Luxury shopping has become something of a disgraced activity of late. It doesn’t look good to splash £1,000 on a slouchy bag when your average plebian is coping with basic mortgage payments.
Hence we’ve seen luxury online retailer Net-a-Porter offering to mail purchases in non-descript brown packaging instead of their usual glossy black be-ribboned bags. Meanwhile the wife of former Lehman-CEO Dick Fuld, we hear, has taken to emerging from her weekly Hermès shopping trips with her purchases discreetly stowed in brown paper bags. Very tricksy.
In any case, savvy retailers are attempting to lift the stigma on spending by portraying it as something of a social contribution.
From the New York Times:
SHOPPING, these days, is a political act. If you are brave enough to buy a $2,000 Prada handbag, you might rationalize that you are helping to stimulate the economy. Solidarity, people!
Saks Fifth Avenue, which has surely felt the recession’s sting, is taking just such a fist-raising stand with its spring marketing. The campaign is inspired by the bold graphic designs and propaganda spirit of Constructivist art – although it is intended to be tongue-in-cheek.
To wit, this Saks advertisement (by Shephard Fairey, the graphic artist behind that Hope poster of Barack Obama).
There are also some shopping bags to go with the new spring campaign — bearing more than a passing resemblance to the Constructivist-type art rolled out by the Soviet Union for their state-run department stores in the 1920s.
Comrades! We send you forth to Harrods and Harvey Nichols. Spend money for the masses! Go!
Related links:
Consumers of the world unite! – New York Times
Luxury fatigue – FT Alphaville