The Billion-Dollar question: Is Bling Over?

[katty]

(for some, apparently not)

EXCERPT/more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122351779589918041.html

Yet the luxury industry built up quite a head of steam in recent months, boosted by the new riches in India, China and Russia. Until recent weeks, the economic troubles seemed surmountable. Mr. Trapani spoke to me even as construction workers around him prepared to open Bulgari's new store on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris.

Sure, retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman were planning to buy more carefully for the spring season -- "we're sharpening our pencils," as Linda Fargo, Bergdorf's fashion director, put it last week. Still, not even such cautious retailers envisioned a tsunami.

So it will take some time for the market to sift through all the luxury expansions that are currently in the works. Last week in Paris, I raced from one grand new store opening to another, feeling vaguely as though we were all fiddling while Rome burned.

At the opening of its new women's store in Paris last week, Ralph Lauren upped the ante on its notoriously expensive Ricky bag: It will now be available made-to-order in 20 shades of alligator skin, including platinum, "vibrant cherry" or cobalt, and priced from $12,995 to $28,995. The company is confident that it's well-positioned with its customers, said Charles Fagan, an executive vice president at Ralph Lauren, before racing off to open a new store in Istanbul.

[hatrack]

1. Introducing The Clue Bus, plowing soon into assemblies of the unaware worldwide . . .

:eyes:

[katty]

2. indeed, make sure it runs over that $28K 'handbag'

[lapfog_1]

3. Didn't that "regular mom" Cindy wear about $285,000 in jewelry

to the Repuke convention?

That's some Bling!

:puke:

[kurt_cagle]

4. The Reckoning Will Come Soon Enough

Most people have been living thriftily (out of necessity) for some time - as bad as things are getting, when you're making $50K a year and your worried about the future, pulling back on spending is a fairly simple proposition. For people like this, who have developed expenditure habits in the neighborhood of a million dollars or more a year, the losses in the markets will hit them hard - it's surprisingly easy to go from several million dollars in the bank to several million dollars in debt practically overnight.