How Luxury Lost Its Lustre

HOW LUXURY LOST ITS LUSTRE

“Luxury is a necessity that begins where necessity ends” Coco Chanel.

Marc Jacobs is the most influential creative voice in luxury today as the creative director of Louis Vuitton, yet Jacobs sees what he does at Vuitton the antithesis of luxury today “for me luxury is about pleasing yourself, not dressing for other people” Jacobs says.

The contradiction between personal indulgence and conspicuous consumption is the crux of the luxury business today; the convergence of its history with its current reality. Louis Vuitton supplied kings and queens, high society matrons and business titans, it was the luggage of the rich and famous. Today however millions of people from a wide range of economic backgrounds owns Louis Vuitton products, ranging from a $ 120 money clip to a trunklike humidor that holds a thousand cigars. Louis Vuitton is the greatest example of what executives in the fashion industry call democratic luxury: it’s big, it’s broad reaching, and it sells wildly expensive stuff that nobody really needs.

“Vuitton is the Mc Donald’s of luxury industry: its far and away the leather, brags of millions sold, has stores at all the top tourist sites (usually steps away from a McD’s) and has a logo as recognizable as the golden arches.” Daniel Piette an LVMH executive told forbs in 1997.

If there is one thing that has changed in luxury in the last thirty years, it is the single-minded focus on profitability. In the old days when luxury brands were privately held companies, owners cared about making a profit but the primary object in-house was to produce the finest products possible. Since the tycoons have taken over, however, that object has been replaced by a phenomenon called the “cult of luxury”. Today luxury brand items are collected like baseball cards, displayed like artworks, brandished like iconography. Bernard Anault and his fellows luxury tycoons have shifted the focus from what the product is to what it represent. To...