today (data, processes, doctrine...) will outlive the next architectural revolution. Together with the meaning we give to algorithms — technology guided by the ideas and creativity of the Houses themselves.
LUX ÆTERNA, eternal light, closes Mozart's Requiem. Playing with the words, I wanted to fold a tension, a stake, into a single name. Light becomes matter, the sacred takes form in the object. Eternity becomes singular, personal, embodied — resonant with the era, in a phrase that is almost anachronistic. The Requiem closes on a prayer for those who came before us: luxury is, in its way, what humans do not to disappear. Adorned with these two vowels, the phrase takes on a new meaning that I like. LUXE ÆTERNAI: what drives me, and what moves me.
My weekly newsletter is its editorial expression; but it is, first and foremost, a practice of thought — a way of keeping a reflection alive in the resonance of a news cycle that brings its share of upheaval every week. A watchtower to guide Houses through the rise of agentic AI.
Beyond the newsletter, it's also my day job: advisory in agentic AI applied to the luxury sector. Helping Houses that want to keep their hand on the grammar of desire — from diagnosis to execution.
What truly interests me, in the end, is that the debate takes place. Inside the Houses, not in conferences or analyst reports. There are places where Tech will lead Luxury into new territories, will give it new dimensions — as it already has, and often for the better. And there are others where Tech will try to drag it, and where Luxury must not go. The arbitration between the efficient and the desirable is one of the dilemmas Houses have to answer right now. Those that fail to form a clear-eyed view on agentic AI risk having those arbitrations made without them — choices that, through tacit compromise, will be so many small cuts in the fabric of desire.
Holding tech on a short leash isn't conservatism, it's transformation.
It's changing everything, so that what is essential doesn't change.
— Mickaël Tsakiris
Paris, April 2026