Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

Deluxe is a fascinating short history of the traditional luxury goods industry. I want to start with a quick definition: a luxury good is something that has been made either by hand or machine to the highest quality possible. This fascination with detail extends into the salesroom; the stores are beautiful and the service is impeccable.

In very broad strokes: Providing a high-quality item and an excellent customer experience is expensive. Relying on the traditionally very small customer base that can afford, say a custom-made Vuitton trunk, means that the companies often struggle. At least until Bernard Arnault came along 30 or so years ago. Arnault came into the luxury business and turned it into a Business - leveraging the luxury brands' reputation to mass-produce less expensive (but still high-quality) goods like perfume and handbags that the upper-middle class and middle class could afford, as could the emerging elites in countries like China, India, Russia, and Brazil. This lead to growth, which luxury companies liked. So they investigated less expensive production methods for all their products to continue that growth. That turns the priorities on their head. Companies like Fendi and Coach still aim for quality, but suddenly cost becomes a more important factor than it was before. This doesn't have to lead to a quality decline, but it certainly sets the stage for it.

There is a lot of elitism packed into the luxury and fashion industries.

At the core, though, there is something that Susan and I believe in too: a well-made product surrounded by a high-quality customer experience. There's a fabulous story the author has tucked away in there about Hermes, one of the only luxury companies to emerge from the book in a good light, having never veered from their handmade, incredibly expensive heritage. In 1995, they took ten of their craftsmen to Pakistan "for a weeklong exploration of their creative roots." The point was to make sure that everyone realized "The world is divided into two. Those who know how to use tools and those who do not." (Quote from the head of Hermes)

[Most of what comes next is me speculating and isn't implied by the book.]

As traditional luxury companies veer away from value and quality, how does that affect, say, someone like me? I would love to be able to afford a handmade trunk or a tailored dress, but it's probably never going to happen. I'm not that rich, and I'm not likely to ever be that rich. But I do want things that are well-made. Once upon a time, you could count on a $500 skirt from Nordstrom or Marshall Fields to actually be better constructed and use a better fabric than a $30 skirt from the Gap. But now, the $500 skirt is being mass-produced in the same factories in China or Vietnam that are producing the $30 skirt at Gap that looks awfully similar. So what am I getting for that extra $470? It leads to a lot of confusion and cognitive dissonance that marketers will often call inauthenticity.

Which, to me, is where Etsy comes in. Etsy provides a place for people who *can* fill the need for well-made clothes/bags/etc with construction and quality you can trust from people you can trust. There's a quality/authenticity gap that the luxury brands are leaving as they abandon their traditional high-quality position.

[Me, done speculating]

If you've made it this far a) thanks for reading and b) what do you think? Do you think at least some of the sellers on Etsy and other crafters fill the need for a higher-quality item that, more traditionally maybe a luxury or a high-end regional retailer or producer would have filled in the past? Have you found items on Etsy to be higher quality than things you find in the store? Or are hand-crafted items more about a non-mass-produced style instead of quality?Or something else entirely?