Great article in the NY Times today: is luxury headed for extinction?
Probably not - for as long as people measure their worth by how worthless everyone else is, there will be a need to demonstrate that “worth” somehow.
But the really interesting point comes toward the end - when a Valentino column gown is slashed down to 70% of its original price (and remember - we haven’t hit the post-Holidays mega-sales yet), and Prada alligator wallets are piled on top of each other willy-nilly à la Wal-Mart discount bin section, will the average luxury customer ever allow themselves to be duped into paying exhorbitant sums of money for these “exclusive” items again?
Probably - societies tend to have pretty short attention spans, but something tells me the sting of these times will be staying with us a lot longer than Saks, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf et al. would like.
December 6th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I’ve never owned any luxury designer stuff (it would be wasted on me since I’m a complete dunce at high fashion :), but I’ll bet those top stores are finding the current economic crisis difficult and probably even more depressing than most of the rest of us.
December 8th, 2008 at 9:15 am
What’s funny to me is how arrogant this industry was before the crisis - it was widely held that the “super-rich” were immune to recessions and economic uncertainty (and call me crazy, but isn’t a class of permanent wealthy smack of the blue-blooded aristocracy America was NOT supposed to be about???). What I’m unclear about is how they expected their forays into “mass luxury” to continue into the future… The book I read this summer, Deluxe, bemoaned this “democratization” of luxury, whereby you needn’t worry if you couldn’t afford a Prada outfit in a million years, you could just save up for the handbag instead! Or get it from Ebay! This was the true cash cow for luxury, but the unintended consequence of that is, when everyone is walking around with a LV-emblazoned tote hanging from their arm, and you can hardly tell a fake from the real deal anymore (partly because fakes are looking better than ever, and designers are using cheaper materials and labor practices with the genuine goods), then what exactly is the cachet of owning genuine designer items anymore? They are no longer special, unique, or even particularly well-made.
It will be interesting to see how this industry re-invents itself. Or doesn’t.