Battle for the recovering luxury market heats up
Louis Vuitton officially opened a new flagship in downtown Beijing on Jan. 13, 2026.
CNBC | Evelyn Cheng
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The big story
For the last few weeks, a new row of luxury stores in downtown Beijing has started to shake up a long-muted consumer scene.
The anticipation grew as Tuesday night approached. Crowds of young people screamed as they caught glimpses of celebrities climbing the stairways inside the translucent, bubble-shaped exterior of Louis Vuitton’s newest store. I could see others lingering on the upper levels of the adjoining mall with their phones out.
The buzz topped one of the more exciting events of late — Apple‘s annual iPhone releases in a nearby shopping complex. It was a reminder that celebrities can still draw aspirational crowds in China, and that luxury houses remain among the few brands able to command them.
After all the shouting and long waits in freezing temperatures, the official opening of the Louis Vuitton store finally arrived. Invited guests could wander through the five main floors of the new store, ending at a café upstairs.
There were no speeches. No choreographed fanfare. Few discernible foreign faces. It was a far cry from Fendi’s 2007 fashion show on the Great Wall.
The art of restraint
Western brands entering China, especially its high-security capital city of Beijing, have long had to straddle a fine line between local marketing ambitions and reputational risks to the brand back home.
When Canada Goose opened its first China flagship in the same Beijing shopping complex in 2018, its CEO was tight-lipped throughout my 20-minute interview. The event was overshadowed by diplomatic tensions with Ottawa following the high-profile arrest of a Huawei executive in Canada. This time, LVMH declined executive interviews around the Beijing store opening altogether.
Yet revenue from China remains difficult to ignore.
Disney CEO Bob Iger visited Beijing last week, following the success of “Zootopia 2” in China. More Western executives typically visit around the annual China Development Forum in late March. Google Cloud is advertising its own event aimed at helping Chinese firms expand globally, with a rare building-sized poster on the facade of a hotel overlooking downtown Beijing’s main thoroughfare.
The political backdrop helps. A fragile U.S.-China truce remains in place. And after nearly a decade of strained bilateral ties, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney is in China this week.
There are also signs that the consumer market is finally picking up after a sluggish post-pandemic recovery.
In November, executives from Prada, Coach, EssilorLuxottica and Value Retail reported that demand in China was stabilizing. In October, LVMH said mainland China was seeing significant growth in fashion and leather, even as the category had yet to see a…