Read Online Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas - Free Book Online

4.167 billion FF (about $ 765 million at exchange rates then) in sales. But Bernard Arnault took Vuitton, and all of LVMH, to another level altogether. His motivation was simple: the luxury goods industry, he said, “is the only area in which it is possible to make luxury margins.” He expanded his group, focusing on what he calls “star brands”—brands such as Vuitton, Givenchy, and Dior, which he described as “timeless, modern, fast-growing, and highly profitable [companies built] for eternity.”
    Some brands he bought easily, others through bold, acrimonious takeovers. With each new brand, Arnault saw opportunity for exploitation. The younger brands like Bliss, Michael Kors, and Marc Jacobs were easy: he streamlined them and folded them into the LVMH production, distribution, and retail network. The older brands were another story. They needed to be renovated top to bottom. To do it, Arnault implemented the new luxury model he helped develop: enhance timelessness, jazz up the design, and advertise like crazy.
    At Vuitton, he began in 1990 by hiring an ebullient forty-two-year-old French businessman named Yves Carcelle as his new head of strategy and development; after a few months, Carcelle was promoted to CEO and chairman of Louis Vuitton. Carcelle was the only son of a civil servant and, like Arnault, had studied at the elite École Polytechnique. Rather than pursue mathematics, Carcelle went into marketing. He worked briefly as a traveling salesman hawking sponges and spent nine years with a German consumer products group. In 1985 , he was hired by a big French textiles group to turn around its failing luxury linens brand, Descamps. In eighteen months, through staff layoffs and production reorganization, Carcelle brought Descamps back into the black.
    Even so, Arnault and Carcelle had their work cut out for them. “You think of Vuitton and you think of airports,” Vogue ’s editor in chief, Anna Wintour, told the New Yorker. “Until now, it has had no fashion cachet, no status. Vuitton’s image has been—it has been Palm Beach.”
    To refurbish the company’s heritage, Carcelle and his number two, Jean-Marc Loubier, launched Vuitton ad campaigns that romanticized luxury travel; organized and sponsored antique car rallies, such as the Vintage Equator Run in 1993 across Southeast Asia; and invited journalists on tours of the Asnières workshop to write stories about how a Vuitton trunk was made. They reintroduced the century-old Damier checkerboard canvas and launched a retro handbag design called the Alma that was inspired by a luggage line from the 1930 s.
    Once they had manufactured the dream, they livened up the design side. For the centennial of the monogram canvas in 1996 , they hired seven cutting-edge designers to reinterpret the canvas and ran the creations as an ad campaign. Spanish designer Sybilla came up with a backpack with an umbrella sprouting from it. Azzedine Alaia wrapped a monogram handbag in leopard skin. Vivienne Westwood came up with a bustle-like fanny pack. But Arnault wanted more. One of the best ways to garner attention is the women’s ready-to-wear shows held twice a year in New York, Milan, and Paris. Covered by more than a thousand journalists and photographed by dozens of newspapers, wire services, and photo agencies, these shows get immediate headlines—and pictures of the outfits appear in magazines and newspapers all year long. “What counts with critiques is not whether they’re good or bad,” Arnault told me, quoting Christian Dior. “It’s whether they’re on the front page.”
    Arnault wanted a women’s ready-to-wear line at Vuitton and told his staff to find a hip, hot designer to do it. After reviewing various suggestions, Arnault hired Marc Jacobs. It was a curious choice. In his midthirties, Jacobs was scruffy and bohemian, a New Yorker deep in his bones. A few years earlier, as the designer for New York–based Perry Ellis sportswear line, Jacobs shook up