Why luxury goods keep booming
“Without basic bitches like me, you wouldn’t be fashionable,” Emily Cooper, the trendy young American marketer, tells stuffy French fashion designer Pierre Cadault in the popular Netflix series Emily in Paris. The exchange illustrates the tensions in the luxury goods sector, because – as Emily suggests – it is “basic bitches” like her that are now driving the market. The world of luxury is changing, whether Cadault likes it or not, and investors should take note.
To understand how and why, we first need to thumb through our millennial dictionary to discover just what is a “basic bitch”. One definition comes from a 2014 New York magazine article as “a terminally boring Sex and the City viewer and consumer of pumpkin-spice lattes”. (Screenwriter Darren Star created both Sex and the City and Emily in Paris.) In terms more polite and familiar to MoneyWeek readers, a basic bitch is a young mass consumer – a buyer and follower of trends, tastes and fashions that are just as likely to have been scooped up from the pages of Instagram as from the pages of Vogue. But a buyer nonetheless, armed with a Mastercard and ready to use it.
In decades past, fashion houses revelled in their snootiness. They encapsulated the haughtiness of
