Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (22 page)

Luxury brands had the answer. At Chanel, executives decided to push the thirty-year-old quilted
2
.
55
bag. “I remember being in all those meetings when we said we have to get aggressive about selling handbags,” Arie Kopelman, former CEO of Chanel Inc., the company’s American affiliate, told me. “You can drive the business with accessories, you can advertise it easily, you can promote it in many ways, and we said, ‘How can we make this happen in the greatest way possible and really go after the business?’ It was a product line that really needed a tremendous push to capitalize on the opportunity.”

Kopelman was among those at Chanel who wanted to do a big ad campaign promoting the
2
.
55
and other similar bags. It was a bold move, since back then, as Kopelman pointed out, “[Chanel] didn’t really advertise except for perfume and cosmetics.” To the French, advertising fashion was considered tacky: “You don’t do that” was the standard response. But Kopelman, a former ad man who had worked for the advertising giant Doyle Dane Bernbach for twenty years before joining Chanel, helped to convince his colleagues otherwise. The ad campaign ran, and Chanel handbag sales took off. “It was clearly a terrific market opportunity,” Kopelman told me. “We jumped on a trend and made the most of it.” Each season, Chanel reissued the
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.
55
in new bold colors and materials. Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld reinterpreted the
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.
55
’s chain strap as a belt slung around the hips and the quilting pattern was used for everything from down-filled coats to a stamped impression on eye shadow. In
1986
, Lagerfeld designed a magnificent couture evening gown embroidered with a trompe l’oeil inspired by the quilted
2
.
55
.

At Hermès, Dumas reinvigorated the eighty-year-old Kelly. He expanded the range from dark tones to a rainbow of colors and in a variety of leathers and featured it in a snappy ad campaign. “He released the Kelly from its conservative past,” de Bazelaire said. “Shook it up. Put it in front of the scene.” Sales exploded. Waiting lists started, and they’ve never abated.

One day in
1984
on an Air France flight from Paris to London, British actress Jane Birkin pulled her Hermès datebook out of her bag and—
whoosh
—all her papers fell out all over the floor. She groused as she scooped them up about how the book needed a pocket. Beside her sat Jean-Louis Dumas.

“Let me take yours and let’s see what we can do,” he said.

A few weeks later, Birkin received her datebook with a pocket stitched inside the cover.

“Now they all have pockets!” she told me when she recounted the story. “Isn’t it marvelous?”

During that same flight, Birkin grumbled to Dumas—she had his attention after all—that there wasn’t a good leather weekend bag for women, “one that isn’t too big, or too heavy when it’s full of stuff,” she explained.

“What would you want it to look like?” he asked.

She described it to him.

Not long after, a big package arrived at her flat. It was a leather weekend bag, just as she had imagined it. Dumas had adapted the
haut à courroies
to Birkin’s specs and dubbed it the Birkin.

“You and Grace Kelly are the only ones with Hermès bags named in your honor,” he told her.

H
ERMÈS’S BIRKIN
and Kelly were big hits with the rich set, and the Chanel’s
2
.
55
with the working woman—I remember when I was writing about fashion for the
Washington Post,
seeing the power lawyers and lobbyists on K Street with their quilted bags dangling from chains on their shoulders. But what was the young or average-income woman who wanted to be fashionable to do? I was in my twenties at the time and, though I had a good job, I shared an apartment with a roommate to make rent. I wrote about Chanel, but I shopped at the Gap. My one luxury fashion item was Chanel No.
5
, but the cheapest level: eau de toilette spray. Yes, I was buying into the dream. But I wondered: How could I and my friends, most also in low-paying, starting-level jobs, be a part of the world of luxury fashion that we read about in
Vogue
and
Harper’s Bazaar,
beyond perfume? And how could we do it without looking like those conservative lobbyists and lawyers?

The answer sat quietly in an eighty-year-old mahogany-and-glass display case in Milan, waiting to be discovered. When Miuccia Prada took over her grandfather’s company in
1978
, she didn’t want to reissue a design made famous by Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn or Jackie Kennedy. She wanted to do new designs. Nothing at Prada would be old. She began exploring the use of different fabrics and designs and came up with a backpack made of nylon parachute fabric trimmed in leather. She had it made on sewing machines that made parachutes for the Italian army and it came in two colors: black and brown.

It didn’t sell for a while. “No one wanted the backpack because it didn’t scream luxury,” Prada told me when I met with her in
2006
. It was anonymous and simple. As Holly Brubach wrote in the
New Yorker
in
1990
, “These were upstart bags: by their design they demanded to be taken seriously, but they were made of a material that, according to most people’s taste at the time, undermined their credibility. Real bags, the sort of bags people were proud to carry, came in leather or crocodile or silk, not nylon.” Fashion editors urged Prada to put the company’s initials on the sack like Chanel or Gucci did to give it more cachet, but she refused. She had always hated logos on luxury items when she was growing up. Instead, she chose to use the tiny triangle label that her grandfather affixed on trunks. It was in black enamel, with the name Fratelli Prada, a crown that signified that the company was an official supplier to the Italian royal family and “Milano.” Miuccia added a line stating that the company was founded in
1913
to validate its place among luxury brands, and attached it to the flap of the backpack.

The backpack finally got its close-up in
1988
. Prada showed her first collection of women’s wear, and when editors and retailers stopped by the showroom to review and order the clothes, they came upon the backpack. The next season it popped up in small articles in the glossies and on department store shelves. Prada increased the buzz by sending backpacks to key editors as a Christmas present. “Then it hit,” remembers fashion public relations executive Karla Otto, who worked with Prada at the time. “It was everywhere.”

The Prada backpack was the ultimate “It” bag for the average consumer: it was hip, modern, lightweight, and at $
450
far less expensive than finely tooled leather bags like the Kelly and the
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.
55
. Prada backpacks were so popular that
New York Times
street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham stood on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue one afternoon, shooting women walking by with the sacks slung over their shoulders, the little triangle with PRADA written neatly in an exclusive serif typeface designed for the company’s logo stuck on the flap for everyone to see. The Prada backpack became the handbag design of the moment: every brand had a version. The backpack sold like crazy, made the company a fortune, and turned Prada into a household name. All the while, Miuccia Prada sat in her studio and cringed. “She hated seeing certain women carrying her handbags,” recalls Leslie Johnsen, who worked as Prada’s director for public relations for North America in the early
1990
s. Meanwhile, Prada’s husband and company CEO, Patrizio Bertelli, sat in his office and plotted the company’s global expansion, funded with backpack sales.

The Prada backpack, in fact, unknowingly became the emblem of the radical change that luxury was undergoing at the time: the shift from small family businesses of beautifully handcrafted goods to global corporations selling to the middle market. When Tom Ford took over the creative direction of Gucci in
1994
, he saw the potential of the youth market in luxury fashion and pushed handbags into the forefront. Models would come marching down the runway of his Gucci women’s wear shows in Milan to the hip-hop sounds of Lauryn Hill or Fatboy Slim, dressed in sexy black satin suits or white liquid jersey columns, clutching or wearing a fantastic new Gucci bag. Soon fashion editors were reporting not only on Ford’s new clothes but also on the new bags. The phenomenal sales of Ford’s bags pulled Gucci out of near bankruptcy and helped underwrite its global expansion. “Tom Ford made beautiful dresses, but he always stuck a great bag on them,” said Claus Lindorff of BETC Luxe. “How many $
2
,
000
white satin gowns are you going to sell? Luxury brands know that clothing is a loss. The bag is the introduction to a brand. Even if it’s a ready-to-wear ad campaign, what you are really selling is the handbag. Thanks to Tom Ford, prêt-à-porter is the decor for the accessory.”

So essential is the handbag in the success of a luxury brand today that Gucci Group attributed the disappointing figures at Yves Saint Laurent in
2005
to the fact that the brand hadn’t had a hit bag in a couple of seasons. And Yves Saint Laurent was, at least until Gucci Group took it over in
1999
, a fashion house, not a leather goods company. In
2006
, Gucci Group was still supporting its fledgling fashion brands, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. But as Lindorff said, “It’s not going to be clothes that make those brands work. Those designers are being told, ‘Get a bloody handbag out there that will sell well.’”

It was an “It” bag that turned Fendi from a dowdy old fur company into a top-tier luxury fashion brand. Back in
1997
, Fendi’s accessories designer Silvia Fendi Venturini came up with the Baguette, a little, soft oblong pouch on a short shoulder strap that nestles comfortably under the arm. It sold out in a matter of months and soon had a long waiting list, including for the $
5
,
000
version made of silk handwoven in the Manifattura Lisio in Florence. All together, Fendi sold more than a hundred thousand Baguettes the first year. It became such an important fashion item that it was written into an episode of
Sex and the City
: when a mugger ordered Carrie Bradshaw to hand over her purse, she responded, “It’s a Baguette.”

Venturini kept coming up with new spins on it—in denim, or covered in sea pearls—and stuck it on the arms of models showing Fendi’s women’s wear, which has been designed by Karl Lagerfeld since
1965
. The Baguette gave the house such a financial and fashion boost that by the fall of
1999
, the luxury barons were fighting over it. Gucci, Prada, Bulgari, and LVMH all tried to buy the company, first founded by Venturini’s grandmother Adele Casagrande in
1918
—she married Edoardo Fendi in
1925
—and run since
1954
by their five daughters. In the end LVMH teamed up with Prada and bought
51
percent of Fendi for $
520
million—valuing the entire company at nearly $
1
billion. Some of Fendi’s suitors complained during negotiations that Bernard Arnault and Prada’s Patrizio Bertelli wanted to pay too much for Fendi. “They’re throwing money around like drunken sailors,” one remarked at the time.

By
2001
, the Baguette was over. Bertelli wisely sold Prada’s
25
percent back to LVMH for $
260
million, and over the years LVMH acquired more shares from the Fendi family, for a total of
94
percent in
2007
. For years LVMH has poured money into Fendi—hiring über–luxury brand architect Peter Marino for a costly renovation of the Rome store, opening more than thirty new free-standing stores in less than four years, buying back dozens of licenses—but by
2005
, it was still in the red. Market sources estimated that Fendi lost approximately $
31
.
2
million in
2004
. Meanwhile, Silvia Fendi Venturini and her team offer several new designs each season, hoping one will be “It.”

T
O MEET THE
increasing demand for handbags they had created, luxury brands had to come up with innovative solutions. Hermès stuck with its limited distribution. For Dumas, it was a question of integrity: the heart of Hermès was fine traditional craftsmanship, and to sacrifice that would undermine the brand. The other major—and minor—luxury brands looked for ways to produce more goods faster and more efficiently. Louis Vuitton expanded its production, adding workshops in France and moving some manufacturing to the Loewe factory in Spain. When I visited the special-orders atelier in Asnières, I got a glimpse of how Louis Vuitton makes its bags: seamstresses sat behind sewing machines, stitching together scores of the new denim monogram handbag. Unlike at Hermès, where bags were crafted by hand one at a time, at Vuitton, the workers were churning them out assembly-line style, in twenty-bag batches. Vuitton executives may crow about quality, but the company’s focus is obviously on productivity.

Gucci, on the other hand, went high-tech. In March
2004
, I visited Gucci factory headquarters near Florence a few weeks before Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole—and much of the team that worked with them—left the company, to see how Gucci handbags were made. My guide was Gucci’s product development director, Alessandro Poggiolini, an affable and polite man in his sixties who had joined Gucci in
1967
as a handbag artisan. (He retired from the company in
2005
.) The original Gucci factory, Poggiolini told me, was on the river Arno in Florence. Later it moved to Via della Caldaie, in the city center, and in
1971
it moved to an industrial park called Casellina di Scandicci, about half an hour outside the city.