Is Luxury about to have an Over Exposure Moment?
LYMH might be about to take over the Olympics, but you can't miss the thousands of knock off Vuitton pouches populating every tourist destination all over the Med
Have you been into a Flannels recently? It's a chain of department stores peppered around national high streets that have been revamped by the son in law of retail tycoon Mike Ashley (he of ‘pile em high and sell em cheap’ Sports Direct). It was Flannels that bought Matches Fashion recently, before closing it in a shocking strop, stealing all the data and the stock, and laying off everyone else.
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Flannels is reportedly doing well, so I went into one to have a look. The store was airy, bright and shiny, with metres of uniform branded merch racked up along the rails.
There were rails of uniform black t shirts printed variously with logos (DSquared, Moschino, Armani) in adults to kids sizes, starting at £200. The merch was basic, branded to capitalise on the huge marketing campaigns the big luxury brands roll out, whether that's sponsoring the Olympics, or decorating the magnificent Rihanna in a collection of handbags as she walks resplendent, half naked and pregnant, down the Seine. Powerful stuff.
A day or so later I boarded an EasyJet flight to Ibiza. Surrounded by under 30s ordering miniature bottles of wine at 9am, their joy was infectious. I did find it curious that almost every single girl was wearing a pair of Chloe branded sliders, while all the all the boys had Vuitton branded bum bags and pouches swinging from their hips and wrists. If that designer clobber had been genuine I'd have swallowed a bottle of Merlot myself.
It's no wonder the dupes market is killing fashion right now. Those brands deserve it - when you are making £2500 handbags for $57 in an Italian sweat shop of course you are going to get ripped off by dupe factories and market sellers. There’s no artistry in your manufacture, just the intellectual property of your logo. There's nothing special about that merch, other than its label and the way it has been fetishised by handsomely paid models and influencers.
The Milan sweat shop stories are not going away either. First it was Dior, now Armani has been implicated, and the original accusations, which surfaced in a court in May, have found their way in to the Wall Street Journal, Vogue and Business of Fashion. Not to mention many angry Reddit forums.
The reset we all asked for in the pandemic - that fashion stop with its incessant collections and crazy growth cycles, never happened. Instead the revenge shopping boom in the west when lockdown lifted was supercharged even further when the Chinese market stepped in. As Sarah Kent reported in the Business of Fashion yesterday:
“If anything, many of the industry’s biggest players have shifted more towards high-margin mass production, while continuing to market their products as exclusive and artisanally crafted. Manufacturing in Italy burnishes this image, but large volumes of production are outsourced across thousands of small producers that make supply chains difficult to control.
“This practice of contractors and subcontractors is in place for a reason. It’s not by accident, it’s in order to reduce costs,” said [market analyst Luca de] Solca.
These high margin, low cost supply chains are doing more than erode consumer trust. Their basic design codes are delivering all luxury brands their own Daniella Westbrook moment, when back of the lorry traders can rip off designs and logos and not lose anything in the making of it.
Luxury codes have reached such basic, mass appeal surely the shine must start coming off soon?
The Dior bag controversy really hit home. You can understand why it would push people to buy fakes on the beach for the same price or less. The issue I have is that craftsmanship even with real high end luxury bags have no value with younger shoppers. It’s all about the 2inch piece of glossy logoed hardware not the lovely smell of beautiful leather or perfectly finished corners. I looked inside a 4K logo bag recently to see zero craftsmanship on the inside. No disrespect to Michael kors or Coach but it could have been one of their bags. It’s sad to see luxury houses get away with this. It’s time for us as consumers either to buy old pre loved good quality designer bags if that’s our ‘bag’ or look at genuine small artisan bag makers who put quality at the fore without compromising on style and design