Milan Opens Tuesday, and Everybody Knows Who Should Be Nervous
A field guide to the week, for those of us who read a schedule the way other people read a seating plan There are…
Renting the Horse
The equestrian silhouette has outlived nearly every trend that came after it. What is newer, and stranger, is that luxury houses no longer merely…
What Happens to the Clothes Nobody Buys
You sent the dress back. Here is where it went, why nobody wanted to tell you, and what changed six weeks ago. You ordered…
Power dressing:Dressing to Not Be Written About
Power dressing used to mean adding armour. The most sophisticated version of it now aims at producing no coverage at all. In late October…
Perfume: The Only Thing Fashion Sells That Nobody Owns
Perfume is where the money is. It is also the one luxury product whose actual contents anybody is free to copy, and the law…
The Diamond Already Fell. Leather Is Next.
Or so the argument goes. The evidence is more interesting than that, and considerably less comfortable for everyone involved. The case is usually put…
Why Robots Still Can’t Sew Your Clothes
Machines are excellent with rigid things and hopeless with floppy ones. A factory can build a car body untouched by human hands and still…
The Brand Ambassador Economy
On what a maison acquires when it acquires a person, and why the contract gets weaker as the person gets more valuable. In December…
Quiet Luxury Is Four Hundred Years Old
The merchants of Edo Japan were forbidden from showing their wealth, so they put it where only they could see it. In museum collections…
Luxury Pricing Pyramid: How a €400 Perfume Bottle Funds a €40,000 Handbag
How a luxury pricing pyramid actually works, and why the cheapest thing in the shop is the most important object the house sells Walk…
Arsenic and Old Lace
In the century when the most beautiful colour in the room was also the most dangerous Matilda Scheurer made leaves for a living. Not…
How Pink Switched Sides
Pink was for boys, blue was for girls, and the swap is younger than your grandmother. Somewhere in the world today, a couple is…
The Name Remains. The House is Gone. What Bankruptcy Law Protects in a Fashion House, and What it Quietly Lets Die
The Name Remains. The House is Gone. What bankruptcy law protects in a fashion house, and what it quietly lets die. In 1984, Roy…
Sun as Signifier: The Euro Summer Never Goes Out of Style. Here is exactly why it cannot.
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into…
Art at the Pleasure of the State: Cannes, French Law, and the Regulation of Global Glamour
The Festival de Cannes is the most-watched cultural event on earth. It is also, quietly, one of the most governed. This is the story…
The Exception Wears Prada
There is a category of power that the law has always found it more convenient to describe than to discipline. Giorgio Agamben, following Carl…
The Business of Being Unattainable: Luxury Scarcity, Economic Theory, and the Law’s Uneasy Encounter with Prestige
Luxury begins, rather inconveniently for economists, at the precise moment economics starts to look a little naïve. Economists adore tidy stories. Demand rises, supply…