Like any corporatized, cliquey industry run by people whose basic human needs are easily met, fashion loves to create drama where there isn’t any—or only just a little. Sometimes, though, the drama is real—at least real enough to give you a little bit of insight into what is actually going on.

To me, the widely known but never publicly acknowledged rift between Tiffany vice president of product and communication, Alexandre Arnault, and former executive creative director Ruba Abu-Nimah, says something interesting about the integration of Tiffany, one of America’s only true luxury brands, into LVMH, the biggest luxury conglomerate in the world. 

In the beginning, of course, the tensions were the predictable result of absorbing a very large business—for which LVMH paid $16 billion—into a vastly larger one. LVMH, with a current market cap of $480 billion, has owned American companies before, with poor-to-mixed results. It still runs Marc Jacobs, which has had its ups and downs and is on fair footing, but it divested from both Michael Kors and Donna Karan, two other (albeit more mid-market) icons of American design that it never managed to make work. Michael Kors took his company public, and became a billionaire, nearly a decade after LVMH sold off its stake.