Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

There's a hot new book about the luxury goods industry and it ain't pretty. I've been reading a lot about Dana Thomas's Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster and its turning out to be something like this summer's Fashion Babylon.

The opening paragraph of a New York Times book review reads:

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.

In the book, Thomas focusses on how a business that once catered to the wealthy elite has now gone mass market. Labels, once discreetly stitched into couture clothes, have become logos adorning everything from baseball hats to supersized gold chains. 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.

"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."

A rather pessimistic outlook, no? I'm still buying the book though. If only to read her scathing profiles of personalities like LVMH's Bernard Arnault and Miuccia Prada.