Calvin Klein is closing down its luxury collection business, closing its offices in Milan and making staff redundant in New York, according to a source. Michelle Kessler-Sanders, the president of the 205W39NYC ready-to-wear business, will leave the company in June 2019. Overall, about 100 people, or 1 percent of PVH's global workforce, will be affected.

After Calvin Klein parted ways with chief creative officer Raf Simons at the end of 2018, they said it was rethinking its approach to the luxury market, on a strategy that would “[offer] an unexpected mix of influences and moving at an accelerated pace."

In January, it was announced that the brand would close its 654 Madison Avenue flagship store, which Simons renovated in 2017, in addition to other changes, some of which came to fruition very soon.

The brand’s sales come from their underwear and denim lines, much of which is produced by third-party licensing partners. But chief executive Steve Shiffman still plans to develop what the source called "aspirational" products. The search for a new design director to lead that effort continues, but it's presumed that the designer won’t be as high profile as Simons.

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France's LVMH is helping projects by upcoming entrepreneurs in the luxury goods space, including a start-up whose software might help detect counterfeits. The owners of Louis Vuitton, aim to support the new businesses by hosting them in a mega-campus where they can collaborate with its in-house brands.

LVMH, the world's biggest luxury goods group, is following in the footsteps of French cosmetics giant L'Oréal in grabbing a corner of Station F, a vast startup incubator in Paris where it offers rent-free space to the startups.

"The idea is to animate and activate those conversations around the things that might affect the luxury industry," said Ian Rogers, who is a former Apple executive who joined LVMH in 2015 as chief digital officer.

Paris is among one of the major European cities bidding to displace London's dominance in the startup scene as BREXIT looms and President Emmanuel Macron pushes a pro-reform agenda to promote business and investment.

Station F was launched last year by French billionaire Xavier Niel, who is also the partner of Delphine Arnault, an executive at Vuitton and daughter of LVMH boss Bernard Arnault.

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New brands like GmbH in Berlin to Grace Wales Bonner and Charles Jeffrey in London, Fengchen Wang and Xander Zhou in China, and Avoc and Y/Project in Paris are fresh, diverse and without any boundaries.