David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Marc Jacobs has a different quote on it, which is, "Luxury is about pleasing yourself, not dressing for other people." This gets to the idea of luxury to fulfill your own goal intrinsically instead of social signaling. It's how you feel a certain way about yourself. I buy that, but I buy it less. I literally think the purpose of luxury is signaling and social stratification, which has always been a need of humanity. I think the most compelling argument around why luxury needs to exist is that it is a deeply human thing to signal your standing in the world. Everybody signals it in different ways. Now this is one of the infinite ways that someone could choose to signal to the world. This is not only what I choose to identify with taste-wise, but if you know, you know, especially with something like the Hermes Birkin bag, where it's not marked. You'll notice Louis Vuitton has LVs everywhere, but there are other brands that choose not to brand something, so that only people in the tribe can understand why it's so valuable and luxurious. I totally buy the argument that it's an essential part of humanity. Especially if you think about luxury and fashion as being two different dimensions. We talked about this a little earlier in the episode. There is luxury fashion for sure. Dior is a great example of that, Chanel is a great example of that. But that's only a small part of what luxury is, it's harder to understand, and frankly, harder to monetize, versus durable leather goods or cars. Those are very clear cut examples. You can really understand intuitively, at least for me, grok better the difference between a luxury product and a premium product. There's also the durability of it. A key aspect, I think, of luxury products is that their value and status is durable over time, where so much of fashion is the opposite of that. If you buy a Ferrari, for example, there's a very good chance that that Ferrari is going to be worth more in the future than it is the day you buy it. And not for its utility. It's because other people have bought into the dream that this is a valuable thing.…

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