Deluxe by Dana Thomas

Author:Dana Thomas
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2007-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

TO MEET THE increasing demand for handbags they had created, luxury brands had to come up with innovative solutions. Hermès stuck with its limited distribution. For Dumas, it was a question of integrity: the heart of Hermès was fine traditional craftsmanship, and to sacrifice that would undermine the brand. The other major—and minor—luxury brands looked for ways to produce more goods faster and more efficiently. Louis Vuitton expanded its production, adding workshops in France and moving some manufacturing to the Loewe factory in Spain. When I visited the special-orders atelier in Asnières, I got a glimpse of how Louis Vuitton makes its bags: seamstresses sat behind sewing machines, stitching together scores of the new denim monogram handbag. Unlike at Hermès, where bags were crafted by hand one at a time, at Vuitton, the workers were churning them out assembly-line style, in twenty-bag batches. Vuitton executives may crow about quality, but the company’s focus is obviously on productivity.

Gucci, on the other hand, went high-tech. In March 2004, I visited Gucci factory headquarters near Florence a few weeks before Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole—and much of the team that worked with them—left the company, to see how Gucci handbags were made. My guide was Gucci’s product development director, Alessandro Poggiolini, an affable and polite man in his sixties who had joined Gucci in 1967 as a handbag artisan. (He retired from the company in 2005.) The original Gucci factory, Poggiolini told me, was on the river Arno in Florence. Later it moved to Via della Caldaie, in the city center, and in 1971 it moved to an industrial park called Casellina di Scandicci, about half an hour outside the city.

Back in the early 1990s, when Gucci was on the verge of bankruptcy, most of its leather goods were classics that carried over from one season to the next. De Sole wanted to introduce more creativity to design and ramp up production. To achieve this, in 1994, De Sole put Gucci production online. Poggiolini took me into a vast room in the factory filled with dozens of desktop computers on long tables to show me how it worked. “In the old days the bag went straight from design to leather, which was time-consuming and expensive and might have been right or not,” he told me. Now, technicians work on the three-dimensional computer image of the bag with the creative teams in London, Paris, and Milan to perfect the design. “You can turn around the bag on the screen and really study it,” Poggiolini explained. Once the design is green-lighted, the technicians print the pattern on pink cardboard for the prototype. The first prototype is made in a black rubberized fabric called Peplon so that the artisans can see the shape of the bag. The leather details are glued on to give the design team an idea of what the bag will look like when completed. When Ford approved the prototype, it went into production.

Unlike at Hermès, where artisans study the skins and

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