When I got a chance to catch up with Tom, a longtime Lalanne collector, he expressed astonishment—as many people did yesterday—at the extraordinary results at Sotheby’s $96 million sale of the contents of Jean and Terry de Gunzburg’s New York residence, and the prices achieved for Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne’s furniture and design works. Naturally, the main talking point was the $33.5 million sale of the 15 mirrors that Claude Lalanne made for Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé.

The disparity between the prices achieved for male and female creators is no secret, but it has been put into high relief by Les Lalanne. It seemed as though François-Xavier’s animal-based work would always eclipse Claude’s primarily vegetable-based work. Until this month, the highest auction price for a piece solely by Claude was the $5.2 million paid for one of her signature Choupattes in the first Pauline Karpidas sale in 2023. That same year, François-Xavier’s Rhinocretaire made a then-unbelievable price of $19 million, almost four times as high.

In December, Sotheby’s raised the stakes in the Lalanne market by selling François-Xavier’s Rhinoceros bar for $31 million. (The received wisdom in the art world is that Ken Griffin was the buyer.) And in this week’s de Gunzburg sale, two different woolly sheep sold for close to $2.5 million. These sheep rarely sell on their own, but they’ve sold for half that price in the past, although one dealer I spoke to insists this is where they should trade.

But last week, at Christie’s in Paris, the pressure started to build in Claude’s market when an 8-foot-tall, gold-colored bronze apple sold for nearly $7 million. Then, on Wednesday, a buyer paid nearly $6 million at Sotheby’s for a Choupatte, similar to the one from Karpidas, and an apple slightly smaller than the one sold in Paris made nearly $8.8 million. Then the set of mirrors sold for $33.5 million—the highest price for a work by Claude, but also for any Lalanne work, or indeed any work of design. While female designers have previously held the top spot in the category, there’s something gratifying about seeing Claude take it over. We’re making progress.

Whenever these kinds of sales take place, there is immediate speculation about the buyer. While I’ve heard that this person was an American and a well-established Lalanne collector, it was not Griffin. And although it may not end up being an art-hoovering skylord of finance, there’s a clear financial play here.

I am told there were several buyers who had expressed interest in the mirrors up to $20 million. In auction terms, that’s really not far off the final $28.5 million hammer price, because the competition tends to loosen all financial discipline. But someone well-entrenched in the Lalanne market surprised me by suggesting that it would be perfectly acceptable for a collector to have bought the set of 15 mirrors and selected the best or most appropriate 10 to keep for themselves, and then to sell off the other five to fund the purchase. After all, even before this week’s success, Claude’s mirrors have sold at a premium—the highest price paid for a single one is nearly $4.8 million, another half dozen have traded around $2 million, and others have made a million or so.

With the provenance boost and continuing supernova effect in the Lalanne market, it’s not hard to imagine a savvy and determined collector significantly reducing their cost of ownership over time. The de Gunzburgs paid €1.7 million, or about $2.2 million, for the mirrors in the 2009 YSL-Bergé sale at Christie’s at the nadir of the global financial crisis. The mirrors have achieved a 14-fold return in less than 20 years. There’s no reason to believe this is the top of the Lalanne market—just as there’s no reason to believe it isn’t, either. And yet, selling five of those mirrors in the future, separately or together, might significantly reduce the cash investment here.