Deluxe II

"Luxury," said Cristiane Saddi, a customer of Daslu, Sao Paolo, Brazil, "is not how much you can buy. Luxury is the knowledge of how to do it right, how to take the time to understand and choose well. Luxury is buying the right thing." (p. 345-6)

"Luxury is exclusivity - it is made for you and no one else has it," Francoise Montenay, Chanel's president for Europe, explained "at a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique. It's the way you are spoken to, the way the product is presented, the way you are treated."

French actress Leslie Caron once said: "It was as important to be well dressed at it was to be educated, have good manners, eat well." (p. 29)

"Most of the designs have been around for almost a century and are coveted not because they are in fashion but because they never go out of fashion." (p. 172)

In Japan, parasite singles are very common; they are unmarried university-educated women, ages twenty-five to thirty-four, who worked in good-paying jobs - as secretaries, teachers, executives and lived with their parents. Living with parent without worrying about household expenses, they have a large amount of disposable income and impressive economic power. (p. 79) Parasite singles are also becoming very common in Hong Kong too.

Luxury fashion is a clubby world - designers all know each other, many intimately so, support staff such as press attaches and assistant designers move freely from one company to another, everyone dines in the same restaurants and vacations in the same locales. They refer to themselves as "the fashion tribe." Individualism has given way to homogenization, not only among stores within a brand but also among brands themselves. They tend to hire the same architects and use the same design tricks to get crowds into the stores and try to avoid leading the way for fear of alienating customers. (p. 90)

The former designer for Gucci Tom Ford said "luxury fashion brands today are too available, everything is too uniform, and customer business is too pedestrian." "It's like McDonald's: the merchandise and philosophy behind it is very similar. You get the same hamburger and the same experience in every McDonald's Same with Vuitton...The world was becoming a global culture." (p. 325-6) So much so the book is covered by the New York artist Tom Sachs's Prada Value Meal (1998), which converts McDonald's-style value meals Prada's logo wrap, on the dust jacket.

If there is one thing that has changed in luxury in the last thirty years, it is the single-minded focus on profitability. Since the tycoons have taken over, however, the primary objective to produce the finest products possible has been replaced by a phenomenon Thomas call the cult of luxury. Today, luxury brand items are collected like baseball cards, displayed like artwork, brandished like iconography. Luxury tycoons have shifted the focus from what the produce is to what it represents. (p. 41)