Louis Vuitton, WTF?

[w.kevin]

Originally Posted by KitAkira

Why is this thread still open/alive?

because it's entertaining

 

[tor]

Originally Posted by indesertum

I just don't understand why it's a status product. Is the bag itself enough quality to warrant the high cost or is it marked up extremely high just so it can be a status product?

It doesn't matter what quality they are. They're expensive and easily recognizable, a perfect combination to be a status symbol.

 

[LawrenceMD]

Originally Posted by LawrenceMD

isn't the SF groupthink about purchasing fewer "quality" items over a bunch of cheaper items? (ugly or not)

Originally Posted by KitAkira

And who ever said LV was an SF-approved brand?
come on now. don't put words into my mouth. I never said that LV or was a approved brand. I was equating the logic behind someone spending that kind of money on a bag with a 3rd world income. fucked up or not. to the OP if you're already in training to become a doctor be prepared to deal with issues like this on other levels too. Like asking yourself why the cancer patient still smokes or why an obese patient still eats excessively. there are things that don't make sense but will continue to happen (the worst is seeing child abuse in patients). if you really want to deal with these issues on a bigger scale then sometimes being a primary physician isn't enough... you've got to go into politics or be at administrative level. if not then it'll eat you up. just focus on the patient in front of you.. not the bags they are holding.

 

[aeglus]

I don't mean Gangnam is literally not Seoul. I mean Gangnam is a totally different world from the rest of Seoul. It's the richest area by far.

 

[clausc]

Some of you guys should borrow and read this book
Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas


NY Times review

August 21, 2007
Books of the Times
The Devil Wears Hermès (He Bought It at the Caesars Palace Mall in Las Vegas)
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Skip to next paragraph

DELUXE

How Luxury Lost Its Luster

By Dana Thomas

Illustrated. 375 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

Back in the late 1980s, the Prada backpack "” made out of black or tobacco-brown parachute fabric trimmed in leather "” became the "it" bag for many would-be fashionistas. It was hip, modern, lightweight and at $450 expensive, but not as expensive as the stratospherically priced bags made by Hermès and Chanel. According to the fashion reporter Dana Thomas, that Prada backpack was also "the emblem of the radical change that luxury was undergoing at the time: the shift from small family businesses of beautifully handcrafted goods to global corporations selling to the middle market" "” a shift from exclusivity to accessibility, from an emphasis on tradition and quality to an emphasis on growth and branding and profits.

With "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster," Ms. Thomas "” who has been the cultural and fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris for 12 years "” has written a crisp, witty social history that's as entertaining as it is informative. Traveling from French perfume laboratories to Las Vegas shopping malls to assembly-line factories in China, she traces the evolving face of the luxury goods business, from design through marketing to showroom sales.

She gives us some sharply observed profiles of figures like Miuccia Prada, who was a Communist with a doctorate in political science when she took over her family's small luxury goods business in 1978, and the business tycoon Bernard Arnault, who relentlessly built LVMH into a luxury monolith with dozens of brands (including Louis Vuitton, Givenchy and Dior) sold around the world.

Ms. Thomas peppers her narrative with lots of amusing asides about everything from how orange became Hermès's signature color because it was the only color widely available during World War II to the money-saving benefits of raw-edge cutting, which has been marketed to the public as a cutting-edge, avant-garde innovation.

But her focus remains on how a business that once catered to the wealthy elite has gone mass-market and the effects that democratization has had on the way ordinary people shop today, as conspicuous consumption and wretched excess have spread around the world. Labels, once discreetly stitched into couture clothes, have become logos adorning everything from baseball hats to supersized gold chains. Perfumes, once dreamed up by designers with an idea about a particular scent, are now concocted from briefs written by marketing executives brandishing polls and surveys and sales figures.

With globalization, Paris and New York are no longer exclusive luxury meccas. Ms. Thomas notes that a gigantic 690,000-square-foot luxury mall called Crocus City (featuring 180 boutiques, including Armani, Pucci and Versace) is flourishing outside Moscow, and that a group of high-end boutiques will be part of a luxury complex called Legation Quarter, scheduled to open in Tiananmen Square later this year.

"Approximately 40 percent of all Japanese own a Vuitton product" today, she says, and one recent poll showed that by 2004 the average American woman was buying more than four handbags a year. With more people visiting Caesars Palace's glitzy Forum Shops each year than Disney World, Las Vegas has made shopping synonymous with gambling and entertainment, even as outlet malls have brought designer clothing and accessories within the reach (and budget) of many suburbanites.

High-profile luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Cartier were founded in the 18th or 19th centuries by artisans dedicated to creating beautiful, finely made wares for the royal court in France and later, with the fall of the monarchy, for European aristocrats and prominent American families. Luxury remained, writes Ms. Thomas, "a domain of the wealthy and the famous" until "the Youthquake of the 1960s" pulled down social barriers and overthrew elitism. It would remain out of style "until a new and financially powerful demographic "” the unmarried female executive "” emerged in the 1980s."

As both disposable income and credit-card debt soared in industrialized nations, the middle class became the target of luxury vendors, who poured money into provocative advertising campaigns and courted movie stars and celebrities as style icons. In order to maximize profits, many corporations looked for ways to cut corners: they began to use cheaper materials, outsource production to developing nations (while falsely claiming that their goods were made in Western Europe) and replace hand craftsmanship with assembly-line production. Classic goods meant to last for years gave way, increasingly, to trendy items with a short shelf life; cheaper lines (featuring lower-priced items like T-shirts and cosmetic cases) were introduced as well.

Although this volume quotes Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, saying such changes mean that "more people are going to get better fashion" and "the more people who can have fashion, the better," the author reaches a more elitist and pessimistic conclusion. "The luxury industry has changed the way people dress," she writes. "It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact with others. It has become part of our social fabric. To achieve this, it has sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers. In order to make luxury "˜accessible,' tycoons have stripped away all that has made it special.

"Luxury has lost its luster."

 

[indesertum]

sounds interesting

 

[why]

Ew, what a terrible excerpt.

 

[Acephale]

Originally Posted by KitAkira

Why is this thread still open/alive?

Why has it not been moved to 'Dumb threads' more like IHOMO.

 

[ryannn]

Originally Posted by w.kevin

because it's entertaining
This thread sucks infinitely compared to Fuel Star.

 

[Crane's]

Originally Posted by AcÃ

phale

Why has it not been moved to 'Dumb threads' more like IHOMO.

Originally Posted by ryanmnguyen

This thread sucks infinitely compared to Fuel Star.

I think it should stay right here. There's a lot of quibbling but that book review posted above is excellent and is the reason why I ***** about the luxury brands mentioned. They aren't luxury brands anymore and don't warrant the price paid.

 

[Acephale]

Originally Posted by Crane's

I think it should stay right here. There's a lot of quibbling but that book review posted above is excellent and is the reason why I ***** about the luxury brands mentioned. They aren't luxury brands anymore and don't warrant the price paid.

So you class LV as 'Streetwear and Denim' even though they do not have a diffusion line or franchise off the brand?

Interesting.

 

[Crane's]

Originally Posted by AcÃ

phale

So you class LV as 'Streetwear and Denim' even though they do not have a diffusion line or franchise off the brand?

Interesting.

I said it shouldn't be moved to dumb threads or removed altogether. As far as it being streetwear that's subject to interpretation. In Japan it sounds like it could easily be classed as streetwear.

 

[Pawz]

You know how many rappers brag about wearing 'Louie' in their lyrics? It's been Guccified into street.

 

[indesertum]

I feel like streetwear and denim is a little misleading as we're definitely not streetwear in the more modern sense (like hypebeast concept). i think streetwear as in anything other than MC like casual clothing.

 

[Acephale]

Originally Posted by Crane's

I said it shouldn't be moved to dumb threads or removed altogether. As far as it being streetwear that's subject to interpretation. In Japan it sounds like it could easily be classed as streetwear.
Are you attempting to articulate that once a brand becomes popular it loses a certain cache? With some streetwear for example Von Dutch and Ed Hardy who were once as cool as but then were worn by the sheeps who buy because their fave pop star or celebrity wore an item (I use those two examples as was dumbfounded when I saw the whole of Shibuya109abees and their Mothers wearing it) and that did taint not only two brands but two peoples but hell everyone deserves their whatever minute$ of fame. Burberry being another classic example. However maintaining a certain kudos does transcend fashion. LV still has style even though a lot of the peoples who wear/carry it do not. And that really is the issue. Association.