Read Online Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Dana Thomas
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture
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the fashion world with a ragtag collection of clothes inspired by rock star Kurt Cobain and dubbed grunge. The collection won Jacobs the Council of Fashion Designers of America women’s wear designer-of-the-year award—and got him sacked from Ellis. For the eponymous company he started with his Ellis settlement, Jacobs made pretty, modern, and dizzyingly expensive clothes for cool rich girls like his pals Sofia Coppola and Kim Gordon, guitarist and singer for the rock band Sonic Youth. What could he bring to the staid, bourgeois house of Vuitton?
Attention, that’s what. Jacobs’s Vuitton ready-to-wear collections immediately became the most popular and critically lauded during Paris’s fashion week and are now seen as a style bellwether for the industry. But the clothes are produced in small quantities, sell for extremely high prices, and are available only in Vuitton boutiques. The ready-to-wear line’s main function, it seems, is to garner headlines and dress up ads to sell leather goods: while it gets a great deal of attention, according to analysts it constitutes a meager 5 percent of Vuitton sales.
While revitalizing the image of Vuitton, Arnault and Carcelle simultaneously strengthened its business side. During Racamier’s reign, Vuitton outsourced 70 percent of its production. Carcelle pulled it all back in-house and increased the number of factories from five to fourteen in ten years. Carcelle also continued Racamier’s effort to take control of distribution by buying out the brand’s U.S. franchisees. “If you control your factories, you control your quality,” Arnault explained. “If you control your distribution, you control your image.” By 2004 , analysts believed that, with its fully owned distribution network of three hundred stores, Vuitton earned gross margins of 80 percent.
The renovation of Dior was far more brutal. Dior’s sixty-three-year-old couturier, Marc Bohan, allegedly learned of his dismissal from his job of twenty-nine years in May 1989 when a reporter from Women’s Wear Daily called for comment. “I was thrown out as abruptly and brutally as if I had been an incompetent valet,” Bohan told the press. Arnault replaced Bohan with Italian ready-to-wear designer Gianfranco Ferré, a move that offended the French as well as those in the couture business, many of whom believed that a ready-to-wear designer knew nothing of the art of made-to-measure clothes.
At Givenchy, Arnault was just as brusque. After a series of tenuous negotiations that played out in the press, Arnault and Hubert de Givenchy reached an impasse, causing the distinguished couturier to retire from the house he had founded forty-three years earlier. Arnault ignored Givenchy’s handpicked choice as successor and hired British designer John Galliano, the thirty-five-year-old plumber’s son and darling of the fashion press who was known as much for his wild partying as for his bias-cut flamenco dresses and 1950 s-inspired tulle confections. Givenchy learned of the appointment at the same time as journalists, through a release from his own press office. When I asked Galliano about the longtime, primarily American Givenchy clientele, he snapped in his working-class-accented English, “I don’t intend to please them. I’m not going there to please them, and probably a lot of them will move away.”
In 1996 , Arnault didn’t renew Ferré’s contract at Dior, and moved Galliano from Givenchy to Dior. Arnault interviewed Jean-Paul Gaultier, the bad boy of French fashion best known for designing Madonna’s cone-breast corsets, for the Givenchy job. Gaultier turned it down; he wanted Dior. Arnault then took a look at Alexander McQueen, the twenty-seven-year-old son of a London cabbie. McQueen was an anathema in luxury fashion, with his soft pudgy body, hard East End accent, and enough rage to make Johnny Rotten seem sweet. He made his name in fashion with shows like Highland Rape, in which models in kilts and
Attention, that’s what. Jacobs’s Vuitton ready-to-wear collections immediately became the most popular and critically lauded during Paris’s fashion week and are now seen as a style bellwether for the industry. But the clothes are produced in small quantities, sell for extremely high prices, and are available only in Vuitton boutiques. The ready-to-wear line’s main function, it seems, is to garner headlines and dress up ads to sell leather goods: while it gets a great deal of attention, according to analysts it constitutes a meager 5 percent of Vuitton sales.
While revitalizing the image of Vuitton, Arnault and Carcelle simultaneously strengthened its business side. During Racamier’s reign, Vuitton outsourced 70 percent of its production. Carcelle pulled it all back in-house and increased the number of factories from five to fourteen in ten years. Carcelle also continued Racamier’s effort to take control of distribution by buying out the brand’s U.S. franchisees. “If you control your factories, you control your quality,” Arnault explained. “If you control your distribution, you control your image.” By 2004 , analysts believed that, with its fully owned distribution network of three hundred stores, Vuitton earned gross margins of 80 percent.
The renovation of Dior was far more brutal. Dior’s sixty-three-year-old couturier, Marc Bohan, allegedly learned of his dismissal from his job of twenty-nine years in May 1989 when a reporter from Women’s Wear Daily called for comment. “I was thrown out as abruptly and brutally as if I had been an incompetent valet,” Bohan told the press. Arnault replaced Bohan with Italian ready-to-wear designer Gianfranco Ferré, a move that offended the French as well as those in the couture business, many of whom believed that a ready-to-wear designer knew nothing of the art of made-to-measure clothes.
At Givenchy, Arnault was just as brusque. After a series of tenuous negotiations that played out in the press, Arnault and Hubert de Givenchy reached an impasse, causing the distinguished couturier to retire from the house he had founded forty-three years earlier. Arnault ignored Givenchy’s handpicked choice as successor and hired British designer John Galliano, the thirty-five-year-old plumber’s son and darling of the fashion press who was known as much for his wild partying as for his bias-cut flamenco dresses and 1950 s-inspired tulle confections. Givenchy learned of the appointment at the same time as journalists, through a release from his own press office. When I asked Galliano about the longtime, primarily American Givenchy clientele, he snapped in his working-class-accented English, “I don’t intend to please them. I’m not going there to please them, and probably a lot of them will move away.”
In 1996 , Arnault didn’t renew Ferré’s contract at Dior, and moved Galliano from Givenchy to Dior. Arnault interviewed Jean-Paul Gaultier, the bad boy of French fashion best known for designing Madonna’s cone-breast corsets, for the Givenchy job. Gaultier turned it down; he wanted Dior. Arnault then took a look at Alexander McQueen, the twenty-seven-year-old son of a London cabbie. McQueen was an anathema in luxury fashion, with his soft pudgy body, hard East End accent, and enough rage to make Johnny Rotten seem sweet. He made his name in fashion with shows like Highland Rape, in which models in kilts and
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