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That's all it is now. There is no quality underneath the luxury that can't be matched, there is just a trademark. Every luxury house other than Hermes has moved production overseas, or into cheaper EU countries. And other than Hermes, which basically keeps the entire traditional leatherworking industry operating in France, the luxury houses are employing cheap labor anyway, often Asian immigrants are making the Italian leather goods in Italian factories. Mr. Gucci has no skilled artisans. Yet people are still paying for it. How divorced can we get the value from the underlying product? Idk, ask Supreme about their stupid brick.
And that kind of luxury competition Veblen good is a ridiculously large global industry. The worst one, in my mind, is the NFL/MLB/etc authentic jersey. A $200 piece of plastic crap, available for $20 on DhGate. Yet some people will still buy it from the Team Store. I'm not much for it myself, but quite simply: if you'd only pay slightly more for a signed copy of LOTR, you will never own a first edition copy of LOTR unless you get extraordinarily lucky at a yard sale. To be fair though, the historic castle may be cheaper than a repro, as the repro will be more modern and easier to maintain.
My title agent examples are largely orthogonal, there I'm talking about NFT transfer becoming the essential legal ceremony indicating ownership, in the way that now it involves signing little pieces of paper in front of the correct witnesses and sending them to the state capital and then having them sent back. Where that starts is with accepting NFT ownership as ownership.
eta: WSJ is reporting today that Dior spends $58 on labor for bags that retail at $2,900. There's no underlying value there, just branding.
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