In Vienna underground stations there is an advertising poster with a drawing of a man in a nightcap, slippers and a wide-stretched nightgown. Everyone here knows the caricatured face: Richard Lugner. He advertises his Lugner City shopping center with allegedly particularly long opening times. The poster says a lot about him: Lugner is a brand that needs no further explanation; he’s not afraid to poke fun at himself when it’s for marketing purposes; And it also has a political aspect, because Lugner fought a lawsuit against the shop closing time law for a while, which he took to the Constitutional and Human Rights Court, albeit unsuccessfully.
He has established himself as an internationally known figure in social life by inviting personalities, some of them of considerable prominence, to his box at the Opera Ball for the past 30 years. The chronicle lists divas like Loren, Cardinale or Lollobrigida, entertainers like Dieter Bohlen, but also Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian or Ivana Trump. Lugner knows how to turn the choice of his companion into a spectacle by raising expectations and giving the guests comments that are not always flattering.
A player and successful entrepreneur
He plays a variant of this game, which goes beyond the limits of the ordinary into the contemptible, with women who, with increasing frequency, take turns sharing a section of his life. He has given them all sorts of animal names, which are enthusiastically taken up by the tabloids. At best, it can be stated as a mitigating factor that Lugner does not spare himself. Most recently, he spoke to the “Kronen-Zeitung” about the expired date of his Viagra tablets.
He nurtured his nimbus with appearances in films and series. He ran twice in presidential elections, and in 1998 he received a whopping ten percent of the votes for this marketing stunt.
With all this, it’s easy to forget that Lugner is a successful entrepreneur. The son of a lawyer who later stayed in the war, he was born in Vienna in 1932. In 1962, the graduate of a technical high school received a master builder’s license. He makes his money by renovating old buildings and building gas stations and offices. A columnist for the “Krone” gave him the nickname “Mortar”.
Of course, the colorful pages shared in detail that he was down with a cold ahead of his 90th birthday this Tuesday and a gala scheduled for Saturday. On Monday, however, he was able to come back to the town hall for a snack with the mayor.
