Dear readers and subscribers,
Thank you so much for coming along with us on this journey into the heart of what we feel is the juiciest, most thrillingly weird, decadent and significant beat journalism has to offer. (A special welcome to our new subscribers from our story in Back Row: scroll down for some extra content from that story.)
There’s a scene early on in Martin Scorsese’s Casino when Sam “Ace” Rothstein explains how all the champagne, private jets, hotel suites, showgirls, and the entire tawdry, neon-drenched glamour of Vegas leads to a plain grey counting room filled to the brim with dollar bills. As the money tumbles into buckets, he asks: “What do you think we’re doing out here in the desert? It’s all this money… It’s all been arranged for us to take your money.”
In the luxury business, all of the glamour and glitz, the front row seats, magazine covers, press trips, influencer marketing, freebies and red carpet action leads to one thing and one thing only. It’s all been arranged so that a handful of men (and it’s mainly men) can take your money. Where else does all the wealth in the world go if not on private jets, hotel suites, watches and handbags?
So why start a newsletter about it now? Well, it’s the moment, duh. Moments. The fashion and luxury business is one that hinges upon moments. The right person at the right time in the right place can by a stroke of immense fortune and talent completely and utterly upend — make and re-make — an entire industry according to their dreams and desires.
Since his takeover of Dior in 1984, Bernard Arnault has indisputably been luxury’s man of the moment. With a net worth of $178 billion thanks to his 48% stake in LVMH, he now regularly trades places with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for the title of richest person in the world.
Earlier this year, the Financial Times reported on a memo that told his managers he was issuing “an absolute ban” on speaking to journalists at seven publications: La Lettre, Puck, Miss Tweed, L’Informé, Médiapart, Le Canard Enchaîné and Glitz.paris.
“I formally condemn any behaviour consistent with maintaining relationships with unscrupulous journalists and giving them information or comments on the life of the group,” Arnault wrote. “Any breach (and this will inevitably be known) will be considered a serious infraction, with the corresponding consequences attached to it.”
And there we were thinking that he was someone who just sells handbags and frocks. We believe that luxury’s moment of reckoning is now. Welcome to Dark Luxury.
Coming up
In the next few weeks and months Dark Luxury will publish original stories about China’s grey market for luxury goods, what bothers the industry’s most influential figures, and watches, the car industry and private jets, as well as insightful analyses into what’s going wrong at some of the biggest fashion brands.
Signing up for £10 a month gives you access to all of those stories, and helps us fund our reporting and our investigations. We’re also offering a temporary 20% pre-Christmas discount on our annual subscription.
Peak advent calendar
When we first set out to report on luxury beauty advent calendars for Amy Odell’s Back Row, we had no idea how important they were to the beauty industry and retailers. The Liberty advent calendar is equivalent to more than 10 per cent of Liberty’s entire revenue for the year, by my calculations, and that’s only one of dozens of variations available now.
Insiders who worked on beauty calendars told us they worried every year that it would be the “peak” of the advent calendar craze, as if they were a commodity we extract from the ground. Another said working on beauty advent calendars was “a labour of hell,” such were the demands on their team to find exactly the right products, get tens of thousands of them made months before Christmas, and to make just enough of the calendars that they sell out in November.
We’ll repost the full story later for our subscribers who don’t have access to Back Row, but if you’re not already a subscriber, we can’t recommend it enough. Odell wrote the book on Anna Wintour and worked for 15 years at New York Magazine, and she aims to turn her site into “the next great consumer fashion and culture title.” We think she’s well on her way. Drop us a line at darkluxury@substack.com if you’d like a free trial of her Substack.
One thing we didn’t have space for in the Back Row story was the discovery that there’s a thriving resellers’ market for empty beauty advent calendar boxes, not just the ones full of products.
Resellers on eBay sold about 800 of them in the last couple of months, for prices ranging from 99p up to £82. For empty cardboard boxes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dior’s shiny, gold (but still empty) advent box goes for the highest price.
Here’s our (crude) ranking of the most valuable beauty advent calendar boxes, representing about £10,444 worth of spending.
As an eBay reseller told us while reporting the story, “there’s a market for everything, isn’t there?”
Dark Luxury’s reading list
We’ll leave you with the Dark Luxury reading list, the publications, writers and journalists in this world who we most commonly find ourselves reading. Our mini version of BusinessWeek’s jealousy list.
The Fence - The UK’s only magazine
Puck - especially now that they’ve bought Substack newsletters Artelligence and Sarah Shapiro’s Retail Diary
Alec Leach - The World Is On Fire And We’re Still Buying Shoes is a very thought-provoking manifesto
This Bloomberg News investigation which revealed that the indigenous people of the Peruvian Andes work free of charge to harvest vicuña wool, which is weaved into $9,000 sweaters sold in Parisian boutiques
This Wall Street Journal story about the “nasty rivalry rocking the world of private jets”
New York Magazine’s Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags
The BBC’s coverage of ex-Harrods director Mohamed Al Fayed
Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia, particularly the chapter on how the mafia interacts with the luxury business in Italy. Business of Fashion’s coverage of the Italian Sweatshops Problem is some good follow-up reading.
The Taste of Luxury: Bernard Arnault and the Moet-Hennessy Louis Vuitton Story, the must-read story about the creation of the LVMH we know today, which is almost impossible to find in English
Style and substance
At Dark Luxury we’re aiming to apply boot-leather, investigative journalism techniques to what can sometimes be a very opaque industry, and we want to do it in style.
We probably shouldn’t share this with you all, but one of the brainstorming exercises we went through with our brand strategist was to rank luxury-focused news sites on an axis of style vs substance. It’s our ambition to live in the top right of the chart, but what do you think about our ranking of the rest of luxury news? Who are we missing?
Drop us an email at darkluxury@substack.com