Designerhomme Book Pick #01 - Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre : Dana Thomas

The Devil Wears Hermès (He Bought It at the Caesars Palace Mall in Las Vegas)

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 21, 2007

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.”

This is certainly a very interesting book to read, Writer Dana Thomas excellent analogy of Louis Vuitton as Macdonald's of Luxury Industry make me wonder, "Is luxury losing its wow factor to any of you? "

Article: NY Times Books

Designerhomme News Pick #01 - Tracey Jackson - NY Times Article About Her Bags

These days, it's the handbag that makes the woman

By Elizabeth Hayt, The New York Times, 21st July 1999

NEW YORK -- Tracey Jackson's collection of nearly 100 handbags is displayed with a reverence usually reserved for reliquary objects. The purses -- limited-edition Gucci bags, one-of-a-kind vintage styles, beaded pouches from India -- rest on tables and shelves all around her Upper East Side town house. "Not just the usual 10021 collection," Ms. Jackson proudly pointed out, referring to her ZIP code.


Her most prized pocketbook, what might be called the holy of holies, is an oversize Hermes satchel in buttery tan leather. Ms. Jackson, a screenwriter, first spotted the limited-edition style in Hawaii a few months ago, on the arm of a Japanese tourist. The woman spoke no English but understood the word Hermes -- a universal language, noted Ms. Jackson, who then tracked down the bag in Beverly Hills.

"I am a bag freak," Ms. Jackson confessed, and there is no doubting her. She recently sold a script to Working Title, the English film production company, about a wife and a mistress who accidentally switch Hermes Kelly bags. "If I was down to my last $1,000, I'd buy a purse," she said. "I think about them every day."


Hers is an obsession shared by more and more women these days, as ornamentation and color continue to invigorate fashion, spicing up the minimalism of the mid-'90s. The basic black leather bag, a staple of most every woman's wardrobe, looks tired by comparison to newer purses in unusual fabrics or embellished with embroidery, beading and fur. The accessories market, whether low- or high-end, is peaking in part because of widespread handbag fever.


Across the country, women are parading out of stores with new purses in hand. At Barneys New York, handbag sales since February are up 31 percent compared with the same period last year. Stanley Korshak, a luxury retail store in Dallas where novelty purses are outselling black ones, has also seen a 30 percent increase in handbag sales this year.


No industrywide figures exist, but almost everyone in the handbag business reports excellent sales, for a few basic reasons: the note of indulgence that bags lend to monochromatic dressing styles, their relative affordability as status labels and the successful marketing of the notion that women ought to acquire a "wardrobe" of handbags for all occasions.


Under the continuing reign of minimalist clothing, when it is nearly impossible to distinguish a Calvin Klein ensemble from a Helmut Lang ensemble, a handbag sets a woman apart, said Valerie Steele, chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "Clothes are sort of anonymous," she said. "You make your fashion statement now with the bag."


This is the sort of thing fashion professionals said about shoes not long ago, to explain the profusion and popularity of styles from $500 spike heels to high-tech running sneakers to hippie-style sandals.


Now, it is the turn of the handbag. "Bags are fresher now," said Ms. Steele, who is writing a book, "Bags: A Lexicon of Style," to be published by Rizzoli in November. "Historically, women are always into shoes, but this year bags have taken off, and they are the current mania."


Ginny Bond Donahue, 27, an aspiring actress in New York, has acquired a dozen purses since March, more than she had bought in the two years before that. "I used to dress from the shoes up," she said. "Now, I dress from the bag around. I'll work an outfit around my purse."
Michelle Kessler, accessories director of Vogue, says that many women are thinking similar thoughts when getting dressed. "It used to be the bag and shoes could save an outfit," she said. "Now, it's the bag and shoes that can make an outfit."


Beth Shepherd, one of the owners of Kirna Zabete, a boutique soon to open in SoHo, said, "I'll buy any sort of bag, from a cheap African basket off the street to a pink Louis Vuitton." In her apartment, a personal cache of 200 purses hangs from a coat rack. When she and her partner, Sarah Hailes, were accumulating inventory for their store, they were so enticed by the fall handbag selection that they had to cut back on their clothing budget. "I can't get enough of them," Ms. Shepherd said. "I'm constantly changing my bags. If I go away on vacation for a week, I'll take 15 bags."

This is an interesting article about Tracey Jackson although it's vintage piece of news from 1999 however it's about Screen Writer Of "Confessions of a Shopaholic", many will still be interested in this. From the Article then, she seem to be a shopaholic too.

Article: NY Times