Recently I had dinner with a fashion and culture commentator who is based in Asia. He was describing the scene at a party celebrating the newly opened Prada flagship in Shanghai; how the impeccably tasteful shop was filled with young kids with too much money and too little taste, dancing to bad music in celebration of conspicuous consumption. “That’s who buys this stuff,” he concluded. And with this one phrase he got to the crux of why many of you cannot relate to luxury fashion. Simply put, if you are a person of taste, intelligence, in possession of a certain attenuated sensibility, a degree of elegance and sophistication, today you are not luxury fashion’s target audience.
Agreed. With few exceptions, modern luxury fashion has always struck me as nothing but a tasteless, lowest-common-denominator appeal to wealth. Gucci's inexplicable transition to polyfabric sweatpants and hoodies is one of the worst examples, but by no means the only one. Good clothes begin with good construction, and luxury brands have lost that quality entirely.