Read Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster for Free Online Page B

Couturiers licensed their names for perfumes. In 1959 , Pierre Cardin, a former Dior assistant who started his own business, revolutionized fashion by licensing the mass production of women’s designer ready-to-wear. Instead of going to a department store to have a Cardin dress made for you with the store’s label inside, you could buy it off the rack and it would bear the label “Pierre Cardin—Paris.” Cardin’s name was stamped on everything from umbrellas to cigarettes, making his signature a coveted logo.
    Another former Dior assistant—and later Dior’s heir—Yves Saint Laurent, took licensing one step further in 1966 by introducing a lower-priced ready-to-wear line called Rive Gauche that targeted young people. Rive Gauche changed the fashion paradigm. Before it was simple: couturiers made exquisite clothes and sold a bit of perfume and some accessories. Now there was a new pyramid model: made-to-order couture on the top for the truly rich, ready-to-wear by the same designers for the middle class, and a broad array of fragrances and accessories for those at the bottom. With the advent of licensing names, the fragrance business began to grow, and couture diminished rapidly.
    “I stopped buying couture because, frankly, it was considered really old-fashioned,” Leslie Caron told me. “I remember one of the fashion magazines asked me to do a layout in about 1968 , and they came up with people I had never heard of like Biba. You were supposed to look like a flower child. You couldn’t wear hats anymore, you couldn’t wear gloves or a bra, and you looked really old-fashioned if you wore couture dresses.”
    Master couturier Cristobal Balenciaga was so disillusioned by the dressing down of society that he abruptly announced the closure of his house. “I was staying with Mona Bismarck in Capri when the news came,” Diana Vreeland recalled in her book. “Mona didn’t come out of her room for three days. I mean…it was the end of a certain part of her life !”
    It was also an end to a certain part of the luxury business. From then on, luxury was no longer simply about creating the finest things money could buy. It was about making money, a lot of money. Couturiers licensed their names liberally, and not just on perfume and eyewear. Givenchy and Pucci both did special designer editions of Lincoln Continentals. Quality dropped. “I bought ready-to-wear made of really bad quality material for a while,” Caron remembered. “I have pictures of me going to the Oscars or premieres in really horrible rags that were considered fashionable.” Service evaporated. “Bloomingdale’s is the end of shopping because there isn’t anyone to wait on you,” Diana Vreeland wrote in 1984 . “Then you see a man; you think he’s a floorwalker: ‘I’m sorry, lady, I can’t help you. I’m like you, I’m just looking for somebody to help me .’ So you go out into the street with tears in your eyes: you’ve accomplished nothing and you’ve lost your health!…Or I go into, say, Saks Fifth Avenue, and there on a rack on wheels are two dozen $ 5 , 000 dresses. On a rack! It shocks me…$ 5 , 000 dresses, dangling there…Of course a lot of people enjoy the variety. They go home empty-handed. But they’ve shopped. It’s a sport.”
     
    V UITTON WAS OUT of step with the times, and this is evident when visiting the museum. From the postwar era to the early 1980 s, there is little on display. Henry-Louis, who was in charge of sales, and Claude-Louis, who oversaw production, were gatekeepers, not innovators. Vuitton made old-fashioned luggage the old-fashioned way for a limited—and aging—clientele. The business foundered, the workshop in Asnières could barely meet the meager demands. By 1977 , the company had two shops—one on the avenue Marceau and the other in Nice—a piddly 70 million FF (approximately $ 12 million) in sales and 7 million FF (approximately $ 1.2 million) in profit.
    Finally, in 1977 , Renée