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.
Richard Johnson
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
Los Angeles Times
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.
Michiko Kakutani
A crisp, witty social history that's as entertaining as it is informative.
— The New York Times
Fareed Zakaria
Globalization, capitalization, class, and culture . . . A fascinating book.
— Newsweek
Caroline Weber
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
Kirkus Reviews
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.
From the Publisher
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
