The jig is up: luxury fashion is all one big racket. When you blow thousands on brands like Dior or Armani, you’re supposedly paying for the quality. Countless hours and specialist techniques go into making unique leather goods and clothing, or so we think.
It turns out they use low-priced sweatshop labor just like every other crappy brand, the New York Post . European legal filings allege that Dior pays $57 to make a signature handbag that it then sells for $2,780. Armani is slightly better, allegedly spending $270 to put out a $2,000 bag.
Even worse, Italian authorities charge that they use illegal immigrants to work long hours, including weekends and holidays, for off-the-books pay as low as $2 to $3 an hour. Sure, it’s sad these people are being exploited, but they shouldn’t be in Italy in the first place. This almost certainly isn’t an isolated incident.
More likely, this is just standard operating procedure for all luxury brands. Nearly every luxury brand these days is owned by one of two companies: LVMH (Dior, Louis Vuitton, Fendi, Tiffany’s) or Kering (Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent). They’re all run as cutthroat businesses, with way more emphasis on corporate earnings than artistic vision.
There’s a reason LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault is the richest man in the world. So it’s no surprise they all converged in style. I saw this trend start to emerge over a decade ago when I was a student at Michigan State.
We had an enormous (and enormously wealthy) Chine.
