In Book VIII of the Odyssey, Ulysses washes up among the Phaeacians. No one knows who he is. At the banquet, a bard (the poet-singer of the Greek courts) takes up his lyre and sings of the Trojan War: the exploits of a certain Ulysses. And the man who hears his own story, told by another, covers his face and weeps. Sylvain Tesson holds this scene to be the exact moment literature was born: "we name the absent, we name the shades". Keep it in mind. It is precisely the situation of your House in 2026, and I will come back to it.
The film first. Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" earned 264 million dollars in its global opening, the best of his career. For millions of viewers who will never read the twenty-four books, this film will be the Odyssey. Their only version. Yet the Homer scholars who have seen it converge on a single verdict. Daniel Mendelsohn, translator of the poem, describes in the New York Review of Books a Ulysses with "no cleverness, no humour, no wily charm". Emily Wilson, the translator whose text Nolan studied, judges that he "tried to pack everything in while missing themes that were essential". Joel Christensen, editor of the Oxford critical guide to the poem, settles it: "This is not Homer's Odyssey. This is Nolan's Odyssey." And the Greek voices, those for whom this poem is a family inheritance, say nothing else: Athinorama, the Athens cultural weekly, salutes the visual ambition but judges that the film steps back from the philosophical complexity of the poem; the Greek City Times sums up the feeling: great cinema, but Nolan's Ulysses is not Homer's, a hero defeated by his trauma where the poem's hero is defeated by his hubris (the Greeks' excess, the sin of pride).
Nolan kept the itinerary and threw away the map. Every episode is there, admirably filmed; the system that gave them meaning is gone. And that system, looked at closely, is made of the same invariants the great Houses live by. That is why this cinema affair concerns you: it shows, at speed and in 70 millimetres, what happens to a heritage when a storytelling machine removes, along with the frictions we endure, the frictions that produced meaning.
Welcome to LUXE ÆTERNAI, my decoding of what AI agents change, or do not change, for Luxury Houses. This is a special edition. I am Mickaël Tsakiris. Twenty years in Luxury, on both sides of the table, in Houses and in agencies, from Saint Laurent to LVMH by way of Dior, Chanel and Hennessy. My work today: helping Houses decide which tasks to entrust to agents, writing the doctrine that governs them, and briefing the executive committees that must decide. I do not code, I do not sell chatbots: I design the rule and the oversight. Enjoy the read.
Without verticality, what remains is a catalogue with weather around it.
In Homer, the gods are not scenery: they are the frame that gives everything else its meaning. Tesson describes them weaving "the high warp", the loom through which the shuttle of our lives runs; Ulysses' freedom exists only measured against this frame that exceeds him. Nolan removes them: Athena reduced to visions, Poseidon to swell, and in place of the pantheon, notes The Ringer, a vague divinity with quasi Judeo-Christian virtues. Without the gods, no more contest between a man and the sky: a series of storms. Another subject.
In a House, that frame has a name: verticality. The founding myth, the heritage, what exceeds the product and the client, what makes you look up. A House whose conversational agent answers in three optimised bullet points has removed its gods: what remains is a catalogue with weather around it.
The lesson in measure your Houses call rarity.
The whole Odyssey proceeds from one precise fault: saved by the "Nobody" ruse, Ulysses cannot resist shouting his true name at the blinded Cyclops. Intelligence yields to pride; Poseidon may strike. Nolan cut the scene, and explained himself on The Daily Show: an untranslatable pun. He took the moral pivot of the story, the first pun in Western literature, for a joke that does not land on screen. Punishment without the fault is no longer a lesson about excess: it is hostile weather.
Yet the lesson of measure is one the Houses know better than anyone: it is rarity. Not selling everything, not showing everything, not accelerating everything. Excess, in Greek, is called hubris; in distribution, it is called overexposure, and it kills brands as surely as Poseidon sinks ships.
Desire is born of the finite, never of the endlessly available.
The most vertiginous moment of the poem is a refusal. Calypso offers Ulysses, says Tesson, "the absolute fantasy" and immortality; he says no, for a mortal woman and an island of stones. Choosing the finite over the infinite: that is the founding gesture of the human condition according to Homer. The film rationalises the episode: seven years of amnesia induced by lotus flowers. No more offer, no more refusal, no more choice; Ulysses no longer chooses to be mortal, he is drugged.
Anyone who works in Luxury will recognise the vertigo: desire is born of finitude. The object that takes on a patina, the series that ends, the wait that lasts. Digital promises the endlessly available; Luxury lives on the finite, chosen. A House that lets its agents make everything available, at once, offers its clients Calypso's immortality: an eternity without desire.
The optimised journey is a Ulysses without mystery.
Ulysses is polytropos, the man of many turns: metis, that cunning intelligence woven with speech, embodied "humanly by Ulysses, divinely by Athena". Christophe Ono-dit-Biot, in "L'odyssée de l'Odyssée", hardens the portrait: "an opportunist", ambivalent, imperfect, and loved for twenty-eight centuries precisely for that. Nolan's hero, observe Mendelsohn and the Homerists, has no cunning, no humour, no charm: an ordinary man haunted by his past. A first-degree Ulysses.
Transpose it: metis, in a House, is the sales advisor who senses that today is not the day to close, the unplanned gesture, the conversation that takes a detour before reaching the product. It is exactly what an agent cannot do, because it optimises the straight line. A client journey without metis is Nolan's Ulysses: efficient, sincere, and without mystery.
A House is an olive-tree bed, not a portable brooch.
Nostos is the return: the word from which we drew nostalgia. In Homer it is not homesickness but a reinscription in the order of the world, and its symbol is a piece of furniture: the marriage bed carved from a living olive tree, rooted in the soil of Ithaca. It cannot be moved. Jankélévitch, quoted by Tesson, holds Ulysses to be "an adventurer by force and a homebody by vocation". The film replaces the bed with a brooch, cuts Laertes and his trees, and inverts the ending: Ulysses abdicates and sails away again. The anti-nostos, under the title Odyssey.
The French word that best names what the film destroys is one you use every day: the House. Not the brand, which travels and licenses itself out; the House, which is a rooting, a place, founding dead, an olive-tree bed. A portable brooch instead of a rooted tree: that is what becomes of a House that lets its story be adapted without a map. Not betraying the House: that is the whole stake, and nowhere else.
The bard who sings your House is now called ChatGPT.
Back to the opening scene, the one Tesson holds to be the birth of literature. Nolan cut it entirely: no Phaeacians in the film. He removed from the founding story of the West the scene where the West learns to tell stories. And here the two threads of this letter tie together.
Because your House is living that scene at this very moment, except that the bard has changed. Your clients ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity what your House is worth, what to buy, what to believe. These machines sing your story before millions of guests, and you are in the hall, incognito, like Ulysses at the banquet. The only question that matters: does what they sing resemble you, or is it already Nolan's Odyssey, your episodes without your system? I call this the agentic footprint: the version of your House the machines tell when you are not in the room. I am convinced that, for a growing share of your clients, that version will soon be the only one that exists.
A film that is the negative of its poem, a warning for your Houses.
In cinema, the verdict is double. The form belonged to Nolan by right: Tesson himself describes Homer framing his battles like a filmmaker, wide shots, tight shots; on that ground, the film is great and betrayed no one. The substance did not belong to him: the gods, hubris, finitude, metis, nostos are not five decorative motifs but the system through which a twenty-eight-century-old poem thinks the human condition, and it is that system, exactly that, which the film removed. Faithful to the episodes, treacherous to the substance: the negative of its poem.
In Luxury, the lesson reads in the same mirror. Your invariants, the ones that make a House more than a brand, are the direct cousins of Homer's: verticality is your sky, rarity your measure, finitude your desire, the human hand your metis, rootedness your nostos. Agentic AI (artificial intelligence that acts, not merely answers) will adapt your story whether you want it or not; adaptation is not the danger, adaptation without a map is. And be precise about what you hand to the agent: endured friction (the irritant, the administrative delay, the form) must die, and the agent excels at killing it; productive friction (the ritual, the chosen wait, the ceremony) is meaning disguised as slowness, and it cannot be delegated. Luxury is not defined by friction; it is defined by the meaning certain slownesses carry. Two moves, starting now: listen to what the machine bard already sings about you, question by question, in every language your clients speak; then engrave what, in your House, does not rationalise, your gods, your olive-tree bed, before entrusting a single episode to an agent.
Constantine Cavafy wrote, in "Ithaka", the line that judges both Nolan's film and the temptation stalking your Houses: "hope your road is a long one". Desire is born of the road, not of the arrival. A House that lets its agents shorten every road will soon have no Ithaca left to offer.
Luxe oblige!
Mickaël Tsakiris
Paris, Wednesday, July 22, 2026