The Most Extraordinary Suit in the World | Zegna

Ermenegildo Zegna’s Vellus Aureum

Luxury strategies and authentic truth. Making things by hand is a disappearing legacy. And even to the concept of the most luxurious, the idea of an object being completely handmade is a vanishing tradition. The concept of design and the handmade — one, being a “designer,” and another being a maker are elements that are achieving a kind of discrete distant from each other. Guy Salter, who I met in Palm Beach, at the American Express Luxury Summit, is the deputy chairman of Walpole, the luxury industry management trade association in the UK and spokesman for the alliance, said the loss of skills was a big concern. “All young people want to be designers and very few, makers. We want to try to change that by promoting craftsmanship in the luxury sector,” he said.

Costly skilled labor and the strong euro have pushed companies to source production from Asia and eastern Europe even though the imprimatur of an established producer in France or Italy is seen as essential to the high price tags. And, in some instances, while the label says “Made in France” — that is merely the branding, not the provenance.

In the UK alone, the tradition of craft in making brands by hand is dissipating at an accelerated pacing, according to Salter’s review, “Britain had only a “handful” of small factories making leather accessories, compared with more than 100 about 50 years ago.” Meanwhile, in France, the government is pushing the larger luxury groups to sign a charter of good practice this month to place more orders with national suppliers. This testament to vanishing authenticity in luxury is telling, given the extent of Dana Thomas‘ 2007 carefully researched overview of luxury’s failure in the truthful authenticity in the legacy of cost to value, precision to multiplicity:

“Back in the late 1980s, the Prada backpack — made out of black or tobacco-brown parachute fabric trimmed in leather — became the “it” bag for many would-be fashionistas. It was hip, modern, lightweight and at $450 expensive, but not as expensive as the stratospherically priced bags made by Hermès and Chanel. According to the fashion reporter Dana Thomas, that Prada backpack was also “the emblem of the radical change that luxury was undergoing at the time: the shift from small family businesses of beautifully handcrafted goods to global corporations selling to the middle market” — a shift from exclusivity to accessibility, from an emphasis on tradition and quality to an emphasis on growth and branding and profits.” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) Ms. Thomas concludes, “It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact with others. It has become part of our social fabric. To achieve this, it has sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers. In order to make luxury ‘accessible,’ tycoons have stripped away all that has made it special. And indeed, “Luxury has lost its luster.” [Thomas, Dana. Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster]

Confection Rousseau, with a staff of 47 in Vierzon, central France, focuses on the specialization of the cutting and stitching thick fabrics, and counted Christian Lacroix among its customers until the designer went into bankruptcy in 2009. Marc Rousseau, company founder, said: “I want the large luxury companies to answer the question: is it necessary to preserve manufacturing and savoir-faire in France? My fear is that these companies are happy to sell through the use of marketing and celebrities and that they don’t care about quality any more. So there is a real threat.”