A mini-renaissance in luxury shopping is setting the luxury sector on a positive trajectory for this year.
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Analysts Predict 4% Growth in Luxury Following Last Year’s Slump
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Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
A mini-renaissance in luxury shopping is setting the luxury sector on a positive trajectory for this year.
A mini-renaissance in luxury shopping is setting the luxury sector on a positive trajectory for this year.
.According to an analysis of 220 luxury goods firms by consulting firm Bain & Co, sales in the sector are set to grow by 4% this year to €158 billion ($192 billion). The study was made in cooperation with the Italian trade group Fondazione Altagamma and follows an 8% slump in 2009.
Bain analyst Rudolf Pritzl noted a return to luxury shopping as consumer trust improves and the travel market recovers: “After three painful years customers are beginning to buy again.”
The trend is particularly positive amongst wealthy Asian consumers who remain committed to expensive accessories, shoes and leather goods.
Indeed, the firm predicts noticeable geographical variation: the growth rate for luxury shopping in Asia is estimated at 15% this year; 4% growth in North and South America and 3% growth in Europe. Analysts believe that this heralds an important shift in “target markets for the manufacturers."
From a more psychological perspective, Pritzl’s observation was that, “The temporary phenomenon of ‘luxury shame’ is disappearing in more mature markets [and] the attraction of luxury goods is returning at the same time.”
Santo Versace, chairman of Fondazione Altagamma congratulated the sector on what they were doing right: “Many brands have concentrated themselves on their core businesses and invested massively in product design and innovation.”
However, while the bigger luxury brands will be able to enlarge their market share and expand via diversification, he warned that many smaller companies will have to be prudent and may even be forced to contemplate mergers or take-overs.
Sources
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