please summarize this article and discuss how it related to any one economical t
ID: 1196538 • Letter: P
Question
please summarize this article and discuss how it related to any one economical topic.
.
Michael Kors’s Locked-Up Luxury
SEPT. 18, 2014
Big City
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
For a long time as a private citizen and for some number of years as a
journalist, I thought a lot about fashion, both about the individual choices
people made when they got dressed in the morning and about what it meant
culturally and socially when those choices began strikingly to resemble one
another. It became a consuming pastime to see what trickled down and what
migrated up — round-toe platform stilettos, for instance, from the world of
11th Avenue at 3 a.m. to the world of Madison Avenue and 65th Street at
noon.
At some point, my attentions managed to relocate. And yet some trends
present themselves so clearly that they find you even when you are not
searching for them. Over the past year, I have noticed on the subway during
rush hour, or in less precious quarters of Brooklyn or the Bronx, or around
community colleges and public housing complexes, that women, both young
and middle-age, are often carrying Michael Kors handbags — those from the
designer’s midpriced line, which typically cost no more than a few hundred
dollars.
In marketing terms the bags belong to a category known as “affordable
luxury.” Some of them are heavily logoed; others, simply shaped leather
satchels and totes, bear a single more discreet emblazoning of the designer’s
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name or initials in gold lettering. At the Macy’s in Fulton Mall in Brooklyn,
all Michael Kors bags are extremely popular, a saleswoman told me, and
they are bought almost exclusively by women who are not white.
Their presentation at the store betrays a bizarre and jarring semiotic, in
part because the bags are routinely locked up. The purses themselves signal
the country club and luncheon life; their display, bound together by wire,
suggests the fears and prejudices of the elites whose lifestyles the products
encode. Duller Calvin Klein bags are liberated, but the popularity of Michael
Kors bags brings concern, the saleswoman said. Similar security measures
have been taken at other Macy’s branches, a corporate spokeswoman told
me.
The various styles have different names, and one of them has the
strange fate of being called the “Selma.”
On a recent morning at the Fulton Mall Macy’s, a woman named
Alethea Taylor, who lives in Crown Heights, was taking pictures of the bags
with her phone, to pass on to her partner, who she hoped would buy her one
for her 40th birthday. She already had three. Another woman, with two
children in tow, had already bought several of the bags, some of them on
layaway. One particular tote, costing $358, was sold out at this particular
Macy’s, and at a branch in Parkchester in the Bronx, a saleswoman said, but
it was available if you were willing to travel to the Roosevelt Field mall on
Long Island.
The popularity of the bags in parts of the city that haven’t been
suffocated by money arrives at a moment when the man behind the brand
has been swaddled in it. In February, Mr. Kors joined the ranks of the city’s
billionaires — one of the few figures in fashion to do so — a little over two
years after his company underwent a successful initial public offering.
Unlike Tommy Hilfiger, who made a conscious effort to connect to hip-
hop stars and by extension communities of color, Michael Kors has made no
glaring attempt to reach a diverse clientele, though his appealing turn as a
judge on “Project Runway” gave him broad celebrity. His company has not
advertised in Ebony or Jet, a spokeswoman for Johnson Publishing, the
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company that owns the magazines, told me. And Michael Kors advertising
campaigns tend generally to portray the habits of a singularly narrow
demographic.
If Prada ads celebrate cool modernism, Louis Vuitton ads celebrate
cinematic artiness and the latest Coach ads pay homage to a kind of urban
pastoralism, Michael Kors ads unabashedly worship moneyed glamour. It’s
the 0.01 percent lifestyle the images convey. The men and women in the ads
are rarely resting quietly. They are forever traveling or disembarking from
helicopters, yachts and planes in which legroom does not appear to be an
issue. No one in a Michael Kors ad flies commercial. Women are
occasionally pictured on the phone — perhaps calling the Beijing office —
and they are always in control.
“When I look at these images, they’re very similar to social media
images we’re inundated with from style icons,” Mary Alice Stephenson, a
fashion stylist and a former fashion editor, told me.
The irony, of course, is that the kind of woman the ads depict is not the
kind of woman who is going to buy a $300 bag, because she has a closet full
of $5,000 ones at home. There is a perverse logic to the emergence of
Michael Kors as the ultimate aspirational brand during the country’s most
dramatic period of social inequality. In New York, census figures released
this week indicated an ever more expansive divide between rich and poor.
One of fashion’s cruelest means of trickery, one of its prevailing intoxicants,
is to offer the illusion of wealth when the reality is too distant to inhabit.
Email: bigcity@nytimes.com
A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2014, on page MB1 of the New York
edition with the headline: Locking Up Luxury.
© 2014 The New York Times Company
Explanation / Answer
The bags here as rightly said symbolize ‘affordable luxuries’. The big brands endorse these products as either a getaway to the elite world for those struggling to cross the borders and join the clan or as a basic necessity for those who already belong to the group. It is not just about following a fashion trend but more of a reflection of the class where you belong. Thus women from across the globe has started investing in this necessity. Now between a designer label such as Micheal Kors and Tommy Hilfiger and the group there is a surge in the Micheal Kors being picked. The reason is perception that builds in the minds of the customers. Advertisements are basic equipment of the signaling theory, and the way Micheal Kors signals itself it comes across as a which is reachable and yet worth aiming for. The ads are far away from the larger than life pictures with models, with picture-perfect figures, draped in the most expensive outfits are flying here and there in helicopters. The depiction is more of this intelligent and independent lady who aces the difficulties of the world, like a boss. This is the image that sells well in the market, which more customers want to dawn. And this makes Micheal Kors a billionaire in 2 years, as he understands what his customers are looking for. There is a beautiful connection of economicsd of signaling theory, and basic demand and theory into the world of fashion and the so-called class.
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