Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster
“If you control your factories, you control your quality, ” Arnault explained. “If you control your distribution, you control your image.”
“stop interrupting me while I’m interrupting you.” Johann Rupert
“Product integrity has to be more important than synergies.” Johann Rupert
“He [Patrizio Bertelli] will cut off business even if it’s profitable at the time when he knows it’s holding back growth.” Leslie Johnsen
“stop interrupting me while I’m interrupting you.” Johann Rupert
“Product integrity has to be more important than synergies.” Johann Rupert
“He [Patrizio Bertelli] will cut off business even if it’s profitable at the time when he knows it’s holding back growth.” Leslie Johnsen
In her reluctance to be forthcoming, Prada had unwittingly exposed the Achilles heel of luxury today: in becoming leaders of global corporations, luxury executives must now conceal from the public not only how their products are made but how the individual brands are doing. The truth, if widely known, could shatter consumer confidence in the brands: they’d stop buying, profits would plummet, and the companies—and their parent groups—could face bankruptcy. Publicly traded companies are required to be transparent—that is, they must publish their financial data in their annual reports. But when luxury brands are consolidated into groups, they can lump all their figures together to disguise what’s really happening. Overall, LVMH is raking in profits and its brands, thanks to the hype, seem highly successful. What you don’t know is that, as Vuitton is doing record sales each year, the Givenchy and Kenzo fashion houses are muddling along.
“I can allow myself to go back to the office at night, to change whatever I want without having to justify it to anyone, and without any anxiety about achieving certain financial results because investors—who understand nothing—decide that today its ten of something, then twenty, then thirty. That’s the problem,” he [Giorgio Armani] said. “Sometimes results take a while, and most of the time, the market requires that the results be felt immediately. Psychologically, this isn’t good for our work, because it puts a damper on our enthusiasm.”
While most businesses would shy away from having the same designer as nearly all their competitors, luxury fashion industry executives sees it as a validation of their impeccable taste. Luxury fashion is a clubby world — designers all know each other, many intimately so, support staff such as press attachés and assistant designers move freely from one company to another, everyone dines in the same restaurants and vacations in the same locales. They refer to themselves as “the fashion tribe.”
Now individualism has given way to homogenization, not only among stores within a brand but also among brands themselves. Like Hollywood studios hiring the same handful of bankable stars to lure middle-market audiences to see their blockbuster movies, luxury brands tend to hire the same architects and use the same design tricks to get crowds into the stores. Luxury brands used to be innovative: they were revolutionary in design, they’d come up with something new. Now, they try to avoid leading the way for fear of alienating customers.
If a luxury brand—other than Chanel, Patou, and now Hermès—wants to launch a new perfume, the company puts together a brief that explains what it wants the perfume to achieve and invites the laboratories to compete for the assignment. Unlike luxury perfume’s golden years, when perfumers and designers used to dream up a new scent together over lunch, briefs today are written by marketing executives with polls, surveys, and sales figures as their guide.
“Basically, it’s ‘We want something for women,’” a perfume executive told the New Yorker. “Okay, which women? ‘Women! All women! It should make them feel more feminine, but strong, and competent, but not too much, and it should work well in Europe and the U.S. and especially in the Asian market, and it should be new but it should be classic, and young women should love it, but older women should love it too.’ If it’s a French house, the brief will also say, ‘And it should be a great and uncompromised work of art,’ and if it’s an American brief it will say, ‘And it should smell like that Armani thing two years ago that did four million dollars in the first two months in Europe but also like the Givenchy that sold so well in China.’” All of this leaves Jacques Polge resigned. “I hear the briefs of brands that declare that they want to create a ‘classic,’ like No. 5,” he says with a sigh. “This is a false notion. We should try to create a perfume of its time, and perhaps it can become a classic.”
Labs are known to recycle a scent they really believe in. They adapt their discourse to make it fit the brief and include marketing studies in the pitch that show it has strong approval ratings. Perfume companies will also buy juices they think are marketable and keep them in reserve until they find the right brand for them. L’Oréal sat on one such essai for three years until Viktor & Rolf chose it for Flowerbomb.
By 1920, chemists had come up with 80 percent of the synthetics used today.
“In the beginning of the twentieth century, perfumery was more figurative. It was floral bouquets,” he told me. “Now we are in narrative: the perfume tells a story.” Next, he says, perfume will be olfactive: you will be able to smell a place. Like Un Jardin sur le Nil. You can smell the souk, the mango groves, the heat, and the dry desert. “You will travel with perfume,” he [Jean-Claude Ellena] said.
While most businesses would shy away from having the same designer as nearly all their competitors, luxury fashion industry executives sees it as a validation of their impeccable taste. Luxury fashion is a clubby world — designers all know each other, many intimately so, support staff such as press attachés and assistant designers move freely from one company to another, everyone dines in the same restaurants and vacations in the same locales. They refer to themselves as “the fashion tribe.”
Now individualism has given way to homogenization, not only among stores within a brand but also among brands themselves. Like Hollywood studios hiring the same handful of bankable stars to lure middle-market audiences to see their blockbuster movies, luxury brands tend to hire the same architects and use the same design tricks to get crowds into the stores. Luxury brands used to be innovative: they were revolutionary in design, they’d come up with something new. Now, they try to avoid leading the way for fear of alienating customers.
If a luxury brand—other than Chanel, Patou, and now Hermès—wants to launch a new perfume, the company puts together a brief that explains what it wants the perfume to achieve and invites the laboratories to compete for the assignment. Unlike luxury perfume’s golden years, when perfumers and designers used to dream up a new scent together over lunch, briefs today are written by marketing executives with polls, surveys, and sales figures as their guide.
“Basically, it’s ‘We want something for women,’” a perfume executive told the New Yorker. “Okay, which women? ‘Women! All women! It should make them feel more feminine, but strong, and competent, but not too much, and it should work well in Europe and the U.S. and especially in the Asian market, and it should be new but it should be classic, and young women should love it, but older women should love it too.’ If it’s a French house, the brief will also say, ‘And it should be a great and uncompromised work of art,’ and if it’s an American brief it will say, ‘And it should smell like that Armani thing two years ago that did four million dollars in the first two months in Europe but also like the Givenchy that sold so well in China.’” All of this leaves Jacques Polge resigned. “I hear the briefs of brands that declare that they want to create a ‘classic,’ like No. 5,” he says with a sigh. “This is a false notion. We should try to create a perfume of its time, and perhaps it can become a classic.”
Labs are known to recycle a scent they really believe in. They adapt their discourse to make it fit the brief and include marketing studies in the pitch that show it has strong approval ratings. Perfume companies will also buy juices they think are marketable and keep them in reserve until they find the right brand for them. L’Oréal sat on one such essai for three years until Viktor & Rolf chose it for Flowerbomb.
By 1920, chemists had come up with 80 percent of the synthetics used today.
“In the beginning of the twentieth century, perfumery was more figurative. It was floral bouquets,” he told me. “Now we are in narrative: the perfume tells a story.” Next, he says, perfume will be olfactive: you will be able to smell a place. Like Un Jardin sur le Nil. You can smell the souk, the mango groves, the heat, and the dry desert. “You will travel with perfume,” he [Jean-Claude Ellena] said.
“She [Monique Rémy] did the inverse of what the market was at the time.”
“The world is divided into two,” he [Jean-Louis Dumas] pronounced. “Those who know how to use tools and those who do not.”
During World War II, handbags became simple and practical, like the leather backpack and the “game bag,” a largish sac worn across the torso so that one could ride a bicycle easily, the preferred method of transportation during gasoline rationing.
The sole objective for both Las Vegas and today’s luxury brands is to take your money. It was only a matter of time until the two converged.
By putting an emphasis on the logo and spending more than $100 million a year to advertise it, luxury companies made their brands, rather than the actual products, the objects of public desire.
“Luxury is the ease of a T-shirt in a very expensive dress.” Karl Lagerfeld
“A mobile phone is more and more an accessory… an object of design and style, a status symbol which almost defines a person—definitely one of the most important objects in a woman’s handbag,” a Prada spokesman said.
The philosophy behind the move is the same as that which sets these two companies apart from their competitors. “Luxury is exclusivity—it is made for you and no one else has it,” Françoise Montenay, Chanel’s former president for Europe, explained to me. “At a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique. It’s the way you are spoken to, the way the product is presented, the way you are treated. Like the tea ceremony in Japan: the ritual, the respect, the transmission from generation to generation. At Chanel, luxury is in our chromosomes. It’s our credo, something we try to achieve all the time.”
“Luxury is the possibility to stay close to your customers, and do things that you know they will love. It’s about subtlety and details. It’s about service. I cannot accept a place where people are badly received. I can’t imagine spending several thousand dollars on something and the salesclerk gets annoyed because you take fifteen minutes to look. Luxury is not consumerism. It is educating the eyes to see that special quality.” Christian Louboutin
“If you sculpt in the vein, it’s beautiful. If you go against the grain, it breaks. Same goes with business. If you go with the flow, it grows naturally. But if you try to grow your company in an unnatural way, it breaks… I did not do a company to make money. I made shoes and it became a company.” Christian Louboutin
During World War II, handbags became simple and practical, like the leather backpack and the “game bag,” a largish sac worn across the torso so that one could ride a bicycle easily, the preferred method of transportation during gasoline rationing.
The sole objective for both Las Vegas and today’s luxury brands is to take your money. It was only a matter of time until the two converged.
By putting an emphasis on the logo and spending more than $100 million a year to advertise it, luxury companies made their brands, rather than the actual products, the objects of public desire.
“Luxury is the ease of a T-shirt in a very expensive dress.” Karl Lagerfeld
“A mobile phone is more and more an accessory… an object of design and style, a status symbol which almost defines a person—definitely one of the most important objects in a woman’s handbag,” a Prada spokesman said.
The philosophy behind the move is the same as that which sets these two companies apart from their competitors. “Luxury is exclusivity—it is made for you and no one else has it,” Françoise Montenay, Chanel’s former president for Europe, explained to me. “At a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique. It’s the way you are spoken to, the way the product is presented, the way you are treated. Like the tea ceremony in Japan: the ritual, the respect, the transmission from generation to generation. At Chanel, luxury is in our chromosomes. It’s our credo, something we try to achieve all the time.”
“Luxury is the possibility to stay close to your customers, and do things that you know they will love. It’s about subtlety and details. It’s about service. I cannot accept a place where people are badly received. I can’t imagine spending several thousand dollars on something and the salesclerk gets annoyed because you take fifteen minutes to look. Luxury is not consumerism. It is educating the eyes to see that special quality.” Christian Louboutin
“If you sculpt in the vein, it’s beautiful. If you go against the grain, it breaks. Same goes with business. If you go with the flow, it grows naturally. But if you try to grow your company in an unnatural way, it breaks… I did not do a company to make money. I made shoes and it became a company.” Christian Louboutin