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Luxury fashion prices have gone too far
The cost of designer goods has shot beyond what the brands’ chatter about look and quality can justify.
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Luxury items still serve their core purpose of separating the rich from the poor, the upper from the lower, and the discerning from the vulgar.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Robert Armstrong
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The trend towards the casualisation of fancy clothes is very old. The American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen noted at the turn of the 20th century that, at the same time the clothing of the leisure classes must display wealth and taste, the wearer must never be seen to be working at this display, or else risk undermining its impact. The message must always be ease. This tension has worked itself out, by fits and starts, over the decades since.
But casualisation may now be reaching an apotheosis, or possibly just a dead end. Increasingly, luxury clothes are all but indistinguishable from the casual clothes they imitate – sportswear and workwear, mostly. Luxury items still serve their core purpose of separating the rich from the poor, the upper from the lower, and the discerning from the vulgar. But to achieve this, they increasingly have to depend on price alone.
