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Today's $157 billion luxury industry outsources production to Chinese factories, dresses celebrities for red-carpet events, fights massive counterfeiting operations and builds designer outlet malls across America. All this is a long way from the industry's history of family-owned businesses handcrafting the best products possible.
Newsweek's style and culture reporter Dana Thomas explores the new luxury industry in her book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. She found that today's luxury marketplace is mostly about hype and marketing. The goal is no longer making something unique and beautiful but maximizing profits. AlterNet spoke with Thomas in San Francisco.
Emily Wilson: Was there something specific that inspired you writing this book?
Dana Thomas: Well, actually yes. I was reading Fast Food Nation, which is a great book, and I was so moved by how he'd taken the business apart and showed exactly what was going on and what was in your Big Mac. I turned to my husband and said I want to write this book about the luxury fashion business because in the 20 years I'd been covering the business, I'd seen how it had changed. I'd covered this evolution and revolution from a niche business to global conglomerates that do billions of dollars a year in sales, and I felt like most people who buy these goods had no idea what was in that bag they were actually getting. I was also a customer, and I grew disillusioned by the quality of the product in a lot of cases and wanted to find out what was going on and why.
Your second chapter is about Bernard Arnault. What is his role in the luxury fashion industry, and how did he change things?
He's been really the catalyst behind much of the change. In the mid '80s he acquired through a fire sale with the French government much of Christian Dior. Arnault, who was a property developer from northern France said, "Oh, I'll take over this whole big mess of a company, (which the French government had been trying to unload for some time), and I won't break it up and I won't do anything and I won't fire people," and then he got a hold of it, and he laid off thousands of workers and divested of just about everything except Christian Dior. So he did just the opposite of what he said he was going to do. It caused a lot of anguish in France, but he got away with it. Then he waged a takeover battle in France and won to takeover the group Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey. It was a long fearsome battle in the boardroom and in the press, and he succeeded when he acquired the Louis Vuitton brand. And then he put this all together with Christian Dior and formed the first big luxury fashion group. He continued to either buy brands or acquire them hostilely, and today it's a group of more than 50 brands and does billions of dollars a year in sales.
He seems like the villain in your book. What do you think of him and his methods?
Well, his method was very simple. He saw the marketing potential of these brands. He thought that they were underutilized and undervalued, starting with Christian Dior, which had long been called the General Motors of fashion, but by the time he got a hold of it, it was sort of more the Chrysler of fashion, and it really needed saving. (Laughs). And so they put much more of an emphasis on accessories and they came up with many more accessory lines and younger hipper designs. One of the most famous -- and the real cash cow for them -- was called the Lady Dior bag, named in honor of Princess Diana. They gave her one in every color and she was photographed carrying it all the time and then they marketed, marketed, marketed. They chopped the name down just to Dior and they blasted it on anything and everything they could find. They started using a logo on the exterior of the bag and on bikinis and on underwear and on coats and even on T-shirts. They started putting out 'J'adore Dior' T-shirts. They sold and marketed like crazy to the middle market, which includes everyone from teachers to high-tech millionaires to the ghetto fabulous. It's a broad-reaching group who has money to spend when they are flush and likes to spend it on luxury brands now.
See more stories tagged with: child labor, sweatshops, counterfeits, burberry, louis vuitton, christian dior, fashion designers, luxury industry
Emily Wilson is a freelance writer and teaches basic skills at City College of San Francisco.
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