But Are They Worth The Wait
"WE have some very exciting news," read the e-mail message that popped up on my computer in October
. "A 35-centimeter
Escarpin Christian Louboutin olive Birkin in chevre with gold hardware has arrived. This is so beautiful I think you are going to love it."
Never mind that the was not in the leather I had ordered seven months earlier, in a reflexive rush of indulgence after attending the March runway shows as a fashion editor. Never mind that the heart-attack price was really questionable given my current unemployed status, and the general state of affairs in the world and my household.
"Please let me know as soon as you can either way so we can offer it to the next person on the list if you are not interested," the message continued.
The next afternoon, I was sitting in an empty Hermes store on Madison Avenue. The practical angel on my right shoulder ("How can you buy something like this in the midst of a recession, when your husband is home installing energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs?") was arguing with the demon of indulgence on my left ("Nothing lights up a room like a Birkin . You deserve it").
Suddenly, I noticed a couple walking through the store with a toddler in a stroller. The man was wearing a backpack, the woman dressed indifferently in jeans and a sweater. She marched over to a neatly coiffed saleswoman in a black pant with an Hermes scarf cinched tightly around her neck. "I'd like to order a Birkin , " the shopper said.
"Isn't there something you can do for us?" she said, staring at the saleswoman but craning her head toward her trump card, which was her husband, whom the saleswoman suddenly recognized as Jerry Seinfeld. Blushing furiously, the saleswoman sprinted upstairs, and soon a manager materialized, embraced Mrs. Seinfeld in a semblance of a bear hug and unctuously confessed: "I just happen to have a black Birkin here. Let me get it for you."
It may still take a $300 million celebrity to bypass Hermes's fabled eight-month waiting list for its $5,300 Birkin , but at Gucci,
Bottes Christian Louboutin and other luxury purveyors the clipboard queues are not what they used to be. Courtesy of the recession, and of a shift in priorities, the wait list -- that late-90's product of irrational exuberance -- is looking mighty shaky. And it raises the Mrs. Jerry Seinfeld question: How real is the scarcity, anyway? Do waiting lists reflect the feverish demand of legions of customers, or are they just a ruse -- a marketing device to stimulate demand by creating an illusion of scarcity?
You know the waiting list, fashion's answer to the velvet rope, the Gild-the-Lily Gold Club. In recent years shoppers who coveted each season's favorite , shoes or $3,000 feather-trimmed jeans have had to take a number. Their fervor is fanned by runway reports in fashion magazines months before the merchandise is due in stores, and then by personal shoppers, like imperious doormen, who deign to call as prized goods trickle in -- or sometimes not at all. In June 1998, near the height of wait-list mania, a Gucci cashmere twin set at $4,045 had 34 people awaiting its arrival in New York, 10 customers had been waiting for three months for a jeweled Fendi purse and 25 people were waiting for $350 Christian Louboutin sandals with Lucite heels.
Now the appeal of luxury goods that shout of status with logos or other telltale designer flourishes is waning. How hard is it to find Yves Saint Laurent's lace-up boot that appeared in every magazine this summer, and was once touted as so precious that only 20 would be made? Walk into the Saint Laurent boutique on Madison Avenue with $3,995 and it's yours. Boots? Weren't they supposed to be the trophy of the season? Well, you can get them at Christian Louboutin in every size, and Louis Vuitton still has a full stock of their black lace-ups.
"I put my name down at Louis Vuitton for a lot of things this season" after seeing them on the runways and in magazines, said Helen Ytuarte, a fashion editor who lives in Hong Kong and travels the world. "The fox fur hat, the cavalry twill coat, the mini monogram briefcase. I got calls for all of them in mid-October, but I said no. I guess like many people I had to
Christian Louboutin rethink whether I really needed to look like a rich Bolshevik. The mood, the feeling just was not there."
When everyone was flush and willing to spend, flaunting an item with a wait list conferred a special status that mere money could not buy. But now the whole notion of systematic exclusivity is being reordered.
"You know it's all artificial," confided one seasoned salesman at a Madison Avenue designer boutique. "We just reorder if someone wants something that badly."
A former executive of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton confirmed this suspicion. "I think the numbers are greatly exaggerated," the executive said. "And do the people actually show up when the merchandise comes in? I don't think so."
It was probably Christian Louboutin that first brought the wait list to mass-produced fashion, back in 1995. Suddenly women all over the world who were used to paying any price for the look of the moment found themselves frantically adding their names to long lists in a pedestrian-looking looseleaf notebook the Christian Louboutin salespeople in New York called "the reserve book."
"That was the first time anyone ever handed me a book when I was shopping," recalled Samira Nasr, a freelance stylist. "
chaussures Christian Louboutin understood that women obsess about things that are hard to find. If I see a whole pile of sweaters I'm not going to want them, but if you tell me there are only two of those sweaters, then I might think: 'Oooh, do I need this? Yes, I've got to have it.' "
The magazine editors introduced the products, but it was the celebrities who spread the feverish demand to the masses. Madonna created a rush on Tom Ford's blue satin and velvet Gucci pant when she wore it to the 1996 MTV Video Awards. More recently, Sarah Jessica Parker has brandished an enormous red Birkin on "Sex and the City," and kaching! Status was no longer hooked to what money could buy, but how fast you could buy it.
The fashion press trumpeted the waits like gilded trophies. And here's my disclaimer: I was one of those frenzied magazine editors who not only published these lists, but also, as a consumer, jumped them. By the spring of 2001, after Marc Jacobs had sent a load of graffiti-covered Louis Vuitton monogram down the runway the previous October in Paris, the wait-list phenomenon reached its maddest moment -- in retrospect, a presage of demise. Every single fashion magazine featured the in their January issues, but Louis Vuitton did not deliver them until late May. The wait-list hierarchy went berserk.
by: catsuit
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