Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre #

Author Dana Thomas
Date March 7, 2026
Rating 4/5

For this book, I have a bunch of random, unconnected thoughts:

• I was mostly taught that the goal of a creative designer is world building, basically creating an environment that their clothes inhabit and represent and that you, the consumer, could “participate in” if you purchased their clothes. This is more or less baked into my idea of what fashion labels are in the modern day, so it’s surprising to see that business people like Arnault had a big hand to play in this. I must say though, when I look back at designs from before the domination of business interests, I see that same sort of world building being done without them (especially with designs like Yves Saint Laurent’s “Le Smoking” tuxedo), so I’m not certain if it’s fair to say that this movement was solely the hand of business tycoons, though they certainly played a big role.

• Some aspects of this remind me of A Midnight In Paris, to the extent that we’re sort of always looking back in time as our personal “golden age”, as if it was something we were just out of reach to experience. What luxury means in our current moment might indeed be a shadow of the 50s and 60s, but sometimes it seems that even those in the 50s/60s saw the best time for luxury to be before them.

• “Sometimes results take a while, and most of the time, the market requires that the results be felt immediately. Psychologically, this isn’t good for our work, because it puts a damper on our enthusiasm.” (Giorgio Armani) - feels reminiscent of the way the fashion runway calendar has changed over time, forcing designers and employees to churn out more and more ideas constantly all the time. Raf Simons has commented on the current fashion industry model too: “Technically, yes — the people who make the samples, do the stitching, they can do it. But you have no incubation time for ideas, and incubation time is very important. When you try an idea, you look at it and think, ‘Hmm, let’s put it away for a week and think about it later.’ But that’s never possible when you have only one team working on all the collections.”

• Dana Thomas, along with many other people in fashion, appear to have some sort of disdain for the “nouveau riche”, even though Thomas is actively discussing how business interests are what caused all these shifts. I find this attitude somewhat annoying, but this is mostly because the style they were engaged in was relevant to their cultural circles, which is fundamentally different from the old guard of luxury. Though, perhaps, when we reach the upper strata of luxury those opinions are more or less irrelevant.

• This distaste is more noticeable in the chapter on “going mass”. Specifically that going mass market means that these luxury brands will be attracting unwanted customers. She highlights this with the relationship between Burberry and the chavs of England, or alternatively the heavily logo-ed clothes with hip-hop subcultures in America. While I can’t say for sure what Thomas’s own opinions are on the matter here, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t like how some brands and people seemingly contend that only “the right people” should be engaging with luxury fashion at any level, which is not how I believe fashion should be promoted. Additionally, to touch on logoed clothing, while some people are certainly wearing logoed clothing as a means of showing off, a lot of this is a cultural matter that I just don’t think is acknowledged. I really like the look of lo-heads and 90s hip-hop culture, and logoed clothing is an aspect of that.

• Thomas contends that online shopping through third parties does the brand image better than going mass market themselves, which is amusing to read now given all of the structural changes and developments in e-commerce for fashion in the last few years. Reading about it after SSENSE’s bankruptcy is particularly funny. It’s seems more like, with the benefit of hindsight, third party retailers have mostly been useful for independent mid market and high end brands trying to make a name for themselves.

• One thing that is noticeably missing, and this only comes from a current viewpoint, is the lack of discussion of fast fashion, which only had a few pages dedicated to it near the end of the book. This, of course, is the case because fast fashion was very different in the 2000s. Nowadays, it serves as a pretty major counterweight to luxury, while also being used by luxury in various ways. Thomas discusses a collaboration between Lagerfeld and H&M as a means of combining luxury with lower market brands, something which is much more common now (Tiffany/Nike sneakers being one of the more amusing ones in recent memory). The thing that stands out to me the most now is how fast fashion is able to cannibalize luxury at such speeds today, but it’s easy to forget just how recent of a development this is.

This is a somewhat difficult book to review because the world of luxury has changed even more in the two decades since this book came out. There’s a lot of discussion about what luxury is, and about its relationship to personalization and uniqueness, but the definition of what luxury is changes from person to person. Luxury, to me, is now very different to what is associated with the huge brands of this book, but rather to individuals and small labels who have honed their craft at one very specific thing over many years. If you ask a menswear nerd who makes the best pair of jeans, you’ll get an hour long conversation diverging into cotton staple lengths and indigo dying practices. To me, the people engaging with luxury at this level have a lot of knowledge about small, nerdy details about the process of manufacturing, even if this world of raw denim and oxford cloth button downs is very different from haute couture. Though, of course, that difference comes to me because I’m not exceedingly wealthy, and because my knowledge of fashion comes from the world of menswear nerds, it’s very different to this. Partly, though, that’s why I enjoyed the book, there’s a lot of information here, and it’s very turn of the century, which I think you need to remember while you read it.