"Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster" by Dana Thomas

[CouttsClient]

Originally Posted by radicaldog

Thanks. That's quite good compared to the likes of Hermes, but still steep. I might get in touch with him for small accessories in calf though.
You definitely should at the very least shoot him an email and ask what sort of things he can do for you. I don't imagine small accessories would be much.

 

[Advent]

Originally Posted by radicaldog

Er, yes. Sorry. I'm thinking of reorganising my pockets and I figured it may be worth investing in a few very good pieces made to my specifications (card case, passport cover, wallet, etc.).
And keep in mind that in leather (calf, goat) it's an entirely different price point.

 

[radicaldog]

Originally Posted by Advent

And keep in mind that in leather (calf, goat) it's an entirely different price point.

Of course.

 

[pebblegrain]

Can anyone summarize the main arguments in the book?

I presume 1 is:

Some mall-luxe brands are assembled 99% in China and shipped to Italy for the last 1%

Anything else?

And, which brands?

 

[SpooPoker]

Originally Posted by pebblegrain

Can anyone summarize the main arguments in the book?

I presume 1 is:

Some mall-luxe brands are assembled 99% in China and shipped to Italy for the last 1%

Anything else?

And, which brands?

The book focuses on mostly LV/Hermes.. but its an interesting read. If you have not had a hand in high end luxury personally, it is a good insight to what really goes on there.

 

[grace2011]

Originally Posted by pebblegrain

Can anyone summarize the main arguments in the book?

I presume 1 is:

Some mall-luxe brands are assembled 99% in China and shipped to Italy for the last 1%

Anything else?

And, which brands?

It's not that simple. Here's a blurb:

*Starred Review* Thomas has been the fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris for 12 years and writes about style for the New York Times Magazine and other well-known publications. She traces the origins of luxury from the mid-nineteenth century, when Louis Vuitton made his first steamer trunks and custom-made clothing was strictly the province of European aristocracy, through the fashion boom of the 1920s, when names such as Dior, Gucci, and Yves Saint Laurent came into prominence, and buyers with expendable income could afford exquisite clothing and perfume. Sadly, today most of the well-known names are owned by multinational groups, and luxury items have become commodities, where buyers crave name brands for what they represent rather than their inherent quality of manufacture and design. Thomas takes us into the streets of New York, where counterfeit items are sold that look so much like the real thing that it takes an expert to tell them apart, to the Guangzhou region in China, where children make knockoff goods under appalling conditions. She manages to remove the veil from the fashion industry with a blend of history, culture, and investigative journalism.

 

[SpooPoker]

^ Thats the sugary, "buy my compelling book" lingo. I still said it best.

 

[pebblegrain]

Originally Posted by grace2011

It's not that simple. Here's a blurb:

blablablabla ...She manages to remove the veil from the fashion industry with a blend of history, culture, and investigative journalism.

Whats the veil?

 

[grace2011]

Originally Posted by pebblegrain

Whats the veil?

You seem very interested in all of this. Why don't you just read the book.
I'm not Miss Grace Cliff-Notes.

 

[CouttsClient]

Here are a few tidbits from the book: Chinese "hostesses" accept shopping visits with their clients at luxury brand stores, which stay open until midnight, as payment for services rendered. The next morning, the hostess returns the purchase for cash, less a 10 percent "transaction fee," this inflating luxury brands' sales figures in China and washing away any illegal cash transactions between the woman and her client. A rich, hip New York banker met a pretty Russian girl in the bar of the Hotel Byblos in Saint-Tropez late one night and took her home with him. The next morning, she told him pointedly: "I could really use a new pair of Gucci shoes." He understood immediately that she was a working girl and took out his wallet. "No," she said, "Gucci shoes." And to the store they went. Louis Vuitton has fourteen official sites – eleven in France, two in Spain and one in San Dimas, California (YES, IN THE USA!!!) where leather goods are produced. Diana Vreeland wrote in 1984: "Bloomingdale's is the end of shopping because there isn't anyone to wait on you, then you see a man; you think he's a floorwalker: ‘I'm sorry, lady, I can't help you. I'm like you, I'm just looking for somebody to help me.' So you go out into the street with tears in your eyes: you've accomplished nothing and you've lost your health!... Or I go into, say, Saks Fifth Avenue, and there on a rack on wheels are two dozen $5,000 dresses. On a rack! It shocks me... $5,000 dresses, dangling there... Of course a lot of people enjoy the variety. They go home empty-handed. But they've shopped. It's a sport." "There I was sitting in a row of the Dior show with French first lady Bernadette Chirac and former first lady Claude Pompidou, and they looked like they had been hit in the face with a cold dead fish. They couldn't believe what they were looking at: this conservative house where they've all bought their clothes for years. How much was there that Madame Chirac or Madame Pompidou could wear?" -- New York socialite and lifelong Dior client Nan Kempner (1997) Miuccia Prada met Patrizio Bertelli, a leather goods manufacturer from Arezzo, in Tuscany. Fashion legend has it that she caught him at a trade show in Milan in 1978 selling cheap knockoffs of her bags, legally pursued him to stop, then decided to bring him on board to handle her manufacturing instead. "I am tempted to say what is luxury: servants and sixteenth-century service. If you want to talk about rare beauty, I know what it is. To fake luxury today is easy. You put some details from the brand's past, you put a little bit of gold, and that's it. I can't bear that... Real luxurious people hate status. You don't look rich because you have a rich dress. When you look at a person, do you see the spirit or the sexiness or the creativity? Just to see a big diamond, what does it mean? It's all about satisfaction. I think it's horrible, this judgment based on money. It's all an illusion that you look better because you have a symbol of luxury. Really, it doesn't bring you anything. It's so banal." -- Miuccia Prada Chanel's first freestanding store was in Hawaii – Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center, 1984, before New York, before Beverly Hills. Why? Because of the Japanese tourists. I remember an American woman I saw one morning in the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. She was a chic New Yorker in her fifties, well dressed in a designer pantsuit, good jewelry, and Chanel sunglasses, and obviously wealthy enough to pay $500 a night at one of the world's top hotels. She walked up to the concierge desk and asked its chief, "Where can I buy a good fake Rolex? You know, a really good fake." The concierge looked at her incredulously and said he didn't know. I looked at her and wondered, "Are the sunglasses fake, too?" "I remember walking into an assembly plant in Thailand a couple of years ago and seeing six or seven little children, all under ten years old, sitting on the floor assembling counterfeit leather handbags," the investigator told me as we drove away from the (counterfeiting) raid. "The owners had broken the children's legs and tied the lower leg to the thigh so the bones wouldn't mend. He did it because the children said they wanted to go outside and play." These days, the rich buy Isaac Mizrahi designs at Target while the middle market shops at Gucci. Mizrahi calls the phenomenon "bipolar shopping disorder." Lagerfeld thinks it's just terrific. "We live in a time when expensive and inexpensive -- not cheap, I hate that word -- can live very well together. It's the first time in fashion this happened." "Before, cheap clothes looked cheap," Andersson (H&M) told Dana. "Today, it's nearly impossible to see the difference, and that's what we are trying to prove. We can never be luxurious as Chanel, but luxury is more in YOUR perception than what it says on the label. We see ourselves as competitors with everyone -- Gap, Zara, but also Chanel. Why shop at Chanel if you can shop at H&M?" The real rich do not attend the couture shows. "Most of the Chanel clients are not here," Karl Lagerfeld said after the Chanel couture show in July 2006. "They have other things to do, you know? But the oceans are crossed by private jets for fittings." "Who are they?" Dana asked "New fortunes. Huge fortunes. People who are richer than air. People we don't really know – we know if the money is clean – but people who don't want to be identified. It's not the red carpet. Whenever you have the dress on the red carpet, those women, they cancel their order immediately. The women who buy couture don't want to be identified with actresses." "Where do they live" "China, there are more than a couple." A few days later, Chanel's head seamstress and one of its vendeuses were flown with the collection to China for the weekend on a private jet.

 

[narcissism]

"It's not about what the goods are, it's what they represent"

 

[Sazerac]

Does anyone here perceive brands in reverse of how much of the world sees them? That is, when you see an LV handbag, do you not think "they must be wealthy" but rather, "they're in a subprime mortgage and that bag was paid for with a check drawn on imaginary equity."

To me, this extends to brands like LV and most BMW and Mercedes models.

 

[indesertum]

^this is what i think when i see louis vuitton on korean women.

 

[narcissism]

One point that CouttsClient forgot to mention that was a key point in the book is the Japanese obsession with luxury goods. The author said that 40% of all people living in Japan own a Louis Vuitton product. Where does the Japanese obsession for Western luxury goods come from?

 

[Metlin]

Originally Posted by Sazerac

Does anyone here perceive brands in reverse of how much of the world sees them? That is, when you see an LV handbag, do you not think "they must be wealthy" but rather, "they're in a subprime mortgage and that bag was paid for with a check drawn on imaginary equity."

To me, this extends to brands like LV and most BMW and Mercedes models.

Indeed. One some level, it becomes less about what social strata people really belong to and rather about what strata they want to project as belonging to. Ironically, this is often demonstrated through blatant consumerism and ostentatious displays of wealth, and the choice in goods and brands used for the display are much more indicative of one's origins.