Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

by Dana Thomas

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER• A hard-hitting behind-the-scenes look at how luxury fashion went global, revealing manufacturing secrets that Prada, Gucci, and Burberry don’t want you to know

“Fascinating . . . The story of luxury goods today is really about globalization, capitalization, class, and culture.”—Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

“What Fast Food Nation did for food service, this book does for fashion.”—Los Angeles Times

Luxury was once available only to the rarefied, aristocratic world of old money. It offered a history of tradition, superior quality, and a pampered buying experience. Today, however, luxury is simply a product packaged and sold by multibillion-dollar global corporations like LVMH, Kering, and Gucci, that focus on growth, visibility, brand awareness, advertising, and, above all, profits. Journalist Dana Thomas digs deep into the dark side of the luxury industry with this uncompromising look behind the glossy facade, to ask: How did luxury lose its luster?

From the author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780143113706
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/29/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dana Thomas is the author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, Gods and Kings and the New York Times bestseller Deluxe. She began her career writing for the Style section of The Washington Post, and she has served as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Style section and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Architectural Digest. In 2016, the French Minister of Culture named Thomas a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. She lives in Paris.

Table of Contents

Introduction     1
Part 1
An Industry Is Born     17
Group Mentality     39
Going Global     73
Part 2
Stars Get in Your Eyes     99
The Sweet Smell of Success     135
It's in the Bag     167
The Needle and the Damage Done     209
Part 3
Going Mass     235
Faux Amis     269
What Now?     297
New Luxury     321
Acknowledgments     347
Notes     350
Bibliography     361
Index     363

What People are Saying About This

Jay Alexander

"Miss J. says don't buy the shoes, buy the book. Perfect front row reading when the shows are late during fashion week. Deluxe is a luxury to read."--(Jay Alexander, America's Next Top Model)

Rose Apodaca

Through exhaustive reporting and personalized storytelling, Dana Thomas has delivered a historical survey of a business that truly keeps the world going round. She may never again be so readily welcomed in some quarters of this beau monde, but the trade off is an essential reference for any student of fashion, finance or culture. (Rose Apodaca, former west coast bureau chief, Women's Wear Daily )

Fareed Zakaria

The story of luxury goods today is really about globalization, capitalization, class and culture. Dana Thomas has a feel for all of this and more and has written a fascinating book. A luxury product about luxury.

Michael Isikoff

"Dana Thomas is a brilliant reporter with a sharp eye for detail. In Deluxe, she provides an illuminating account of how the multi billion dollar luxury industry and the corporate giants that dominate it prey on, and bamboozle, consumers in the United States and the rest of the world."--(Michael Isikoff, co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War)

Joel Achenbach

"Deluxe is delicious if you know about fashion; fascinating even if you don't. We're not just backstage at the runway show, we're all the way back in the factory, which might well be in a remote province of China. Dana Thomas is a fearless reporter who shows how so many designer goods have gone to hell in a handbag. This is a page-turning yarn about the men and women who have transformed luxury into an off-the-rack, global commodity."--(Joel Achenbach, Washington Post columnist and author of The Grand Idea)

Editorial Reviews

With Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, [Dana] 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.” —New York Times

From the Publisher

In an engaging, deliciously informing combination of high-end gossip and highbrow cultural history, Newsweek's Paris-based correspondent, Dana Thomas, offers a sophisticated history of the most revered fashion brands on the planet. Fun, knowledgeable, and encompassing famous marques from Louis Vuitton to Prada, Thomas's book describes the origins of the great European houses and details their transition to the realm of corporate takeovers, board intrigues, global mass production and distribution, and marketing wizardry. After reading Deluxe, fashion fans will understand how the exclusive artistry of the pioneering fashion designers has been translated into the cachet of luxury logos now available to all -- albeit at a premium price -- in flagship stores, airports, and shopping malls.

If you have ever wondered why a woman absolutely needs to buy a $3,000 handbag, or why she might perish without a certain shade of lipstick, this book explains it all in empirical, evolutionary detail. Dana Thomas has brilliantly dissected the fashion phenomenon while the healthy beast still thrives luxuriously on the operating table. Deluxe might make some women pause before spending the rent money on their Manolo Blahniks.
— New York Post

Richard Johnson

What Fast Food Nation did for food service, this book does for fashion, exposing the underbelly of the $157-billion luxury industry and the lockstep consumer psychology behind its glamorous veneer.

Los Angeles Times

A crisp, witty social history that's as entertaining as it is informative.
— The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

Globalization, capitalization, class, and culture . . . A fascinating book.
— Newsweek

Fareed Zakaria

In Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, Thomas investigates the business of designer clothing, leather goods and cosmetics, and finds it wanting. Hijacked, over the past two or three decades, by corporate profiteers with a "single-minded focus on profitability," the luxury industry has "sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers."…Thomas's message is relevant to shoppers of every stripe. Whether upscale or middle-market, paying in cash or buying on credit, today's customer is barraged at every turn with the logos that…mean pure, corporate gold. Deluxe performs a valuable service by reminding us that these labels don't mean much else. Once guarantors of value and integrity, they are now markers that point toward nothing, guiding the consumer on a road to nowhere.
—The New York Times Book Review

Caroline Weber

A scathing expose demystifies the luxury-goods industry, detailing how venerable fashion houses have traded quality for profits. There was a time, writes Paris-based cultural journalist Thomas, when only an elite few understood, appreciated and could afford to spend the money on one-of-a-kind luxuries. All that has changed, and not for the better. Now anyone can have piece of the magic for the right price. Over the last 25 years, traditional fashion houses like Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Prada have gone from being small, family-owned businesses that cared singularly about quality and prestige to being publicly traded global conglomerates whose attention is firmly fixed on the bottom line. The result is an industry that spends billions influencing our sartorial decisions, all the while undermining its products and losing most of what made it special. Each chapter focuses on elements of this history, starting with the ruthless corporate tactics of Bernard Arnault, president of Louis Vuitton parent company LVMH. In the author's view, Arnault embodies the distasteful notion that what a luxury good represents is more important than what it is-and what it represents is shaped by the aesthetically empty practices of marketing and advertising. The real profits in the luxury trade come not from clothes, but from accessories like perfume and handbags, covered in the book's middle chapters. Though rich in detail, these sections drag a bit, but the narrative pace picks up again in the last third. Expanding luxury goods to the mass market requires managing costs, Thomas points out, so many luxury goods are now made in China-and counterfeited there; fake handbags are a multi-billion dollar industry. Somereaders will take issue with the whiff of snobbery wafting from the text, as when the author declares that it's so obvious Donatella Versace came from nothing. One can tell, however, that Thomas is genuinely troubled by the facts she has unearthed about the debasing of products that were once genuinely unique. Painstakingly researched and deftly written, valuable to fashionistas and fashion victims alike. Agent: Tina Bennett/Janklow and Nesbit Associates, Inc.

Kirkus Reviews