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Eat Dior, or Eat at Dior? How Luxury Brands Are Building Beyond the Product

Dior’s new Milan restaurant raises a playful question with a serious implication: if luxury is selling experience rather than product, how far can a fashion house go in becoming part of a client’s life?

Paris Fashion Week opened on Sept. 28, a year after the extraordinary run of debuts that reshaped some of luxury’s biggest houses. Matthieu Blazy at Chanel, Jonathan Anderson at Dior, and Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe all return to settle further into their roles, while Pierpaolo Piccioli shows at Balenciaga amid reports, not yet confirmed by the house, that he may be leaving. There will be plenty said this week about who is settling in and who is already under pressure.

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But something that happened 10 days earlier, in Milan, shows another side of what luxury is trying to achieve. On Sept. 18, Dior reopened its flagship on Via Monte Napoleone with a restaurant, Monsieur Dior, entrusted to Enrico Bartolini, Italy’s most Michelin-starred chef. For years, the industry has told itself that luxury sells experience rather than product. In practice, most of the experience has stopped at the edge of the body: a beautifully lit store, an appointment held just for you. Dior has just asked its clients to eat it. Which raises the question: are you meant to eat Dior, or eat at Dior?

This isn’t a new idea. Armani opened a cafe in Paris in 1998 and eventually built an entire food division around the format. Versace followed in 2000 with a restaurant inside its first branded hotel. Roberto Cavalli brought the idea to nightlife in 2002, followed by Dolce........

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