Shoes. I clock a pair of Prada shoes on the front of the current Newsweek. I pick it up. The cover line: The Case For Luxury, the savvy shopper buys less but spends more in hard times. Interesting proposition: I'm curious. I buy it. I read it.
Luxury sales are increasing, while low-end, cheap products are on the slide; People are trading excess for excellence, superficiality for substance, says Newsweeks Jonathan Tepperman in one of the lead articles, A Few Good Shirts. He quotes, spokesman for Savile Row Bespoke, Gavin Davis' phrase a flight to quality. He points out that the Contemporary Arts Fair tanked ...but old masters are going strong. According to Temperman, The reason is simple; quality pays. Well made but expensive items in classic styles offer a few big advantages over more disposable things.
Disposable things. I read again.
It's a twisted logic, like saying the reason so many small businesses are filing for bankruptcy at the moment is because more and more people would prefer to spend quality time at home with the kids.
The sales in stores targeting lower income and mainstream shoppers are on the decline because those who would happily spend their hard earned money in stores such as GAP and Saks Fifth Avenue are being hit with much more severity than those at the top-end of the consumer ladder.
The statistics quoted in the article reflect the basic difference between income and wealth: the wealthy are not being (or not allowing) the current economic situation to impede their spending power, while the poor have no option. More, the nature of the global economy and the current rates of exchange means that rich folk from other parts of the world are finding places like London more and more attractive for holidays and shopping. Less well-off people are too cash-strapped and busy trying to keep their jobs and their homes to think about luxury investments.
This confidence in the buoyancy of the luxury market isn't shared by other media either. Reuters reports (March 19th): Many European luxury houses are having to slow global expansion, close shops and cut expenses such as catwalks as demand plummets in key emerging markets like Russia and big retail outposts such as the United States. Another Reuters report dated April 4th reads: Overall, luxury analysts expect the global luxury market to decline more than 10 percent this year, its worst drop since 2002.
But why, I ask myself, why is the (once) great Newsweek rolling out such a questionable story? I flick through the pages of my newly purchased copy. I looking at the ads. I get my answer. Louis Vuitton, Rolex,Tag Heuer, Corum - all of whom get favourable treatment in the A Few Good Shirts article. I also note an ad for American Airlines...Business Class.
But there are other reasons. Undermined by internet-based news media, publications like Newsweek have been moving further away from the coverage of hard news and more towards opinion based articles. As part of this shift - which included many redundancies - the publishers have also planned reductions in the magazines print run - attempting to trade up and target a more affluent reader than ever before...
According to James Robinson, in a recent Observer article (March 1st), Despite its recent circulation gain, Newsweek is losing money and, in a worsening economic climate, those losses are likely to increase, unless its cost base is radically reduced. Printing fewer copies will help, and if it can attract a more affluent readership it may demonstrate there is a future for news weeklies.
The trading-up-in-hard-times lead story is not just an example of projected wishful thinking on Newsweeks part, it also follows the mantra of the luxury industry itself, who for years have been trying very hard to drag us away from our cheaply made Chinese, Indian and Turkish (read overseas) disposable things in favour of their better made but more expensive ones. Revelations about horrendous sweat shops, fly-on-the-wall programmes about Savile Row, stories about an arts and crafts revival are all part of the same urge to pull us away from the cheap side of consumption...This Newsweek article, lost in it's own lack of logic is in a way just part of this on-going sales pitch.
Personally I'm all for trading up, as long as it doesn't mean dumbing down in the process.
Their speciality is the slack jacket - a piece which all sorts of brands feature, but very few seem to get right...
J Keydge includes a seersucker jacket, a leather trim jacket and madras patchwork version within their excellent current collection.
It's forty years since Neil Armstrong uttered those famous words about small steps and mankind...While virtually every aspect of the NASA programme is subject to debate and suspicion (Capricorn One is a must see in that respect), one thing no one can deny is the way in which it wrote the Omega Speedmaster into the American history books. Worn by Armstrongs' co-pilot Buzz Aldrin (below), it's the first and only watch to be worn on the moon and is still worn on many NASA shuttle missions to this day.
