How Luxury Lost Its Luster
By Dana Thomas
Illustrated. 375 pages. The Penguin Press. $27.95.
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DELUXE
DELUXE
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.”
REFLECTIONS
” Our work is the reflection of our image “
Adriana Sassoon
Image used as a reference.
Copyright © 2006 ADRIANA SASSOON .All Rights Reserved.
Hub of high fashion
Hub of high fashion
Sassoon’s son fancies hairstylist ‘university’ here
By Scott Van Voorhis Friday, March 21, 2008 -
Move over Harvard and MIT. There’s a new competitor on college row:The Academy for Hair and Skin by Elan Sassoon. Elan, son of celebrity hair stylist/shampoo guru Vidal Sassoon, has relocated from Miami and has chosen Brighton to launch what’s being billed as the first ever U.S. cosmetology school with a university feel – right down to its own 178-room dorm. Sassoon last year bought a modest Commonwealth Avenue building and is now seeking City Hall permission to transform it into a 90,000-square-foot university for the next generation of high-powered hair stylists.A longtime entrepreneur, the 38-year-old is developing the school without his famous father’s help.While Boston might seem like an unlikely place to launch such a stylish endeavor, Sassoon sees his $16 million venture as part of a wave of hot new businesses bringing high fashion to the Hub.“Zara’s, the Mandarin Oriental, Louis Vuitton – now is the time to be in Boston,” Sassoon said, mentioning two deluxe retailers and a hotelier that have recently moved to town. “All these hot companies are coming and opening up. There is a nice shift in that direction to high fashion.”Sassoon is even putting down roots here, having moved to town last spring and having bought a house in Chestnut Hill, where he lives with his wife and two school-aged children.The school’s 10-month program aims to turn out elite hairstylists – with a very college-like cost of $18,000 to $20,000 per student.But that’s a career investment that can pay big dividends to those with the right training and drive.Top Newbury Street hairstylists can pull down $150,000 a year. In New York, the profession’s elite can make $200,000 a year.While most of the school’s expected 300 students will come from Greater Boston, Sassoon thinks the academy will attract global interest.He also wants the school to be about much more than just learning styling hair.Students will also take courses delving into the field’s history and noted practitioners, as well as classes on “color theory” and the history of design.Instructors will be paid $70,000 in a bid to bring in the best the field has to offer.There will also be a 200-seat amphitheater where everyone from famous plastic surgeons to noted hair stylists can come share their professional wisdom.“We would like the school to be a center of fashion and design,” Sassoon said.
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