Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster Read Online Free

luxury is about pleasing yourself, not dressing for other people.”
    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. For most people, Louis Vuitton represents true luxury. The suitcase or handbag covered with its intertwining LV logo implies that its carrier appreciates the fine-quality craftsmanship, has the money to afford it, and travels in the same circles as other Louis Vuitton customers—in first class. Long ago, that assumption was true. 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 own 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 business call democratic luxury: it’s big, it’s broad-reaching, and it sells wildly expensive stuff that nobody really needs. “When you look at [Louis Vuitton], you see it is mass-produced luxury,” Jacobs tells me. “Vuitton is a status symbol. It’s not about hiding the logo. It’s about being a bit of a show-off.”
    Louis Vuitton is the cornerstone of a publicly traded luxury conglomerate called LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton—or LVMH for short—run by French tycoon Bernard Arnault. In 2005 , it had more than fifty brands—including Moët & Chandon champagne, Givenchy couture, and Tag Heuer watches—fifty-nine thousand employees and seventeen hundred stores, and did $ 18.1 billion (€ 14 billion) in sales and made $ 3.5 billion (€ 2.7 billion) in profits. Its flagship is Louis Vuitton, which does an estimated $ 3.72 billion in sales annually, accounting for approximately one-quarter of the group’s total business. Vuitton is the McDonald’s of the luxury industry: it’s far and away the leader, 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. “Luxury is crossing all age, racial, geographic and economic brackets,” Daniel Piette, an LVMH executive, told Forbes in 1997 . “We’ve broadened the scope far beyond the wealthy segments.”
    The heart of Louis Vuitton is the trunk. Back in the mid-nineteenth century, when Louis Vuitton started his business, trunks were an integral part of travel, like suitcases on wheels are today. A traveler left for months at a time, with as many as fifty trunks in tow filled with everything from petticoats to porcelain. Today Louis Vuitton makes about five hundred trunks annually. Rarely are trunks used for travel anymore. If so—and it’s usually for nostalgic reasons—they’re often sent ahead by mail or boat, or loaded on private jets. More often Louis Vuitton trunks, old or new, are displayed in homes like art or used as shelves, coffee tables, or bars.
    Louis Vuitton trunks are still made more or less the same way they were 150 years ago, mostly at the Louis Vuitton compound in the working-class Paris suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine. Entering the Vuitton compound is like stepping from drab, monochromatic Kansas into the rich Technicolor world of Oz. Across a thick green lawn framed by strong old trees and well-tended rose beds sits a simple two-story white stucco country house with gingerbread trim and a silvery zinc roof. Louis Vuitton, a hardworking artisan of humble roots, built the place in 1859 to move his family out of filthy, crowded Paris. Out back is a century-old, two-story, L-shaped workshop where 220 artisans build hundreds of trunks and sew thousands of handbags every year. It is one of fourteen official sites—eleven in France, two in Spain, and one in San Dimas, California—where Vuitton leather goods are produced.
    The trunk’s structure is built out of okoumé, a hard, lightweight wood from