Dream On
By Kate Betts
Summer 2005 Style & Design
There's nothing new about luxury purveyors cashing in on the mass
market. Back in the 1930s and '40s, French fashion designers like Coco
Chanel and Christian Dior gave consumers who couldn't afford couture a
whiff of high style at a fraction of the price with perfumes like Chanel
No. 5 and Miss Dior. In the 1960s, Pierre Cardin famously began
splashing his logo onto everything from umbrellas to cigarettes. These
days it's not just fashion designers but also interior decorators,
architects and industrial-product designers who are discounting the
luxury dream by signing deals with mass-market outlets like Kmart and
Target. Then there are retailers like Ikea, Crate & Barrel and Hold
Everything that offer such high-end materials as Italian hand-blown
glass, state-of-the-art molded plastic and crystal at everyday prices.
This supplement to TIME looks at how the booming luxury-goods industry
is influencing the mass market today. Perfume still provides most luxury
purveyors with the broadest reach: Estée Lauder's Beautiful fragrance,
for example, racks up $4 million in annual sales in Chicago alone. But
more and more homes are getting the scent of high design too. "There is
a whole population of people who want stylish home products that are a
little more contemporary and that come at a great price," says Dave
DeMattei, Williams-Sonoma Inc.'s president of emerging brands. It's
astonishing just how quickly luxury trends trickle down. The flower
motif on a $32,000 pair of Bulgari earrings, for example, is just as
likely to show up on an $8 pair of household pliers. —Kate Betts
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