Johann Rupert isn’t afraid of the Apple Watch but robots keep him awake at night. The chairman of Richemont (whose jewels include Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Montblanc) was bullish about Apple’s new toy. “You expect me to spend $13,000 on a watch and then throw it away in a year’s time? That’s not smart,” he thundered.
Nevertheless, he has grave concerns about the second machine age, as outlined in his favourite book, Federico Pistono’s Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK. “How is society going to cope with structural unemployment?” he asked of a future where he saw a luxury market “squeezed and squeezed” and the middle classes all but destroyed. The most pessimistic prognosis of the conference, it was perhaps typical of the man christened “Rupert the Bear” by this paper. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom: he also dispensed some excellent career advice to the children of the future: “Become a hairdresser. Become a florist. Diagnostic medicine? Forget it.” At least we won’t need to worry about school fees any more.
Big data are super sexy. “With 100 billion searches a month, Google’s the best way of predicting the present. And it’s getting pretty good at predicting trends, too.” So said Peter Fitzgerald, president of innovation and digital at the British Fashion Council, as he tracked the surge in “midi skirt” searches this year. I want what he’s got.