Pierpaolo Piccioli hates the word “luxury”. It always, he says, after a long drag on his cigarette, “has to do with price”. That’s a problem, he ventures, because, “we kind of forgot the idea of the value of products”. What makes something luxurious, per Piccioli, is not a matter of whether it’s very expensive. It’s “where the conversation at the centre of each product is the value of it”.
This might be news to some luxury brands, where making things ever more expensive has been their biggest strategy of this decade. Morgan Stanley figures show that a Lady Dior bag increased in price by 75 per cent since 2019. Chanel’s 11.12 bag has doubled in price. An Hermès Birkin is a relative steal, with only a 36 per cent price hike. Balenciaga isn’t immune; its City bag, a design that’s 25 years old, now costs $4500. One might argue there is little conversation at the centre of such a product at all, let alone a conversation that centres on the value of it.
