The Comité Colbert does not, as a rule, sign treaties. On July 1 in Paris, the guild of French luxury houses signed one with India’s Indo-French Chamber, promising to remove “the main barriers” to establishing its maisons there. Luxury has turned to India because China went quiet, and it turned before India is built to receive it.

The coverage called it a milestone. The calendar says hedge. Bain and Altagamma’s latest study puts mainland luxury spending down three to five percent, against a global market barely flat at €358 billion. The report calls it maturity, not a rebound; the post-pandemic surge is not returning. Chinese shoppers are trading down to local labels and experiences. Taken together, the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and India now match mainland China in scale. Growth did not vanish; it moved.

The retreat is already priced. In January, LVMH sold DFS’s Hong Kong and Macau stores — along with its Greater China brand rights and intellectual property — to a partially state-owned Chinese company at a steep discount from the 1997 acquisition price. It also scrapped its flagship shopping and entertainment project on Hainan. Firms do not exit a market they expect to recover.

The pull is real. India holds the world’s third-largest population of billionaires and stages some ten million weddings a year. What it lacks is a floor to sell on. The guild’s own list of barriers runs from customs duties through a more entrenched obstruction: India’s non-tariff certification regime, which the guild has made its first lobbying priority. Under India’s Bureau of Indian Standards rules, imported luxury goods require country-specific compliance testing regardless of their provenance; for some houses, the cost of clearing that process now matches or exceeds what India generates in revenue. Premium retail there is barely a decade old; the country’s highest-performing malls have existed for less than ten years, and its newest landmark opened in Mumbai in 2023. LVMH keeps three hundred staff in India and twenty thousand in China.

The pivot has state backing. Earlier this year, the European Union and India concluded their trade agreement, the largest the EU has ever signed with a single country, with tariffs coming down in stages rather than at once. The guild’s memorandum, five months on, follows the same logic: access promised, details deferred. The relief both instruments offer arrives later. On present evidence, so will the market.

None of this makes the demand imaginary. It makes the wager early — placed on a market growing fast enough that luxury cannot wait, but not yet built to receive it.

A guild obliged to dismantle a market’s barriers before it can sell there has not found a market; it has commissioned one.

It may still pay. Luxury has decided it cannot afford to wait for the verdict. India has not yet decided what it wants to be.