How luxury became something everybody aspires to

"Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster"

by Dana Thomas

Penguin, 375 pp., $27.95

Now that Vera Wang designs dresses for Kohl's, and mall merchant J. Crew peddles $600 cashmere blazers, what is "luxury" fashion? In "Deluxe," Dana Thomas, Newsweek's Paris-based fashion and culture reporter, seeks to provide answers: what luxury once was, what it has become and why its signifiers — the shiny double C's, the "Made in Italy" label — continue to hold consumers in thrall.

As the luxury business has boomed, it has been transformed, and in Thomas' view, the change is not for the better. While a few companies continue to focus on beautifully designed, handcrafted wares, she argues that many more have sacrificed quality to feed a ravenous new customer base composed mostly of the middle class. Luxury has been democratized, but it also has sold its soul.

Through her meticulous research, Thomas takes us behind the seams of the new-luxury model.

In the 19th century, luxury goods were a small business that created staggeringly expensive clothes and accessories, mainly for European aristocrats. Now, it's a $157 billion industry that sells logo key chains, department-store perfumes and a seemingly infinite number of other products, many of which are shoddily made. To show us how this came to be, Thomas takes us around the world, from Shanghai's sleek Armani boutique to a dank sweatshop in Guangzhou; from the meditative calm of a French rose field, where the raw materials for Chanel No. 5 are gathered, to L.A.'s frenetic Santee Alley, home to growth of a very different kind: the counterfeit luxury goods market.

These days, branding gurus and CEOs are the industry's true stars, all but displacing fashion designers — the innovators whose dizzyingly clever clothes are the reason people want the logo key chains in the first place. Thomas dissects the art of their dying craft: We see Hermes leather workers who sew each purse by hand using linen thread waxed with beeswax; a Florentine factory owned by the Pucci family where silks are woven on looms that date back to 1780; the scarlet-soled stilettos Christian Louboutin fashions out of satin, crocodile and batik from Mali. But many designers have gone from being owners of the businesses that bear their names to powerless product pushers — "hired hands that are as disposable as the clothes and handbags they create," Thomas writes.

Some executives look down on the mass market even as they make billions off their new, aspirational customers. When Miuccia Prada's nylon backpacks became a 1990s sensation, the designer "sat in her studio and cringed. 'She hated seeing certain women carrying her handbags,' " recalls the company's former PR director.

Elsewhere in the book, one advertising director likens Chinese consumers' uninformed appetite for luxury goods to "buying a big glob of shiny glitter." And then there's the following gem from the head of the company that makes Crystal, the top-of-the-line champagne sung about by rappers. "We can't forbid people from buying it," he says. "I'm sure Dom Pérignon or Krug would be delighted to have their business." Thomas' tone tends toward journalistic remove, but at times like these, the reader hungers for a stronger indictment of the industry's jaw-dropping snobbery.

At other times, Thomas can sound almost as elitist. On a visit to Sao Paolo super-boutique Daslu, she gushes over the crystal-flecked gowns and uniformed maids, the private helipad and 4,000-square-foot Louis Vuitton shop, taking comparatively scant notice of the city's extreme poverty. When some posh women venture to Daslu to sip champagne, dance and mingle in the store's "clubby and delightfully upbeat" environs, they arrive in armored limousines, bodyguards in tow.

"We have a lot of problems with security here," Daslu's marketing director tells Thomas. "The really rich don't go out and walk in the streets." Occasionally, it seems that Thomas doesn't, either. For someone who is charting a trend, she can appear oddly out of touch, as when she refers to the long-popular craze for vintage as "a new subsection in fashion."

And while she manages to make the manufacturing process seem absolutely riveting — no easy feat — "Deluxe" would have more heft had she delved into the psychology of shoppers who obsessively consume luxury goods, independent of their lifestyles and bank accounts. They get mentioned in passing — the secretary who's saving up for her second Prada bag, the young Japanese woman who turns to prostitution to support her handbag habit — but one yearns for more insight. Stock prices and profit margins are well and good, but when it comes to crafting a compelling narrative, the human element is a necessity, not a luxury.

Suzanne D'Amato is deputy editor of The Washington Post Sunday Source.