He’s running late for a meeting on the other side of Paris, but something unspeakably ugly stops François-Henri Pinault cold.

“Look at this,” he says, bolting from a leather chair in his office overlooking the city’s eighth arrondissement, as the late-afternoon light falls across the floor. Reaching his massive, nearly bare desk in two graceful strides, he snatches a piece of paper tucked into the corner of his leather-trimmed blotter. It’s a small black-and-white brochure, dense with tiny type.

“This,” he says, dangling the folded sheet between two fingers as if it were a dead rodent, “is what is coming inside a pair of Gucci sunglasses. You open this elegant case, and this is the first thing you see.” The brochure was printed, he concedes, by Gucci’s eyewear licensee—one of only two licensees the company maintains—but still it rankles him.“This cannot go on,” says the C.E.O. of PPR, the $23 billion conglomerate whose luxury unit, the Gucci Group, also includes Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, and other brands. “People have to realize that what we are selling is an experience, from beginning to end.”

Such a rant might seem de rigueur for someone in the business of making and marketing beautiful things, but coming from the son of François Pinault—the polarizing entrepreneur and art collector who transformed a provincial timber concern into a retail and luxury giant—it is, in its way, revolutionary. A tacky brochure most likely would have fluttered right past Pinault the elder, now 71, a high-school dropout who made his name and fortune forging deals and shuffling assets, leaping from industry to industry while hired guns oversaw the day-to-day maintenance of the companies he acquired. The soft-spoken François-Henri, 45, who took over Artémis, the family holding company, four years ago, decided in 2005 that he wanted to run PPR as well. He has made it clear that he is a different sort of leader—one who is interested not just in buying companies but in actually operating them.

Until recently, he had done so quietly, prompting whispers that he was too mild to follow his fiery father. But lately, he has shown his own talent for attracting attention, not all of it welcome. In early March, he and actress Salma Hayek ­revealed they were expecting a child and planning to marry; the relationship had been so discreet that even his siblings hadn’t known about it until mid-February. At about the same time, he plunged into secret negotiations with the German family that owned a 27 percent controlling stake in Puma, the world’s third-largest sporting-goods and clothing brand. The resulting $1.9 billion transaction, a pre­lude to a $5.4 billion offer for the remaining shares, was announced the Tuesday after Easter weekend—just as the paparazzi were finishing their initial assault on his personal life.