|
|
| Lifestyles
of the Rich and Shameless |
| “Viva Brazil!” shouts September's Vanity Fair, the world’s top fashion mag, in a luxurious photo spread full of long-limbed models and tuxedoed twenty-somethings. Most all of them, more likely than not, do plenty of their shopping at Daslu, a “mega-luxury designer store in Sao Paulo” where customers, notes a recent British Guardian piece, “arrive by helicopter and are ferried in golf carts across marble floors to spare their Jimmy Choo heels.” Workers in Brazil, Latin America’s most unequal country, currently average $200 in monthly wages, about what the nation’s privileged pay for two Jeep Cherokee tankfuls of gas. September 24, 2007 |
| Christie's, the international high-brow auction house, last week announced a new world record in artwork sales over a six-month span. Over the first half of 2007, Christie’s salesrooms in New York, London, Hong Kong, and 11 other global watering holes for the world’s wealthy sold $6.5 billion worth of art, including 358 pieces with price-tags over $1 million. Christie’s CEO Edward Dolman credits a surge of new buyers — “Wall Street hedge fund managers, guys in the City (of London), and Russian oligarchs, as well as Middle Eastern and Asian businessmen” — for the soaring sales. The new buyers, he says, lean toward modern art like Andy Warhol’s Green Car Crash, a painting that sold for $72 million this spring. July 16, 2007 |
| America’s “elite affluent” — those households worth over $10 million — plan to contribute an average $82,000 to charity this summer, says Elite Traveler magazine. But they’re planning to spend even more — an average $94,000 — on jewelry and luxury watches. In fact, America’s decamillionaires tell market researchers they’ll be spending $622,202 per household on luxury goods and services during this year’s prime vacation season, 55 percent more than they spent over the summer months just two years ago. May 28, 2007 |
 In Zurich, Swiss watchmakers seem to have a bit more spring in their precision movements. The Swatch Group, the world’s biggest watch company, says soaring demand for its luxury watches — timepieces that can run around $127,000 — sent annual sales over $5 billion in 2006 for the first time ever. The top Swatch luxury watches offer a good deal more than bling appeal. Some models, news reports note, “show everything from the time on different continents to the phases of the moon.” January 29, 2007 |
| Forbidden fruit sells. At a premium. Forbidden fur, too. Many top fashion designers, the British Guardian reports, are now gratuitously slapping fur onto their catwalk creations. One example: Prada this fall is fringing fur around platform shoe soles. This past July, designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s show featured a model wearing a fur coat “with multiple fox heads bobbing along the sides.” Fur, notes Julien Macdonald, a design superstar with stints at Chanel and Givenchy, “adds ultimate luxury and glamour to my collections.” Fur sales overall have jumped 29 percent since 2000, to $11.7 billion worldwide. September 25, 2006 |
| |
|
|
|
|
