Do you own a Louis Vuitton bag? Do you feel proud and a little bit superior every time you carry it at the grocery store? Look around, how many LV monogram bags can you count during your weekly shop? Funny, we don't usually think of the wealthy as doing their own shopping, or cooking or anything else domestic for that matter, so here's the conundrum: is a LV monogram bag a "luxury" item if anyone can not only afford one, but has easy access to buy one?

This concept is explored by Dana Thomas in her new book, Deluxe, How Luxury Lost It's Luster.  As an exploration of how luxury brands have gone from producing rarefied, difficult to procure, hand-crafted products to mass-market purveyors of expensive "luxury" goods for the masses it is an interesting and enlightening journey. Thomas uses Bernard Arnault's reign at LVMH as a prime example of this subtle but very lucrative branding strategy. Of course you paid a lot for your Vuitton bag. Everyone who actually buys the real thing does. But it's not made as well as it used to be, because they have to make so many more of them now. Everybody wins, right?

Thomas also brings in the counterfeit market as another example of how even those who can't afford the real luxuries, can aspire by buying knock-offs which often don't even look like, say, a Prada bag, but there it is -- that little metal triangle proclaiming to all that "I have neither the money or the taste to know the real thing when I see it." This builds neither brand equity for the product nor the status of the carrier.

It's my belief that the companies that still rely on a small, highly-elite clientele, producing small-run, hand-made products (Hermés springs to mind), will begin to design products that are still not only difficult and expensive to acquire, but also difficult to identify. If you can spot a handbag by its unique leather stitch, a coat by its buttons or a shoe by its sole color, you can still be in the club. Luxury will become blind and status will be conferred on those whose regal bearing is the only signifier of their super-wealthy status. If you have to ask, you can't be in the club.

It's On the Desk.