House of Style

Before you meet Asim Abdullah, you hear the stories: master’s degree from Stanford, made his fortune in Silicon Valley, married to a beautiful doctor, with whom he has two children and shares a lovely home down on the Peninsula, as well as the famous Pacific Heights pied-à-terre—if you can even use that word for an apartment that takes up an entire floor high in one of SF’s most venerable apartment buildings and has views that reach, or so it seems, as far as the Farallones. Unless you’re a saint (and who among us is?), you’re pretty much guaranteed to hate him before you’ve even laid eyes on him. But then you do meet him, and he’s charming—offering to get you a glass of water and then, later, in mid-conversation, interrupting himself to say, worriedly, that you’ve got the sun in your eyes and wouldn’t you rather sit over here? Drat. He’s thoughtful as well. Even so, it might just be possible to keep hating him—or at least work up some mild resentment—if he weren’t so damned interesting.

For instance, buying Emanuel Ungaro, which he did in 2005. With any other man, you’d suspect that the couture house was a mere plaything—an excuse to fly to Paris once a month. But no. Asim explains his fascination with the power of luxury brands, the psychology of creating demand based on what is, in essence, an artificial scarcity, and you actually believe him. “It’s such a different business from the tech business,” he says. “It still boggles my mind how women are willing to sign up to buy an Hermès bag that costs $10,000, and then they tell you the bag is only going to be available for two years even though you know that, if they wanted to, they could produce it for seven—they could produce Hermès bags in the thousands!” So it wasn’t the prestige of owning a designer label that was appealing? “The thing that I really like about Ungaro is not that it’s a trophy property, but that you end up implementing a set of marketing strategies and long-term plans. How you deal with, say, a product like Gap or Zara is very different than how you deal with Chanel or Ungaro. I don’t think of us as being in the apparel business—I think we’re in the luxury business, the image business.”

Don’t forget that he’s smart—you don’t play a part in, basically, creating the first commercial phase of the Internet without some serious brains. (Which, by the way, grossly oversimplifies his high-tech career, but then again, if you could really understand and convey what those companies did, you’d have invested in them at the right time, and you’d be sitting in your own penthouse right now.) And he’s smart enough to have packed up what he learned in those years and brought it with him. “The fact that I have been an entrepreneur most of my life means that I’ve learned to go from one milestone to another milestone and stay focused, because this is how companies develop in Silicon Valley,” he says. “If you don’t reach the next milestone, guess what? You don’t get the funding.”

Isn’t there something a little counterintuitive about living in SF—the bluest city in the bluest state in the nation—and relaunching a couture house? “A few years ago, we asked ourselves this question, whether we wanted to be in Europe or back in Asia”—both Asim and his wife, Isha, were born and grew up in Pakistan—“or off on an island somewhere. We concluded that even though there was nothing holding us back, we just think this is such a perfect place to be.” But what about luxury and this particular city? “I was reading someplace that San Francisco has the third-largest concentration of billionaires in the US. There is a lot of wealth here, but some of the traditional things you would expect to go along with that statistic—the trappings, the chauffeur-driven cars—you don’t see. People are, from a fashion standpoint, very straight­forward. I haven’t figured out if this is arrogance in a different way—‘we don’t care about all of this’—or if this is genuinely the culture of this place. But it’s a bit of an enigma.” Could it be the guilt factor? “I agree there is a guilt factor, and people are very generous and philanthropic as well. You look at the museums that have gone up, and the good work that has been done, the contributions that people make—it’s not like they don’t like to part with money. Maybe it has to do with reverse snobbery, which is quite refreshing.”

Speaking of philanthropy, this is probably the point at which you think to yourself, OK, he’s smart and engaging enough to make marketing strategies interesting, but what has he done for the city, or the world? (Apart from that whole Internet-commerce thing.) Sad to say—sad, that is, if you’re still trying to find excuses to resent the man—Asim is a commissioner of the Asian Art Museum, and not only for the simple reason that art is, generally, a good thing but because, as he points out, the arts stimulate the economy and create jobs. He says he and his wife have a broad portfolio when it comes to charities. “We’re involved in a few different initiatives: the hospital in Pakistan from which Isha graduated and an institution called the Global Heritage Fund, which reinvigorates ancient sites of historical importance.” In addition, Isha works with an after-school program in SF that encourages inner-city kids to go to college, as well as volunteering at a local clinic.

At this point, you look around his comfortable study, desperately seeking something, anything, that you could find objectionable. He glances at his BlackBerry, which he has been politely ignoring while you talk. You make an inane comment about wanting one. He says, “I was quite happy before getting it, but I would be miserable without it now,” and then adds, seriously, “It’s the tool of the devil—choose wisely.” Here he is, trying to save you from yourself. Really, what’s not to like?