the heiress

As the fashion-obsessed daughter of Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury-goods company LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Delphine Arnault has long had a front-row seat at LVMH fashion shows. But last fall her father decided that the time had come for her to have a front-row seat in his LVMH business dealings too. Delphine, 28, was appointed to the board of LVMH, becoming the only woman alongside 15 men.

Delphine has undergone a quiet fashion apprenticeship over the past three years. After graduating from the London School of Economics, she worked for two years at McKinsey in Paris before joining LVMH in 2000. She learned the business with John Galliano, working on product development and marketing for his label and then switching to Dior. Now Delphine heads Dior's women's shoe division, one of the company's fastest-growing sectors. "She's got a very good sense of product, a very good eye," says Sidney Toledano, chief executive of Dior Couture, who says Delphine is treated the same as anyone else at the company. "Her father insists on that."

The Dior job takes Delphine out on the road frequently, checking in with Dior factories, ensuring that retailers are giving suitable prominence to her merchandise and trying to gauge the public's reaction to new products. People at the company who know her say she can be shy on first contact but that she's a careful observer who appears to have inherited her father's determination to get the job done.

Bringing a young and inexperienced family member onto the board of a public company can be touchy in the U.S., but in France it is common practice, and company insiders say Arnault had no qualms about it. Through a complex holding structure, the family owns 65% of the voting rights and 48% of the capital of LVMH. With Delphine, the family has three of the 16 board seats; Bernard Arnault's father Jean, 83, is the third. If Delphine can prove herself, she could be well placed to succeed her father one day. But Dad's only 54 and shows no sign of relinquishing power to anyone. --By Peter Gumbel FOR TIME MAGAZINE