Deluxe

by Dana Thomas

  He produced his first shoes in a little factory called Evelyne Shoes in Nice. “They were nice, but they were not taking me seriously and they were really too slow,” Louboutin remembers. They were also quite expensive: a single pair of shoes cost about $110 if Louboutin supplied the skin and $125 if the factory supplied the skin. “First cost!” Louboutin recalled, rolling his eyes. “Can you imagine?” His retail price was double, plus 20 percent VAT, making his shoes a pricey $270 to $300 a pair.

  One of his first customers was Princess Caroline, who, while trying on Louboutin’s pumps, declared to her friend that they were “so Anouk Aimée,” referring to the chic French movie star. As it happened, the other person in the boutique was a reporter from W magazine. When the article was published with Princess Caroline’s public anointment, Louboutin became an instant luxury star. The American retailers came that March to buy for the winter 1992–1993 season, and, as Louboutin remembers, “I had no shoes. I had never considered retailers wanting to buy my shoes. There are no luxury department stores in France. The French do not go to a department store for luxury goods. I was like Guerlain, who had his boutique and no distribution.” The buyers found Louboutin’s shoes to be quite expensive. When he explained that his source was costly, they said, “Why don’t you go to Italy?”

  He took their advice and found a factory in Lombardy that was more efficient and half the price. He liked the place because it was spotless and they made gorgeous shoes. “If you do luxury,” Louboutin explained, “you have to treat people in a human way and you have to be elegant. You can’t ask poor people in bad conditions to make beautiful things.” Though his reputation and production were rising, his company was still minuscule: himself, an administration person, and a part-time salesgirl in the shop. “When I wasn’t in Italy,” he remembered, “I was in the store, selling.”

  His third season, he added his signature scarlet sole. Within three years, he broke even and paid off his debts. In 1997, he opened a store on the Left Bank in Paris. Then came stores in London, New York, and Beverly Hills. In 2003, he opened a franchise in Moscow. “I wasn’t excited about doing a franchise,” he said, but “franchises are good for places you don’t visit, or are foreign to you. A franchise is like a translator in a country you do not understand.” In 2007, he is opening in Las Vegas.

  The secret to Louboutin’s success is his ability to balance the industrial and the exclusive. He will turn out twenty thousand pairs of an elegant, classic pump, but he also designs what he calls Cinderella shoes, delicate treasures that he produces in an extremely limited run. “I have a small piece of batik from Mali that I want to use,” he told me. “I think I can do twenty pairs of shoes with it: ten for two different stores. This way, a woman can have the pleasure of having a shoe she’ll never see anywhere else and another shoe that is a great shoe.” In addition to the Cinderella shoes, Louboutin offers a made-to-measure service where, like couture, you can change the height or the color of a design or come up with something brand new and have it fitted to your foot. “That’s why I keep the company on a human scale,” he says. “If I lost the laboratory, I’d lose the pleasure of design.”

  The other reason his company flourishes is simple: integrity. “I remember my father cutting wood,” he told me. “If you sculpt in the vein, it’s beautiful. If you go against the grain, it breaks. Same goes with business. If you go with the flow, it grows naturally. But if you try to grow your company in an unnatural way, it breaks…I did not do a company to make money. I made shoes and it became a company.”

  Naturally, the luxury tycoons have been circling for a few years now. The first bite came at a dinner party for eight at a private home in Paris in 2000. Louboutin found himself sitting on the sofa surrounded by four top businessmen.

  “When can we buy a bit of your company?” one asked eagerly.

  “I felt like a girl being invited to dance,” Louboutin recalled. “I blushed and said, ‘No thank you.’”

  “My company grew little by little, and one of the reasons is because I handle everything,” Louboutin told me. “I don’t have any desire to rush, to concentrate on too many markets. If I did, I would lose the core of my work, which is designing shoes.”

  Yet Louboutin doesn’t completely dismiss the idea of selling. “If there is a moment I no longer want to play this game and I could cash out and do something with that money to help the poor and the sick,” he said, “then I’d sell.”

  ON A COOL SPRING morning in Paris, I was chatting with a Hollywood producer friend who was in town and told him about this book.

  “Fine,” he said, sizing up the story like a movie pitch. “I see where you’re going with this: luxury companies have gone mass and along the way forgotten their original mission, which was to provide the rich with truly exceptional products. So here’s what I want to know: What do the rich do now?”

  “That’s a good question,” I answered. “I’ll find out.”

  I thought back to my visit to the Vuitton factory in Asnières. Along with watching the seamstresses and technicians churn out hundreds of logo bags, I saw the craftsmen making a large square wooden jewelry case covered in python. Nothing on the box identified it as Louis Vuitton—no monogram, no label—and though I am not particularly keen on reptiles, I found it to be exceptionally beautiful. It was a one-of-a-kind special order, I was told, for a “good client.” Anyone with enough jewelry to fill it, I said to myself, must be a very good client indeed.

  For the ultimate in lingerie, the rich go to Alice Cadolle in Paris, a couture house specializing in undergarments run by Poupie Cadolle, the great-great-granddaughter of founder Herminie Cadolle, who invented the bra back in 1889. The experience of having a custom-made bra at Cadolle is luxury in the old-fashioned sense of the term: genuine personal attention, exquisite materials, beautiful handcraftsmanship, all to create something just for you. Poupie, a genial blonde with a knowing smile, receives you in her salmon-colored salon with plum velvet drapes and Herminie’s Napoleon III sofas, asks you what you’re looking for, and takes your measurements. She has four hundred basic designs to choose from and then alters the pattern to fit your body. You select the fabric—although she prefers to work with lace and tulle—and you choose the color, although Poupie pushes black. “I find that 95 percent of the women look beautiful in black,” she told me. “It looks good against their skin.”

  Poupie makes about 550 made-to-measure bras a year, 100 strapless bras, 50 girdle-like foundations (“for ample women to wear under couture gowns,” she said), and 30 traditional lace-up corsets for clients who include several movie stars, one queen, and a few of the showgirls from the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris. She makes corsets for films as well, including for Juliette Binoche in Chocolat, Monica Bellucci in How Much Do You Love Me?, and the cast of the French retro whodunit 8 Women. Four times a year, Poupie travels to New York to see her regular American clients. The basic bra requires three fittings and costs about $800. Matching underwear is $160 to $400, depending on the fabric.

  A few years ago, a corporation offered to buy Cadolle. “I said no,” Poupie told me. “We have been independent for 120 years, we can be for another 50.” She’s grooming her pretty twenty-eight-year-old daughter Patricia to take over when she retires. In 2005, Poupie had to move out of the building where her great-grandmother Alice set up shop in 1911. It was a charming old place with a clackety gated elevator and a plush salon with red-velvet drapes. Today, it is part of a half-block-long Roberto Cavalli store.

  The really rich still buy and wear couture, which runs from $20,000 for a basic suit to $100,000 for an evening gown. But the regulars generally do not pay full price. “We’re dickering, we’re in the Armenian rug dealer stage,” life-long couture client Nan Kempner told me a few years ago regarding a Dior couture jacket she loved but found to be overpriced. “One has one’s priorities,” she said.

  She got the jacket.

  I remember attending a fitting for one of Dior’s best clients o
ne afternoon in the avenue Montaigne couture salons. She ordered eight or ten gowns with matching made-to-measure shoes. When she was presented the bill, the vendeuse made sure to point out that these were special prices. The message was clear: if you buy couture in bulk, you get a discount.

  The really rich do not attend the couture shows either. “Most of the Chanel clients are not here,” Karl Lagerfeld told me after the Chanel couture show in July 2006. “They have other things to do, you know? But the oceans are crossed by private jets for fittings.”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “New fortunes. Huge fortunes. People who are richer than air. People we don’t really know—we know if the money is clean—but people who don’t want to be identified. It’s not the red carpet. Whenever you have the dress on the red carpet, those women, they cancel their order immediately. The women who buy couture don’t want to be identified with actresses.”

  “Where do they live?”

  “China, there are more than a couple.”

  A few days later, Chanel’s head seamstress and one of its vendeuses were flown with the collection to China for the weekend on a private jet. “There will always be a need for haute couture,” socialite São Schlumberger told me, “because there will be people who, if it exists in red, will want it in white, who want quality, something special for themselves, something where there aren’t dozens of the same.”

  In the United States, the rich shop at Giorgio Armani. The wealthiest 5 percent of Americans account for 47 percent of all sales in Armani-owned stores, Victoria Cantrell, senior vice president and chief information officer for Giorgio Armani Corporation, said in 2006.

  For jewelry, the rich prefer custom-made. The French fine jeweler Boucheron, owned by Gucci Group, reported in 2005 that special orders were up 15 percent a year.

  For handbags, they order Hermès.

  Yet they also shop at outlets. When I was at the Desert Hills Premium Outlets in August 2006, I spotted a shiny young couple loading shopping bags into the trunk of their ivory Maybach 62 sedan—which at the time sold for more than $380,000 new. When I tried on a pair of black leather mules at the Sergio Rossi outlet later that afternoon—which, at half price, still ran $200—the saleswoman told me, “We had a princess in here the other day who so loved those shoes she bought them in every color. She comes here every season.”

  They demand and take advantage of perks, such as personal shoppers who not only pull clothes for private viewings and fittings in plush salons but also cater to a customer’s every whim. Danielle Morolo, a personal shopper at the Americana Manhasset luxury shopping center in Manhasset, New York, packs customers’ suitcases. She runs errands—once it was all the way Palm Springs—and she spent part of her vacation in Florence to hunt down lace for a customer. “I’ve had people call me from the office and ask me to go to their homes and pick something out of the closet because they didn’t like what they were wearing,” she said. “I have the security codes to clients’ homes.”

  They don’t even have to show up to shop. “My best customer lives in Atlanta, but hasn’t been in the store since the Super Bowl 2000,” said Jeffrey Kalinsky, owner of the trendy fashion boutique Jeffrey in Atlanta and in downtown New York. “We mail her a package every week, she picks out what she wants, and sends the rest back. These days, we go to them.” Los Angeles retailer Tracey Ross regularly secures tickets to American Idol or movie premieres for customers, and sends customized gift baskets to their homes or hotel rooms.

  Hong Kong luxury retailer Lane Crawford opened a VIP suite that connects to its neighboring Four Seasons hotel in 2005 for its best clients. The three-thousand-square-foot Platinum Suite, as it is called, is spacious and modern, with commanding views of Hong Kong harbor. Among its perks are the hotel’s concierge and restaurant services as well as stylists and makeup artists to help you choose just the right outfit from Lane Crawford and get dressed for an event. The suite is often booked for private meetings and dinner parties, but Bonnie Brooks, president of the Lane Crawford Joyce Group, told me during visit, “If you are in Hong Kong for the day, and want a place to park, you can come here. And you don’t have to spend.”

  Saks Fifth Avenue invites its top-spending clients to an annual dinner at a top New York restaurant—in 2006, it was at Le Cirque—and sends them home with goodie bags stuffed with cashmere blankets, Baccarat crystal vases, or Fabergé eggs. Neiman Marcus’s customers who spend $5 million a year on their Neiman Marcus credit card receive complimentary memberships to Exclusive Resorts, a luxury residence club, and three weeks at one of the properties. “[Big-spending customers] like to be coddled,” a Saks spokeswoman said. “Getting VIP treatment makes you feel special. It’s human nature. You love to get the prize.”

  In Las Vegas, the really rich stay in hidden villas that are furnished with European antiques and include twenty-four-hour butler service, private pools, private gyms, saunas and steam rooms, and entourage rooms for their nannies, pilots, chefs, and whoever else is in tow.

  They have perfume made just for them, like Louis XIV did two centuries ago. Each year, Patou receives a handful of orders for in-house nose Jean-Michel Duriez to create a made-to-measure perfume bottled in a Baccarat crystal flacon. The service costs approximately $70,000.

  And if they live in or visit South America, they shop at Daslu, the world’s most luxurious store.

  OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, I had heard about Daslu, the luxury fashion emporium in São Paolo, Brazil, owned and run by a savvy, ambitious woman named Eliana Tranchesi, and, to me, it sounded like everything that luxury brands professed to be.

  Daslu started, like most other successful luxury ventures, quite humbly. Back in 1958, Tranchesi’s mother, a high-society lawyer’s wife named Lucia Piva de Albuquerque, would fly from São Paolo to Rio de Janeiro to buy Brazilian high fashion. Then she’d invite her lady friends to her modest 1940s home in the posh Vila Nova Conceição neighborhood to sell them the clothes, donating a portion of her profits to charity. At the time, Brazil was closed to imports. If South Americans wanted European luxury, they would travel to Europe or the United States to buy it. Over the years, Lucia’s living room business grew. Official store hours were 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. She hired her friends’ daughters to help with sales. Her uniformed maids scurried about, serving tea and coffee and fetching clothes from various rooms. It became known as Daslu, which translates to “In Lu’s House.”

  In 1977, Eliana, then twenty-one, began to get involved. She worked as a salesgirl and launched an in-house label, which she designed and had produced in Brazil. Lucia bought the house next door to expand the retail space. As the business grew, Lucia added another, and another, and another, and connected them, creating a warren of salons filled with shoes, clothes, handbags, and jewelry. Eventually Daslu took up the better part of a tree-lined block. “It didn’t have any windows, and there were no signs outside,” Tranchesi told me over tea at the Plaza Athenée one October afternoon in Paris in 2005. “There was an awning with a big D on it, and that’s it.” When Lucia died in 1983, Eliana took over.

  In 1989, Brazil’s new president, Fernando Affonso Collor de Mello—the first democratically elected leader in twenty-six years—implemented an economic plan to battle the country’s rampant inflation that included freezing assets and bank accounts, and easing restrictions on imports. For Tranchesi, it was an answer to her prayers. “I said, ‘We are going to have Chanel, Gucci!’” she remembered. “And my friends said, ‘Are you crazy? No one has any money.’” Tranchesi didn’t care. “I knew we had clients with taste,” she told me, “that there would be a market.” She jumped on a plane and flew to Europe to meet with fashion houses. “The first collection we bought was Claude Montana,” she remembered. It was followed by Valentino and Moschino. In the mid–1990s, a Chanel bigwig traveled to São Paolo and stopped by Daslu to see what the all the hubbub was about. He was bowled over.

  “We have to have a Chanel store in here,” he told Tranchesi when they me
t in her little office upstairs. “But where?”

  Tranchesi looked around.

  “Here,” she said.

  “There were thirteen other important retailers in São Paolo at the time with big display windows on the street,” Tranchesi told me, “and he chose Daslu, inside, on the third floor, in the middle of the men’s department! He came to the opening and at the end of the day he was on his knees putting shoes on clients’ feet. We sold 70 percent of the collection in the first day. I asked friends to leave behind some of what they had purchased so I could show it the second day.”

  Though Chanel was a roaring success, Tranchesi still had trouble getting brands to sell to her. “They didn’t see Brazil as a good market,” she said. “But then they’d come here and were overwhelmed.” Eventually, she snagged Gucci, Prada, Zegna, and Dolce & Gabbana, which all set up in-store boutiques. To make room for them, Tranchesi had to keep buying and renting neighboring houses. By 2002, she had twenty-three houses, for a total of 135,000 square feet, and seventy thousand clients. Their armored limos with bulletproof glass clogged the street. Neighbors started to complain. When Tranchesi needed to expand even more, the zoning commission said no, so she decided it was time to move. In June 2005, she closed the old, rambling Daslu and inaugurated the new Daslu, a 180,000-square-foot Florentine-villa-like fashion emporium in Vila Olímpia, a bustling business district about a mile from the original location. In the first four months, she added fifteen thousand new clients.

  In April 2006, I traveled to São Paolo, the world’s fifth largest city, with eighteen million people, specifically to visit the new Daslu. Even with all I knew about the store, I was still knocked out.

  You enter by a long private driveway and pass through two security gates. The economic disparity in Brazil is radical and divisive: the poorest 40 percent of the country’s 188 million possess only 8 percent of its wealth, many living in sprawling urban shantytowns known as favelas. The richest—the country’s ruling class—live like pre-revolution aristocrats with fortified homes where they entertain lavishly, with armored limos and bodyguards. “We have a lot of problems with security here,” Mônica Mendes, Daslu’s international director of marketing, explained to me. “The really rich don’t go out and walk in the streets.” Most cars have darkened windows not to block sunlight but for security, and you never, ever roll your window down. Locals will drive through red lights rather than stop and take the risk of being carjacked. Mendes was so nervous sitting at one red light where there were a few squeegee guys that when it turned green and we drove on unharmed, she crossed herself and said a prayer of thanks. “São Paolo is one of the most important markets for bulletproofing,” she said. “Everybody has it.”