Thomas, Dana 1964-

views updated

Thomas, Dana 1964-

PERSONAL:

Born 1964; married Hervé d'Halluin; children: Lucie Lee.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Paris, France.

CAREER:

Newsweek, Paris, France, cultural and fashion writer, c. 1995—. Paris correspondent, Australian Harper's Bazaar.

MEMBER:

Overseas Press Club, Anglo-American Press Association (Paris, France).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Sigma Delta Chi Foundation Scholarship; Ellis Haller Award for Outstanding Achievement in Journalism.

WRITINGS:

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, Penguin (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, and Financial Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

Having written about luxury fashion for the Washington Post, New York Times Magazine, and Newsweek, Dana Thomas witnessed a significant change in the industry between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. What had once been a fifty-million-dollar-a-year industry in which most brands were still family-owned and operated had exploded into a global industry with more than one-hundred-fifty billion dollars in annual sales. Sensing that this revolution would make a great story, Thomas made an exhaustive study of trends and data, and interviewed dozens of the industry's major players. Her resulting book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, was hailed as a fascinating expose of the luxury fashion industry.

Thomas identifies Bernard Arnault, chair and chief executive of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, as the epitome of the new fashion mogul who sought to expand the relatively small luxury market into a gigantic global empire. Arnault bought Dior and several other elite brands, spent vast sums on advertising and product placement with movie stars, and succeeded in establishing his brands as objects that consumers around the world felt they must have. A few decades earlier only the truly wealthy could afford to buy brands such as Gucci and Prada; by the late 1990s and early 2000s even middle-income consumers craved—and bought—elite brands, even if these were only small items such as sneakers or sunglasses. Increased demand led many companies to shift away from their original emphasis on impeccable quality and to focus instead on maximizing profits. Goods that had once been handmade to exacting standards are now frequently outsourced to factories where labor costs are cheaper; companies have also started to use cheaper materials and to employ subtle design changes—eliminating linings, or making sleeves a fraction of an inch shorter, for example—to keep costs low and profit margins high.

For Thomas, this democratization of luxury is in many ways a negative trend. Customers, she writes, are often paying a lot of money for goods that are not much different from lower-end labels. As she explained in an interview posted on the Penguin Books Web site, luxury brands have "diluted their names, presence, prestige and message" by going after the mass market. "The goal of luxury brands was to produce the best that money can buy. Today it's about producing the most profit for their shareholders. Luxury brand items are no longer special. They are common—the exact opposite of what luxury's founders set out to achieve."

Thomas sketches profiles of several of fashion's most powerful and controversial figures, and peppers the book with many revealing anecdotes. She describes her visits to the venues where many luxury goods are produced, from the small ateliers of artisans such as Poupie Cadolle to the Florence silk factory that weaves fabrics for Pucci to the vast factories in China where counterfeit items are made. Noting that the Chinese factories that she visited seemed to operate under relatively good conditions for workers, she nevertheless told the Penguin interviewer that, when she accompanied police on a counterfeit workshop raid in Guangzhou where children were employed, "It was truly something out of Oliver Twist."

Counterfeiting, she emphasized in the interview, is a big part of the luxury business and has "repercussions [that] are far more sinister than most people can imagine." These include financing for global terrorist operations. Thomas cited data from the IACC and from an Interpol report to the U.S. House Committee on International Relations associating profits from sales of counterfeit items with Hezbollah, paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, and Colombia's FARC rebel army, as well as with the World Trade Center bombing of 1993.

David Siegfried, reviewing Deluxe in Booklist, observed that Thomas's treatment of the root of consumer desire for luxury is relatively superficial. USA Today contributor Lyn Millner made a similar point, noting that "an examination of the luxury industry begs for questions about our yearning for status and wealth" but that these themes remain unexplored. Some critics, including New York Times Book Review writer Caroline Weber, discerned a hint of snobbishness in Thomas's tone. Nevertheless, Weber concluded that "Deluxe performs a valuable service by reminding us that these labels don't mean much else [except corporate profit.] Once guarantors of value and integrity, they are now markers that point toward nothing, guiding the consumer on a road to nowhere."