Dana Thomas, a writer on the fashion industry for Newsweek, has a forthcoming book entitled Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster on how globalization has diminished the allure of products made by luxury brands. Hers is a hedonist's view that luxury is not what it was before. For her, these brands have been diluted by pandering to the plebes and by losing sight of the craft involved in making luxury products. To her chagrin, some are even, golly me, "Made in China." According to Thomas, what's worse is that these brands seem to have become marketing- and advertising-driven instead of focusing on what made them special before--craftsmanship. I am inclined to disagree with her on the latter point. Cachet was always something built up through sloganeering and snob appeal. To me, what's changed is that opportunities for marketing and advertising have just proliferated. In any event, here is Savannah Now's take on the book:With this book, Dana Thomas, a fashion writer for Newsweek, has delivered a blistering expose of the "luxury goods" industry, illuminating with unwavering scrutiny how once-venerable fashion houses have traded quality for profits.
There was a time when only an elite few understood, appreciated and could afford to spend the money on one-of-kind luxuries. All that has changed. Now anyone can have piece of the magic for the right price, and it's not for the better, writes Thomas in "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster."
Over the last 25 years, traditional fashion houses like Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Prada have gone from being small, family-owned businesses that cared about quality and prestige to being publicly-traded global conglomerates whose attention is firmly fixed in the bottom-line.
The result is an industry that has spent billions influencing our sartorial decisions, all the while undermining its products and losing most of what made it special.
Each chapter focuses on elements of the history, starting with the ruthless corporate tactics of Bernard Arnault, president of LVMH, owner of Louis Vuitton. He embodies the distasteful notion, Thomas writes, that what a luxury good represents is more important than what it is - and what it represents is shaped by the aesthetically empty practice of marketing and advertising. The allure of luxury deflates after we learn that most of what people buy is not clothes, but accessories, like perfume and handbags. Thomas also notes that many luxury goods are made in China.
While it's not completely clear where Thomas' sympathies lie, one can tell she's genuinely troubled by the facts she has unearthed. The splendor of luxury is clearly tainted by knowing so much about it.
In contrast, Sasha Issenberg's new book Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy makes the case that sushi has not been victimized and homogenized to the same extent that luxury brands have. In other words, sushi may have benefited from globalization in a way that luxury has not. To begin with, she believes that there never was a "golden age" of sushi characterized by extensive historical tradition that has since been violated, for lack of a better word. Instead, sushi has benefited from adaptation and novel variation. Furthermore, unlike luxury which has to an extent become whatever marketing and advertising flaks working for major international luxury brands deem it to be, it is remarkable that sushi has not become a monolithic industry controlled by a handful of players (oligopoly) dictating what sushi is and should not be:These instances illustrate globalization in a different way that nonetheless lends insights into its dynamics. Does globalization mean the corporatization and commercialization of all aspects of human endeavor, or can it also mean the expansion of cultural vistas in creating the "welcome" new from the "tired" old? The possibilities are...endless.Issenberg, an ex-contributing editor to George magazine, argues that critiques of food globalization typically rely on a pervasive myth of a pure and pristine past, one in which the delicacy grew organically from ancient local traditions and was never contaminated by culinary influences from any other culture.
Obviously, this way of thinking is a load of crap, and hats off to Issenberg for pointing that out. In all but the most remote exceptional cases, food traditions have always been bumping and grinding up against one another. Foods collide and are changed – even improved – just like peanut butter and chocolate.
Issenberg further argues that sushi, despite its rapid rise as a worldwide fast-food phenomenon, defies the usual patterns of globalization – namely, that corporate monoliths take over the production and assembly of raw ingredients, which leads to an inferior and homogenized product being fed to ignorant and uneducated consumers.
Modern sushi, he says, hasn't been marketed to us by members of a corporate boardroom, nor have there been powwows determining the market dominance of California rolls. Sushi's evolution and its many different shapes and sizes are the result of individual chefs who have "mixed flavours across continents."
What's more, tuna on top of sticky rice isn't much older than the avocado-stuffed rolls. If it's absurd to posit an "authentic" past in the history of almost any food, sushi is particularly distinguished for adapting to the changing environment.
