Reddit reviews Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

These are my absolute favorite books about fashion history/the industry:

• The End of Fashion: The Mass Marketing of the Clothing Business Forever by Teri Agins. Honestly the best book for understanding changes in the contemporary fashion space, from "why is fast fashion so shitty?" to "why is it hard to avoid sweatshops?" to "why do trends change so quickly?" to "why don't they make clothes like they used to?"…essentially, 50% of all the big existential-angst questions I see on FFA about The Mysterious Foibles of the Fashion Industry are addressed by this book. It takes on so many angles—how the industry has changed in terms of manufacturing process, marketing process, the press process…from here, I'd also recommend Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster and Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, but the Teri Agins book is, imo, the most comprehensive for an industry overview.
  
• Fashion: 150 Years of Couturiers, Designers, Labels by Charlotte Seeling. Excellent overview of the most influential and frequently mentioned designers, brands, personalities in fashion; also tremendously useful for a decade-by-decade overview of major fashion influences and themes. It's also a great jumping-off point into other areas of interest! For example, if you fall in love with Dior, The Met has a list of downloadable books about fashion, and you can read a whole book discussing every single couture collection by Christian Dior and how that shaped the house. When I first started posting on FFA, this was the first book I read, and it gave me a deep reverence and appreciation for small details of construction (where a button is placed, how a seam is shaped) and how that produces so much character in a brand. It's been very lovely since then to watch various designers (e.g. Raf Simons) operate at Dior, and see how they reinterpret the earliest Christian Dior designs into something new. And The Met has quite a few other books!
  
• Fashion Theory: A Reader, edited by Malcolm Bernard. A dense but wonderful read if you're interested in more theoretical/academic discussions of fashion x imperialism (there's a wonderful piece about Western imperialism as manifested by the men's suit, and how it's overtaken many traditional men's outfits in other countries), fashion x gender (normative gender expression, non-normative gender expression). Really, really wonderful if you are interested in how fashion can shed light on greater trends about globalization, gender, race, class…

I read a book on this, the retail price is roughly 14x what it cost to make. Which is completely ridiculous but you kind of have to admit that that's some real successful marketing.

Style guides:

• I Love Your Style, Amanda Brooks. Lots of photos -- would make for a good coffee table book.
  
• Fairchild Dictionary of Fashion. Great reference on design terms -- seams, silhouettes, etc.
  
  Historical:
  
  
• The Beautiful Fall, Alicia Drake.
  
• Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster, Dana Thomas.
  
• Not historical per se, but anything by Simon Doonan. Lighthearted reads about retail, fashion, style.
  
  Edit: formatting.

Thanks for the link! I read a book about this years ago before I knew anything about the rep world and it was pretty illuminating. It’s actually called “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster”. It was written in 2007 so it might be a bit dated however the basic thrust still definitely stands. If I recall correctly the only brands (at the time of publishing) that really were still worthy of the “luxury” label were Chanel and Hermés - they were specifically cited for their leather and textile quality and skill of their artisans. I think it also talked a lot about how brands like Marc Jacobs are made side by side in the same Chinese factory (lol) as unbranded cheaper merchandise. Which we obviously know and benefit from!!

Amazon link