In the Lap of Luxury, Paris Squirms
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/fashion/15paris.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Published: January 14, 2009
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Fauchon food store, which has noticed a softening in sales of some items.
FRANCE is the birthplace of luxury fashion, and here the recession biting the world has the feel of a morality play.
As high-end consumers everywhere have suddenly suppressed their appetite for luxury goods, what was once considered a recession-proof industry has been hit hard.
High-end stores in the United States watched in horror as holiday sales tanked, while in Tokyo, Louis Vuitton canceled plans for what would have been its largest and most glittery store anywhere.
For the French, each wave of bad news has brought high anxiety here.
When Chanel recently announced the layoff of 200 temporary employees only slightly more than 1 percent of its 16,000-member work force the daily newspaper Le Parisien called the news a bombshell.
The television channel LCI described the move as the most serious setback to the company since Coco Chanel fired her entire staff and closed shop when war broke out in 1939.
But there is also, paradoxically, an underlying satisfaction here that an era of sometimes vulgar high living is over and that a more bedrock French way of life will emerge.
Only in France is the recession lauded for posing a crisis in values.
A recent issue of Le Figaro Magazine featured a 12-page guide to scaled-down living in 2009, with predictions that people will work less and put family (even in-laws) first. A French trend expert quoted in the magazine dramatically described the changes as nothing less than a revolution in values.
Alain Némarq, the chairman of Mauboussin, the prestige jewelry firm, noted in an interview that saving the luxury industry should be an important national priority because it employs 200,000 people in France, is part of French heritage, brings prestige to the country and seduces not just the happy few but a large swath of the public.
Rather than trying to keep the machine running by pumping out high-price hand bags, watches and other goods, he proposed the unthinkable: the entire luxury industry should slash prices. We need a return to reason, decency, discretion, beauty and creativity in other words, to true values, Mr. Némarq said.
(Mauboussin has led by example. It has sold its one-carat diamond solitaire Chance of Love ring for about $14,500, roughly a third less than its normal price, and its lower-end 0.15-carat diamond ring was priced at $895, Mr. Némarq said.)
Some French intellectuals want to go much further, calling for the death of the entire luxury industry as a sort of national ritual of purification.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/fashion/15paris.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Published: January 14, 2009
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Fauchon food store, which has noticed a softening in sales of some items.
FRANCE is the birthplace of luxury fashion, and here the recession biting the world has the feel of a morality play.
As high-end consumers everywhere have suddenly suppressed their appetite for luxury goods, what was once considered a recession-proof industry has been hit hard.
High-end stores in the United States watched in horror as holiday sales tanked, while in Tokyo, Louis Vuitton canceled plans for what would have been its largest and most glittery store anywhere.
For the French, each wave of bad news has brought high anxiety here.
When Chanel recently announced the layoff of 200 temporary employees only slightly more than 1 percent of its 16,000-member work force the daily newspaper Le Parisien called the news a bombshell.
The television channel LCI described the move as the most serious setback to the company since Coco Chanel fired her entire staff and closed shop when war broke out in 1939.
But there is also, paradoxically, an underlying satisfaction here that an era of sometimes vulgar high living is over and that a more bedrock French way of life will emerge.
Only in France is the recession lauded for posing a crisis in values.
A recent issue of Le Figaro Magazine featured a 12-page guide to scaled-down living in 2009, with predictions that people will work less and put family (even in-laws) first. A French trend expert quoted in the magazine dramatically described the changes as nothing less than a revolution in values.
Alain Némarq, the chairman of Mauboussin, the prestige jewelry firm, noted in an interview that saving the luxury industry should be an important national priority because it employs 200,000 people in France, is part of French heritage, brings prestige to the country and seduces not just the happy few but a large swath of the public.
Rather than trying to keep the machine running by pumping out high-price hand bags, watches and other goods, he proposed the unthinkable: the entire luxury industry should slash prices. We need a return to reason, decency, discretion, beauty and creativity in other words, to true values, Mr. Némarq said.
(Mauboussin has led by example. It has sold its one-carat diamond solitaire Chance of Love ring for about $14,500, roughly a third less than its normal price, and its lower-end 0.15-carat diamond ring was priced at $895, Mr. Némarq said.)
Some French intellectuals want to go much further, calling for the death of the entire luxury industry as a sort of national ritual of purification.
