Why Luxury Brands Are A Big Waste Of Money

Luxury fashion is a waste of money. Now I am going to tell you exactly why.

But to understand how luxury fashion became a waste of money, we need to take a trip down memory lane.

In the 20th century, Paris was the melting pot for budding fashion designers and couturiers.

Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain, Yves Saint Laurent, Cristobal Balenciaga, Cogre Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Hubert de Givenchy and many more designers

hailing from all over France, Spain and Italy at some point settled in the French capital to pursue their dreams of creating a luxury fashion house.

However, all of them had very different motivations for wanting to start a luxury fashion house.

Christian Dior wanted to celebrate femininity and escape from what he had perceived as the death of French women's style since the Second World War.

The new look was his version of a return to the elegance and femininity he remembered before the war.

On the flip side, Coco Chanel wanted to liberate women, creating a uniform style that was comfortable and practical for women to wear.

What they did all have in common was a very strong understanding of fashion and in some cases were exceptional couturiers with the ability to manipulate silhouettes and form with ease.

Yves Saint Laurent and Cristobal Balenciaga especially come to mind here.

In fact, Cristobal Balenciaga was so respected by his peers that Cristenduor called him the master of us all.

In Italy, a similar fashion movement was going on.

In 1910, Amenagildo Zenia created a luxury fabrics brand.

Adele and Eduardo Fendi created their namesake brand in 1925.

And a few years earlier, in 1921, Gucci Oguci created his eponymous label.

After being inspired by the lifestyle of British aristocrats, he observed when he was working as a waiter in the Savoy Hotel.

Now, for the most part, all of these fashion designers that created luxury fashion houses in the 20th century really dressed the highest in society.

They were dressing the royals, the aristocrats, the celebrities. These were the customer bases and they never, ever compromised on quality.

In fact, that was one of the main things that, you know, made them want to create what they wanted to create.

This is why Gucci O'Gucci wanted to create extremely high quality leather accessories.

There was a pride in the fact that people wanted to produce a product that was of the quality that royals would take to and would want to use.

And when you consider that a lot of these people, their customer base was high society, It makes a lot of sense why there was this expectation anyway.

The customers expected amazing service. They expected high quality garments.

They expected the best fabrics and materials to be used to create their garments. And this is the reason why the clothes were so expensive.

For the most part, a lot of these clothes were made to measure. And it would take a team of seamstresses, embroiderers and many more hands, days and sometimes even weeks to make a single garment for a client.

With time, as Monarchy started to lose relevance, the clientele slightly shifted to the new class of rich people, which included musicians and show business moguls.

And when you read about a lot of these couturiers and designers from the 20th century, they respected the craft, like I said earlier.

Christopher Balenciaga used to ask for tips from Chanel, and Chanel sort of took Christopher Balenciaga under her wing.

You have designers like Yves Saint Laurent talking about different designers that he was inspired by.

This super high priced clothing was a way for rich people to differentiate themselves from the rest of society.

Essentially, the clothes signified their higher social standing.

And of course, wearing clothing as a social signifier of where you stand in society is absolutely nothing new.

People have been doing this forever. There were even times in the British Empire where you were not allowed to wear the same things that royals wore.

So that when you would see a royal on the street, you would know that there were, you know, royals or like a nobleman.

they were allowed to wear certain things that the everyday person wouldn't be allowed to wear. And this is the point where Mr.

Bernard Arnault comes in. Now in fashion we tend to pick on Bernard Arnault because Bernard Arnault is probably the most prominent person in fashion.

He's a top three richest man in the world. I think right now he's the second richest man in the world behind Elon Musk.

So for the sake of this video I'm just going to talk about Bernard Arnault but there are many people that do what Bernard Arnault did and they got the blueprint from him.

He's sort of really really amplified this way of doing

business but there are so many conglomerates in fashion Bernard

Arnault runs LVMH but they're also really big conglomerates

like Richemolle and Kering,

OTB and so many other groups so I'm just talking about Bernard Arnault for this video but bear in mind that there are so many other fashion conglomerates that do the exact same thing.

Bernard Arnault studied the growth of these brands and saw a unique opportunity to use the fact that these brands were so unattainable as a marketing point to sell cheaper consumer products that can generate more money.

He saw how well fragrances like Chanel No.5 sold and started acquiring fashion brands like Dior and later Givenchy.

Now a very good source on learning how luxury fashion has changed over time is this really amazing book by Dana Thomas called How Luxury Lost This Luster.