by Dana Thomas
Once you arrive at the store’s entrance, a valet takes your car and you are whisked inside the vanilla marble hall to the concierge desk, where a hostess will sign you in. If you are a regular, you have probably already alerted your regular salesgirl that you are coming, and the hostess will ring to tell her you’ve arrived. If not, you will be assigned a salesgirl for your visit. The salesgirls are known as Dasluzettes and are the daughters of São Paolo’s best families. They are très soigné—tall and thin, with smooth butternut skin and long glistening hair—and they move in the city’s rarefied social circles, attending smart dinner parties and extravagant galas nightly. “The salesgirls live the life that the customers live,” Tranchesi explained. “So they understand.”
If you’re a regular customer, chances are your Dasluzette has already pulled several pieces that you will probably love and put them aside in a private salon for you to try on. New clothes arrive often, which is why Daslu’s best customers tend to come to the store four times a week. “Women in Brazil are completely crazy about fashion,” Mendes told me during my visit. “Clients buy American Vogue, tear out the pages, give them to the salesgirl and say, ‘When that arrives, I want it.’ When the Fendi Baguette first came out, we sold them all in presale before we received them.”
If you are a new customer, like I was, your Dasluzette will give you a tour, collecting items that interest you as you move from room to room. Like the old Daslu, the store layout is like a house with interconnecting salons. The decor is in soft off-white tones with thick champagne-hued carpeting—it’s as if you’ve plunged into a vat of crème anglaise—and white orchids everywhere. On the ground floor are the designer boutiques, including all the regular suspects: Vuitton, Dior, Gucci, Valentino, Jimmy Choo, Sergio Rossi, Chloé, Pucci, Valentino, Manolo Blahnik. “Every young Brazilian woman knows Manolo Blahnik,” Tranchesi said with a laugh. “And Valentino sells well because the husbands love their wives in Valentino dresses.” For most of the brands, Daslu owns the franchise and chooses the clothes. But the brands usually handle the decor themselves, to maintain continuity; Peter Marino designed the Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana boutiques. Vuitton, Burberry, Armani, and Ferragamo lease their space from Daslu. The Vuitton store, at four thousand square feet, is the largest in Latin America.
On the second floor you’ll find fine jewelry, perfume, lingerie, swimwear, vintage wear, a few more luxury brands, a champagne bar, the Leopolldina restaurant, and Daslu private label for women, known as Daslu Collection. No men are allowed in the Daslu women’s department, and there are security guards posted at the entrances to make sure. There are no dressing rooms on the women’s floor. Instead, customers strip down to their lacy underwear and try on the clothes right there on the sales floor. “My mother only received friends, so there was no problem changing in front of one another,” Tranchesi explained. “I did the same: friends receiving friends, so no need for changing rooms. It’s natural for Brazilians. You aren’t ashamed if men aren’t around.”
The Daslu collection has become a pillar of the store. It accounts for 60 percent of sales there and is now carried by several international retailers including Bergdorf Goodman, Saks-Jandel in Washington, Tracey Ross in L.A., and Harrods and Browns in London. Tranchesi still designs the collection and has it made in Brazil, mostly in locally produced materials. The clothes are casual chic: swishy jersey dresses, sexy stretch jeans, towering strappy sandals decorated with big faux jewels, filmy gowns flecked with crystals. As you settle into one of the cozy corners with comfy sofas to try them on, the maids, known as the “uniform girls” because of their black dresses with white aprons and stockings, will serve you refreshments. “When Daslu was in my mother’s house, the maids, who wore the same uniform, helped and served,” Tranchesi explained. “They started by giving coffee or water. Then they started to put the clothes back.” Now there is an army of three hundred.
The ambiance at Daslu is clubby and delightfully upbeat. Customers come from Rio and Salvador, Argentina and Peru. Everyone knows everyone—there are plenty of air kisses. They shop for a few hours, meet up for high tea in the Leopolldina restaurant or for a drink in the champagne bar, catch up on gossip, then shop some more. Six times a year, Daslu hosts a festive fashion show/party for ten thousand of its best customers. “The women dance, shop, and have a great time,” Mendes says. On Tuesday evening, Daslu stays open until ten, and chic Paulistas meet there for dinner and shopping. The wealthy and famous like Daslu, she explained, “because you have a lot of privacy, you have everything you need, and everyone is treated like a VIP.” Celebrities particularly like the safety of the Daslu compound. “Nothing happens to them here,” Mendes said. “No one notices or bothers them. [Formula One champion] Michael Schumacher came here last year and nobody said anything. [Brazilian soccer star] Ronaldo is one of the most important clients we have at Daslu and nothing happens. No autographs. No photos. Nothing.” A few years ago, Tranchesi had a study done of shopping habits at Daslu. “Normally, in a Brazilian shopping mall, 20 percent buy,” she told me. “At Daslu, 75 percent of people who walk inside buy something.”
On the third floor is the men’s department. There’s a Johnnie Walker whiskey bar, a bookstore with a fireplace and sofas, and even a La Perla lingerie boutique, “so they can buy for their wives and girlfriends,” Mendes says. There’s a men’s Daslu ready-to-wear line; departments dedicated to electronics, athletic wear, and gym equipment; a travel agency; a luxury real estate agency; Mitsubishi, Volvo, and Maserti dealerships; a Ferretti yacht broker; a Daslu helicopter dealer (one hangs on display in the atrium); a tobacconist; a music department; a Japanese restaurant called Kosushi that is considered the best in São Paolo; and a wine department with a selection of vintages to rival the best caves in Paris.
On the fourth floor, you find the children’s clothing and toy department, with a playroom and a kid’s-height bar with bowls of gumdrops and plates of chocolate chip cookies, a bank, a pharmacy where you can fill your prescriptions, a hairdresser where each client has a private room, and a spa: “Brazilian women are crazy about the body and skin care—it’s unbelievable,” Mendes said. “They have facial massages regularly.” Daslu of course has the best facialist in town. “It takes four or five months to get an appointment.” She adds. In addition, there is Casa Daslu, with table-, glass-, and silverware as well as refrigerators, barbeques, and a Viking showroom; a stationer to do your engraved notepaper and invitations; a chocolate shop run by Tranchesi’s sister, where all the chocolates are made by hand; and a bakery called Pati Piva that does extravagant tiered wedding cakes. On the ground level, there is a consecrated wedding chapel, and on the fifth floor is a series of immense terrace-like reception rooms and a ballroom that can seat thirteen hundred, all with a view of the city. “I think Daslu is the only place in Brazil where you can do everything for your wedding, including holding the ceremony and the reception, booking the honeymoon, and buying the house,” Mendes said.
When it is time to pay, you are ushered into a lounge-like room where you sit on one of the comfortable Louis XVI chairs, have a coffee brought to you by a uniform girl, and chat with your salesgirl while everything is run up. On the counter sits a pile of the latest Daslu CDs, a compilation by the Daslu deejay of hip Brazilian and Latin music, which you can buy for a few reales. On the wall is a flat-screen TV broadcasting Daslu TV. Throughout the store, Daslu radio is playing. You pay the bill and are escorted out by your Dasluzette, empty-handed. Everything has been sent down to your car, or up to the helipad.
There are seven hundred Daslu employees, including the uniform girls; a thousand others employed by brand shop-in-shops, travel agencies, restaurants, and so on; and nine hundred third-party service providers such as valets, janitors, and security guards. Next door, Daslu has an employee day care center called the Villa Daslu Educational Center with a nursery where female staff can come and nurse their babies three times a day, and a school for children up to age fourteen. Some two hundred at
tend. The children receive instruction in English, art, sewing, piano, guitar, and ballet—often by clients. When I visited the school, I met two tall, elegant clients who had just finished teaching a group of eight-year-old girls in the ballet studio. There is also a pediatrician, a dentist, and a psychologist. After a hot lunch in the school cafeteria, children seven and older go to the local public school. Younger children stay and play. They have snack time on picnic benches in the garden. “The uniform girls were unhappy with the schools and the quality of life for their children, so we opened the school,” explained Mendes as we walked down the hallway and visited classes. “This is even better than my children’s school.”
But what really sets Daslu apart from other luxury retailer’s is Tranchesi’s personal involvement with the business. Chances are, you’ll run into her while you are shopping, and she’ll ask how the kids are, help you pick out a few things, or assist in fittings. “In America, in Europe, retailers know what they’ve sold by looking at the numbers in the computer,” she told me. “I know what we sell here because I’m on the shop floor. I don’t sit in an office. I run the business from here”—and she tapped her belly. “In luxury brand stores, when you pay, they forget about you. They completely forget about you,” Mendes told me. “Eliana doesn’t just know the name of the client, she knows the client. Daslu is her house, and the customers are her guests.”
Shortly after the opening at the new location in July 2005, Daslu was raided by federal police agents and Tranchesi was arrested for alleged tax evasion. The government alleged that import-export firms falsified invoices listing prices of imported goods far below market value to allow Daslu to pay less in duty. “It was crazy—280 police came to the office,” said Mendes. “You never see that in a favela, even when there is a big drug trafficking bust. But Daslu, yes. It was to show off in the press, to draw attention from Lula and his problems,” she said, referring to President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, the country’s socialist president, who has been embroiled in a series of corruption scandals. Tranchesi was released shortly after. In December 2006, Daslu was ordered to pay $110 million in back taxes. The store planned to appeal.
On the second day I went to Daslu—it took three entire days to see the place—I had lunch with one of its good customers, a chic woman named Cristiane Saddi, the marketing director for the local Mercedes dealership that her husband owns. She also volunteers at a local Syrian-Lebanese hospital that her grandmother and her great-aunt founded. Saddi is one of those remarkable women who give Brazil its reputation as the land of stunningly sensual women: thin, tan, and taut, with long black hair as slick as oil and eyes to match, she was dressed in a tight white Dolce & Gabbana blazer over a lacy white camisole, skinny white Diesel jeans, big diamond stud earrings, and towering heels. We met in Leopolldina, Daslu’s elegant restaurant and one of São Paolo’s top power spots, packed daily with celebrities, businessmen, and socialites. The chef is Italian, and the cuisine is a Best of Europe tour: filet mignon with red wine sauce, wild mushroom risotto, lobster-stuffed ravioli, prosciutto and melon, and seviche.
We talked of her Daslu experience. “My mother used to go to the original one and would take me,” Saddi said as she tucked into an ample lunch of beef filet and pasta. “I started shopping there myself when I was fifteen. Now I’m forty-three. It grows and grows and never loses that family feel. You’re not received as a client but as a family friend. When I got married, we lived just down the street. I would call and say, ‘I need a gift for this or that,’ and they would pull something. Salesgirls are your friends. They are in the same social swirls. When you go to Daslu, it’s not to buy a new pair of shoes. It’s to see your friends. You can’t find this service anywhere else in the world.”
And we talked about life as a São Paolo socialite: “You can be everything all together—work, mother, hostess—because you have staff,” she said. “In return, you help with the schools, houses, everything. My driver has been with me twenty-one years, since I married, and I have watched his children grow up. When he was sick I put in him in the hospital and got him the best doctors, the best treatments. You help them, because they help you. All the families here do that. It’s an exchange.”
What I really wanted to know, though, was this: what, for Cristiane Saddi, is luxury today?
“Daslu is a luxury because you can do what you want,” she explained, pouring dark chocolate sauce over two slices of cake. “They have the best brands and the best choice in the world, from bras to evening gowns to housewares. Everything you need for everything. How many fashion stores also sell cars? You just think about a product—you can buy it at Daslu.”
After two days at Daslu, I understood what she meant. Daslu may have been dreamy, but it wasn’t a dream.
As she dug into her cake, I began to think about the state of the luxury business, how it seemed over the last two decades to have lost its soul. I wondered where it would go: what would it do once the Japanese and Americans had grown weary of luxury brands and emerging markets were saturated? When gimmicks like art galleries and gala concerts would no longer draw crowds in the stores? When there were no more corners to cut and there was no more growth to be had? Was there enough integrity or value left in these brands to allow them to continue to call themselves “luxury”? Or, more important, to maintain their legitimacy, I asked Saddi, would they be able to keep the wealthy like her and her peers as customers?
“Yes,” she said. “The Louis Vuitton here carries only its most expensive items,” she said. “Daslu clients don’t need the logo entry-level handbag or to wear labels or logos. We buy from luxury brands, but not ordinary products. Special items. There’s always something special. You can see what is mass and what is special. Luxury is not how much you can buy. Luxury is the knowledge of how to do it right, how to take the time to understand and choose well. Luxury is buying the right thing.”
And with that, Saddi wiped the chocolate off her lips, reapplied her lipstick, got up, and kissed me good-bye.
“Must get back to work,” she said, and she clicked off in her stilettos.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deluxe exists thanks in large part to two extraordinary women: Nina Hyde, the legendary fashion editor of the Washington Post, who gave me my first job as a fashion reporter in the late 1980s, and taught me that fashion was as serious and respectable a beat as covering the White House; and Amy Spindler, style editor of the New York Times Magazine, who assigned me a series of major investigative pieces about the fashion industry in the late 1990s, and said to me, “You should turn this into a book.” She was right. Sadly, like Nina Hyde a decade earlier, Amy Spindler succumbed to cancer far too young and before she could see it happen.
Peter Riva helped shape the idea for Deluxe and gave me the kick I needed to sit down and write the proposal. My agent, Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbit, had the patience to keep rereading it for what seemed like forever until it sparkled, then sent it to Ann Godoff and Emily Loose at Penguin Press in New York and Stefan McGrath at Penguin Press in London, who—on my fortieth birthday, no less—courageously took me on and guided me into authorhood. Penguin Press editors Jane Fleming and Helen Conford tag-teamed me, asking all the right questions and adding needed structure, both to me and the manuscript. Happily, their interpretation of “a couple of more months” was as elastic as mine.
Deluxe would not contain half the information it has without Newsweek. My editors Fareed Zakaria, Nisid Hajari, and Susan Greenberg and my Paris bureau chief Christopher Dickey allowed me to wander the planet on behalf of the magazine in search of the real story behind the luxury industry, and published early versions of these reportages in Newsweek’s international edition. Sue Greenberg further gave up weekends and part of her New Year’s vacation to gently shape the manuscript into a seamless read, as she has done with my Newsweek copy for more than a decade. Longtime Newsweek Paris bureau photo editors Ginny Power and Jacqueline Duhau helped to choose and find just the right pictures to acco
mpany my words and popped up my spirits when they started to wane.
A slew of young, hungry reporters helped me with research, including Marie Valla, Jenny Barchfield, Remi Hoki, J. J. Martin, Erin Zaleski, Florence Villeminot, Nicole Martinelli, Laura Czigler, and Lauren Greenwald. These dynamic young women spent hours chasing down obscure numbers, setting up interviews in far-flung places, and, when needed, translating foreign languages. Fact-checker supreme Austin Kelley pored through mountains of documents, deciphered my scribble, and followed up with sources to make sure I got it right. And several luxury brand PR folks—including Amee Boyle at Giorgio Armani, Olivier Labesse at DGM Conseil, Marie-Louise de Clermont-Tonnere and Claire Chassard at Chanel, Annelise Catineau and Olivier Monteil at Hermès and the unflappable Nathalie Tollu at Louis Vuitton—answered my seemingly endless barrage of follow-up questions with speed and aplomb. I could have never pulled this book together without them.
I am deeply grateful to the hundreds of people I interviewed for Deluxe on the record, including Wanda McDaniel, Kenneth Fang, Tom Ford, Laudomia Pucci, Kris Buckner, Handel Lee, Menehould de Bazelaire, Leslie Caron, and Olivia de Havilland, and those who spoke to me off the record and told me the secrets of the luxury industry. Mônica Mendes was right to insist that I travel to São Paolo to see Daslu firsthand, and was extraordinarily welcoming when I did, and Jennifer Woo and Bonnie Brooks of Lane Crawford, Wilfred Koo of Givenchy, and David Tang helped me negotiate Hong Kong and Guangzhou, making what seemed impossible achievable. Several friends, including Laurie Sprague, Cathy Nolan, Kevin Mulvey, and Mike Medavoy, read Deluxe in rough form or debated its premise with me, and their input shaped its outcome. I must also thank photographers Don Ashby, Marcio Madeira, and Patrick Demarchelier and artist Tom Sachs for generously providing beautiful images for Deluxe, Andre Balazs, Philip Pavel and everyone at the Chateau Marmont for putting up with me as I tried to channel the hotel’s writing ghosts, and the indefatigable June Newton, who kindly invited me into her home and took the most honest portrait of me ever.