The devil--and everyone else--wears Prada: the democratization of luxury.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, David
• Position: Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

by Dana Thomas Penguin Press HC, 384 pp.

In the early nineteenth century, a thirteen-year-old French boy named Louis Vuitton left his modest family homestead, a farm near the base of the Alps, for Paris, where he would become an apprentice to a luggage manufacturer. He made the 300-mile journey by foot, and, counting the odd jobs he picked up along the way, the trip took him more than two years.

In Paris, Vuitton designed the world's first flat-top trunk--earlier versions had domed lids to disperse rainwater off the backs of coaches--to produce, for the first time, luggage that could be stacked efficiently. Before, trunks had been made of leather, which often attracted mold and cracked, and Vuitton developed a lightweight waterproof poplar and cotton alternative. When competitors copied him, Vuitton introduced a recognizable canvas print of red and beige stripes intended to distinguish his handiwork; soon, red became brown, and the checked two-tone design became the signature company pattern. The distinctive Louis Vuitton features we have come to associate with luxury and privilege were developed by the unpretentious craftsman in response to particular and very practical problems, and although his celebrated studio served the richest and most discriminating families of nineteenth-century Europe, it retained until his death in 1892 the ethos of a humble workshop, dedicated to exquisite quality produced in small volume. That year, the company produced its first handbag.

Today, Louis Vuitton is no modest Parisian atelier but the flagship brand of the world's largest luxury goods conglomerate, LVMH (Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton). Vuitton's kind of fairy tale no longer has a place in the fashion industry, laments Newsweek correspondent Dana Thomas, in her new, richly reported book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, because craftsmanship and elegance no longer govern the business. Profits do. Conglomerates like LVMH make money not by selling at prices that reward quality but in volume that rewards aggressive branding. Those houses that have thrived in the new $157 billion luxury goods economy have done so by marketing an image of Old World craftsmanship to the global midmarket consumer and by manufacturing branded products she might finally be able to afford. Deluxe is a melancholy meditation on the fate of the handbag in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Once upon a time, Thomas writes, the finest goods in...