Janus Thinking

The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair with Luxury – published earlier this year by Radha Chadha and Paul Husband – looks at how Western brand retailers are increasingly meeting their bottom line by marketing to Asian consumers.

The authors cite the fact that over half of the revenues brought in by Western luxury brand retailers comes from Asia.  Japan’s market is the biggest, but the authors show how China’s and India’s markets are propelling this trend forward.  

Among other topics, the book shows how fickle luxury trends can be, and traces the history of luxury fashion over the last century.  Around the turn of the century, during the Belle Epoque, most sales came from a small elite of European upper classes.  A handful of Asian cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, took part as well, only to disappear again after Japan’s losses sustained during the second World War, with the austerity introduced by China’s communist regime, and the nationalistic tendencies of a newly independent India.

This book also shows how luxury retailers have gone about democratising the must-have luxury fashions which middle-class housewives, schoolgirls, and mistresses swoon over today across Asia.  It also looks at how these trends will continue to evolve in the future.