Dana Thomas > Quotes

“Not everybody reads poetry or listens to music, but every single person in the world gets up in the morning and puts on something, and whether you like it or not, that’s a statement about who you are.”
― Dana Thomas, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano

“Unlike perfume, handbags are visible on the body, and--like Air Jordans for teenagers--give the wearer the chance to brandish the logo and publicly declare her status or aspiration.”
― Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

“Real luxurious people hate status. You don’t look rich because you have a rich dress. When you look at a person, do you see the spirit or the sexiness or the creativity? Just to see a big diamond, what does it mean? It’s all about satisfaction. I think it’s horrible, this judgment based on money. It’s all an illusion that you look better because you have a symbol of luxury. Really, it doesn’t bring you anything. It’s so banal.”
― Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre

“Their primary customers are upper-income women between thirty and fifty years sold.

The average markup on a handbag is ten to twelve times production cost.

Perfume has, for more than seventy years, served as an introduction to a luxury brand.

The message was clear: buy our brand and you too, will live a luxury life.

The contradiction between personal indulgence and conspicuous consumption is the crux of the luxury business today: the convergence of its history with its current reality.

Today, luxury brand items are collected like baseball cards, displayed like artwork, brandished like iconography.

The tycoons have shifted the focus from what the product is to what is represents.

Perfume has a mystical, magical quality. It catches your attention, enchants you. It complements and enhances your personality. it stirs emotion, within you and others around you. Perfume was a link between gods and mortals. It was a way to contact the gods, Hermes's Jean-Claude Ellena told me. Now it is a profane link: it's between you and me.

Contentment is natural wealth. Luxury is artificial poverty. Socrates

More than anything else today, the handbag tells the story of a woman: her reality, her dreams.

Oscar Wilde said elegance is power.

If it would abolish avarice, you must abolish its mother, luxury. Cicero

People don't believe there is a difference between real and fake anymore. Bernard Arnault's marketing plan had worked: consumers don't buy luxury branded items for what they are, but for what they represent.

Luxury is the ease of a T-shirt in a very expensive dress. If you don't have it, you are not a person used to luxury. You are just a rich person who can buy staff. Karl Lagerfeld

Luxury is exclusivity, it is made for you and no one else has it. At a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique.

If you do luxury, Louboutin explained, you have to treat people in a human way and you have to be elegant. You can't ask poor people in bad conditions to make beautiful things.”
― Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

“at a first glance, natural dyes appear to be more expensive than those used for petroleum-derived synthetics, simply because of the higher cost to farm raw materials. But there are "externalities" not included in synthetic's calculation -environmentally damaging ones like fracking and oil spills.”
― Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

“Killing animals is the most destructive thing you can do in the fashion industry", she told me. "The tanneries, the chemicals, the deforestation, the use of landmass and grain and water, the cruelty - it's a nonstarter. The minute yo are not killing an animal to make a shoe or a bag you are ahead of the game”
― Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

“But her no leather - no fur policy drew fire. Critics charged that faux hides, many of which are petroleum based, were more damaging to the earth than the real stuff.

Bull, said McCartney. "Livestock production is one of the major causes of ... global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity", she shot back, with more than fifty million animals farme and slaughtered each year just to make handbags and shoes. Conventional leather tanning employs heavy metals such as chromium, which results in waste that is toxic to humans.”
― Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

“In 1991, 56.2% of all clothes purchased in the United States were American-made. By 2012, it was down to 2.5%. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1990 and 2012, the U.S. textile and garment industry lost 1.2 million jobs. That was more than 3/4s the sectors labor force, said it to Latin America and Asia. Once-vibrant industrial centers down the Eastern Seaboard and across the South faded into ghost towns, as factories sat empty and those who were laid off went on unemployment. In the United Kingdom in the 1980s, one million worked in the UK textile industry; now, only 100,000 do. The same went down across most of Western Europe. All of heroin textile jobs globally nearly doubled, from 34.2 million to 57.8 million.”
― Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

“follow a simple three-step process: use a high-quality liquid or single-dose pods; run a fast cycle with cold water; finish with fabric conditioner. “When you use that regimen, you can actually extend the life of clothes by four times,” he said. “And the environmental impact of that is just amazing; it’s just humongous.”
― Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion – and the Future of Clothes

“Simultaneously, most luxury companies have raised their brands’ prices exponentially, and many justify the move by falsely claiming that their goods are made in Western Europe, where labor is expensive.”
― Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

“IN THE NORTHWEST CORNER of Alabama, across the Tennessee River from R&B recording mecca Muscle Shoals, is Florence, a town of 39,000. Before NAFTA, Florence was the Cotton T-shirt Capital of the World. “They used cotton that was grown around here,” fashion designer Natalie Chanin told me, over heirloom BLTs and iced tea at The Factory Café, her farm-to-table restaurant located in Bldg. 14, one of twenty immense”
― Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

“Shoppers snap up five times more clothing now than they did in 1980.”
― dana thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

“Hoje em dia, falsificar luxo é fácil. Colocam-se alguns detalhes do passado da marca, coloca-se um pouco de ouro e pronto. (Miuccia Prada)”
― Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

“I visited a factory in Guangdong Province and held the bags in my hands. To see them, I had to promise the manufacturer that I wouldn’t reveal the brand names. Each brand made the manufacturer sign a confidentiality agreement stipulating that he could not reveal the fact that he produced their products in China.”
― Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

“Clothes are our initial and most basic tool of communication. They convey our social and economic status, our occupation, our ambition, our self-worth. They can empower us, Imbue us with sensuality. They can reveal our respect or our disregard for convention.

Shoppers snap up five times more clothing now than they did in 1980. In 2018 that averaged 68 garments a year.

Americans now spend more time on digital media than working or sleeping and much of that time they are looking at or buying fashion.

According to McKinsey, nearly 80% of all luxury purchases are "digitally influenced".

Instagram begat a new pathology called the Cinderella syndrome: the resolute avoidance of being seen in the same outfit twice.

Learning experience = tech talk fora way to harvest data.”
― Dana Thomas, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes

“Mao suits,”
― Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster