Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster - Hardcover

Thomas, Dana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594201293 ISBN 13: 9781594201295

Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The, 2007

Synopsis

Documents how luxury goods have been transformed by a shift from exclusive distribution practices by quality-minded family businesses to mass production by profit-minded big corporations, revealing the secrets of top designers while examining the ways in which today's methods have had a negative impact.

About this title

About the Author:

Dana Thomas has been the cultural and fashion writer for Newsweek in Paris for twelve years. She has written about style for the New York Times Magazine since 1994, and has contributed to various publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times in London. She is the Paris correspondent for Australian Harper's Bazaar, and a member of the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris and the Overseas Press Club. Thomas taught journalism at The American University of Paris from 1996 to 1999. In 1987, she received the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation Scholarship and the Ellis Haller Award for Outstanding Achievement in Journalism.

Review:

Deluxe is delicious if you know about fashion; fascinating even if you don't. We're not just backstage at the runway show, we're all the way back in the factory, which might well be in a remote province of China. Dana Thomas is a fearless reporter who shows how so many designer goods have gone to hell in a handbag. This is a page-turning yarn about the men and women who have transformed luxury into an off-the-rack, global commodity. -- Joel Achenbach, Washington Post columnist and author of The Grand Idea

If you have ever wondered why a woman absolutely needs to buy a $3,000 handbag, or why she might perish without a certain shade of lipstick, this book explains it all in empirical, evolutionary detail. Dana Thomas has brilliantly dissected the fashion phenomenon while the healthy beast still thrives luxuriously on the operating table. Deluxe might make some women pause before spending the rent money on their Manolo Blahniks. -- Richard Johnson, New York Post

The story of luxury goods today is really about globalization, capitalization, class and culture. Dana Thomas has a feel for all of this and more and has written a fascinating book. A luxury product about luxury. -- Fareed Zakaria

Through exhaustive reporting and personalized storytelling, Dana Thomas has delivered a historical survey of a business that truly keeps the world going round. She may never again be so readily welcomed in some quarters of this beau monde, but the trade off is an essential reference for any student of fashion, finance or culture. -- Rose Apodaca, former west coast bureau chief, Women's Wear Daily

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1594201293
• ISBN 13: 9781594201295
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384