In light of his earlier moves—replacing most of the management team his father had assembled, including longtime family confidant Serge Weinberg, who preceded François-Henri as C.E.O. of PPR; selling off Printemps, the mass-market department store chain that was the second P in PPR; and, perhaps most controversially, emphasizing the brands themselves over the diva designers at his most prestigious fashion houses—one thing is clear: This is not his father’s PPR.

“Sometimes matters of style can be deceiving,” Pinault says, throwing back his fourth espresso of the day. “Remember, you never want to be too obvious.”

Now Pinault must show that his plans will work. The challenges are formidable. In early 2006, he set a goal of doubling Gucci’s sales, to $4 billion a year by 2011. He’s trying to fix the underperforming brand Yves Saint Laurent, which was $268 million in debt when the ­Gucci Group purchased it in 1999. And while Puma has been growing for more than a decade, its future depends on the loyalty of the fickle hipsters who were instrumental in its rise.

Pinault must balance these priorities without neglecting the company’s four mass-market retail operations: Fnac, a book and electronics retailer; Conforama, a household-furnishings chain; mail-order catalog Redcats; and CFAO, which distributes cars and pharmaceuticals in French-speaking Africa. These slow-growing divisions drag PPR’s operating margin down to 7 percent—compared with about 20 percent for such pure-­luxury giants as LVMH and Cartier parent Richemont—prompting analysts to routinely ask Pinault when he plans to dump those companies in favor of glitzier brands. But he has repeatedly insisted that PPR’s non-luxury units, which account for 80 percent of the firm’s revenue but only 57 percent of its operating profit, are a hedge against the vagaries of the go-go fine-goods market.

Pinault knows the retail businesses well, having worked at most of them since joining PPR straight out of business school in 1987; he has even run two, Fnac and CFAO. His father didn’t speak of succession during those early years, though François-Henri, one of three children and the eldest son, was always the presumed choice. He spent his boyhood and teenage years in Brittany, just a few miles from where his father was raised. It was an upbringing focused on tennis and soccer rather than empire building, and that was what Pinault père wanted for his kids—a life more genteel than his own bourgeois background. Besides, his son was by nature easygoing, with little of the older man’s canned heat and carnivorous drive. “We just thought he was a regular guy who liked sports and girls,” says Christophe Cuvillier, who met the younger Pinault in business school and is now C.E.O. of Conforama. “It wasn’t until someone noticed he had a better car than we did that it occurred to us who his father was.”

But during those years of ricocheting through PPR’s divisions, François-Henri says he developed a passion for the mechanics of running a conglomerate. His father began to hint about the future, enlisting a group of 10 outside C.E.O.’s to formally monitor his son’s progress throughout the 1990s. Then, on a misty Friday night in April 2003, the two men settled into their usual corner banquette at L’Ami Louis, the bistro they visit monthly, not just for the escargot but because the chef-owner is from their ancestral hometown. Before the wine arrived, François Pinault dug into the pocket of his suit, pulled out a set of engraved interlocking gold rings, and pressed them into the hand of his astonished son, then 41. On one ring was inscribed "François 1962–2003"; on a second, "François-Henri 2003." The third ring was left blank, presumably for François-Henri’s son, also named François, now nine years old.

“He told me that by Monday he would be gone, that all his things would be removed from the office, and that I would be running everything—just like that,” Pinault says now, turning the rings, which hang from his key chain, over and over in his hands. “Everything” meant Artémis, the family holding company (named after the goddess of hunting), which was ­instrumental in bringing rapacious, American-style private equity investing to a somewhat reluctant European business community. Its few long-term holdings include Bordeaux vineyard Château Latour, Christie’s auction house, and a controlling stake in PPR.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Pinault continues. “He was barely 67 and totally vital. I said, ‘Why would you possibly want to do this?’ He told me it wasn’t a matter of what he was ready for; it was that he was putting himself in my place, thinking that if he were 41 like I was, he would want to be running the company, not waiting around for his ­father to get too old or die.”