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purseblog prada saffiano Penguin Press, $18.45 Thomas takes it as given that the purchase of a $7,500 hand stitched crocodile leather Hermes Birkin bag is an experience ennobling to buyer and seller, a triumph of taste over vulgarity and artistry over philistinism.She never once speaks of a mythical, pre consumerist past of communitarian solidarity and material equality.Instead, she has penned her own mythical history of consumerism, a history that emphasizes a purer, more elegant experience of material consumption. Thomas pines for the day when luxury was "simply about creating the finest things that money can buy," when there was a place for "humble artisans who created the most beautiful wares imaginable." Thierry Hermes started as a lowly harness maker with a shop in Paris, Louis Vuitton as the son of farmers who scored an apprenticeship with a Parisian trunk maker. By the late 19th century, both were master craftsmen who served the French aristocracy.Some time in the 1980s, our humble artisans were replaced with bloodthirsty capitalists ripped from the pages of a Naomi Klein polemic.Fashion tycoons, Thomas reports, "hyped their brands mercilessly," adopting "the luxury equivalent of the American military's 'shock and awe' approach to war . . . Luxury was no longer about creating the finest things money could buy. It was about making money, a lot of money." Strip this narrative of its self sacrificing royal artisans and cigar smoking fat cats, and it's not implausible. Something was lost as luxury went corporate in the late 1980s. The heirs of artisans who had dressed the French royal court started opening stores in airports. The House of Gucci, which began as a small saddlery shop in Florence, started selling its leftovers in suburban outlet malls; you could now buy last year's "it bag" on your way to the food court.Fashion houses licensed their names to lesser designers, an idea they borrowed from, of all places, Disney.But for a reporter who covers the economics of fashion, Thomas seems surprisingly unacquainted with the concept of a tradeoff.Just as surely as something was lost when Gucci started stamping its name on cheap T shirts, something was gained when sales clerks could buy