One of my new guilty pleasures is watching Million Dollar Listing New York - about three rather obnoxious real estate agents in NYC.
In one episode, a guy goes in to buy two bathing suits for upcoming vacation. He picks two that are sort of like gym shorts but with (in my opinion) truly ugly wild prints. In any case, each one cost $350 dollars - total of $750 for two swimsuits.
Seriously?
For two swimsuits with maybe a yard of fabric for the two of them?
In another episode a guy was looking for a shirt and found a white, long sleeve shirt off the rack. It was not custom tailored for him. It was a basic, long-sleeve white shirt off the rack.
It cost $475.
I can see if something has the “wow” factor - a really cool jacket, or some extra special one-of-a-kind article of clothing that you have to have and screw the price if you can afford it. But on a generic white shirt, or a swimsuit that is just colorful but otherwise just a swimsuit?
My working theory is that the mere fact that one *can *pay $350 for swim trunks is more significant that the trunks themselves.
No doubt this is well-made, quality clothing (ugly print notwithstanding), but I have to think the markup is mostly about excluding the riff-raff and allowing rich folks to enjoy the privelege of being able to shop at these high-end stores without having to rub elbows with the rest of us.
And the “well-made, quality” qualifier doesn’t always apply either. I once went to a conference in New Orleans and realized I’d forgotten to pack the skirt I was planning to wear for my talk, so I had to go out and buy a skirt, and I said “whaddahell, I’ll go to the fancy downtown shopping center and buy a skirt at Saks Fifth Avenue!! I’ll spend a few hundred bucks but this will be the best-quality skirt I’ve ever owned, probably hand-stitched by bilingual Italian nuns or something (wow!), and it will be my best dressy skirt for the rest of my freaking life! My Saks Fifth Avenue skirt!! Woohoooooo!!!”
Well, I’m glad I enjoyed the anticipation of that shopping experience so much, because the experience itself was complete crap. There I was in Saks Fifth Avenue, surrounded by (I presume) former celebrities and foreign minor royalty and tobacco heiresses impulse-buying diamond cuff bracelets and what-not, and the more I pawed through the racks of skirts the more incredulously disgusted I got.
All it was was the same damn department-store shit mass-produced in Third World countries, but at ten times the price. “Hand-stitched by bilingual Italian nuns” my naive gullible ass.
I know whereof I speak when it comes to spotting couture details in ready-to-wear clothing, and this stuff was absolutely NOTHING special. I checked hems, I checked seams and linings and zippers and buttonholes, and it was no better than your average department-store brand. How a store can have the nerve to charge that much for that kind of goods, I’ll never understand. How rich-bitch shoppers can be dumb enough to pay that kind of price for that kind of goods, I don’t even want to understand.
Maybe they had the good stuff tucked away in a special closet somewhere where riffraff like me who just walked in off the street couldn’t see it, but what they had out on the racks was sure as hell no big deal.
So I went to the discount store across the street and got a perfectly good black wool skirt for thirty bucks. Still have it. My non-Saks-Fifth-Avenue skirt.
Because people pay it. Nothing more, nothing less. If everyone said “Heavens me, that’s too expensive” and walked out, the price would eventually work it’s way down. If they could hardly keep the clothes on the rack, the price would move up. That’s just how it works.
I really don’t know anything about the store, but maybe that’s it. Maybe they have super high end stuff somewhere else, and this is for when the super high end person says to their personal shopper “Oh, and I also need a plain black skirt” and the shopper says “I’ll run down and get you one”.
A friend of mine was recently saying that she fell down and ripped her $150.00 jeans. My reply was, “Well, your first mistake was paying $150.00 for a pair of jeans.”
Yeah, and even the middle-of-the-road places have sales a few times a year where it’s 25% off, or “buy one get one free” kinda stuff. So that indicates to me that even at 1/4 or 1/2 price they’re still making a profit.
After working in retail for a few years I coined a theory about stuff like this…
Whenever you walk into a store (and this counts for everything, not just clothes) you’ll find three types of goods. The first type is “built cheap”. This is stuff that’s only there to be lowest price-point in any category. It’s basically unusable rubbish. It sells to people who are naive/desperate enough to hope that the department store wouldn’t sell them something that just flat-out doesn’t work.
At the opposite end of the scale, you’ve got “built for the badge”. I say for the badge because the branding is the most important thing about it. It’s usually got some funky styling going on as well, so it looks different from everything else in its category. It sells to people looking not just for something functional, but for a status symbol – people who want all the hippest brand names. Stuff like this generally costs at least double the price of the ordinary version, but it is never double the quality.
The third type is “built for function”. which is what I usually go for, and which is sometimes the hardest to find. It usually doesn’t have all the funky styling and prestige branding. It definitely won’t be the cheapest thing in the shop, but it might not be the most expensive either. It’s the thing you’ll probably overlook at first, because it’s not shouting at you about how cheap/flashy it is. It’s generally made by companies that don’t have the cache of a big brand name, so they are obliged to sell their goods on the quality of workmanship, and it’s sold to hard-headed customers who just want something that works and won’t break.
The one exception to what I’ve just laid out is toasters (and anything else with a similar kind of heating element, like hair dryers or space heaters). With these, it really doesn’t matter what you spend. Either the heating element is going to break or it isn’t. You get no benefit at all from spending more money, so you might as well go with the cheaper one.
Since I quit working in retail and got interested in music, I’ve discovered a fourth type of good you might find – “built to industry standard”. In price, it usually dwarfs even the built for the badge kind of goods. That’s because the people who make it don’t care about selling it to you at all, they’re just servicing their industrial clients. But for some reason, some people get to thinking that the industrial-grade version of something must be better than the consumer version (because it’s what the pro’s use, I guess). That’s generally not the case. For the most part, you’re paying for stuff that Joe Average off the street wouldn’t even care about – stuff like industry standards compliance. If you buy something like this and you’re not a business you’re probably screwed, because the maintenance costs will eat you alive.
Like most things, it really just depends.I have a knack for fashion, and I can walk into H&M and put together some creative, stylish outfits- and that’s where my most of my clothes end up coming from.
I also have a few very nice dresses from Antropologie, which run around $150-$300. They are not exceptionally flashy- goldenrod polyester classic shift dress, a red silk sun dress and a rust colored cotton sun dress…all solid colors and relatively conventional cuts. None of them are, at first glance, much different than my everyday wardrobe.
But each and every time I wear one, I get compliments and a lot of “Where did you get that?” If I go to work and then class and then happy hour, I’ll get compliments at each of them. It’s like clockwork.
I don’t know what it is. Sometimes about the fit and the styling takes it a step beyond even a well put together H&M outfit. It makes me crazy, because I’d prefer it if expensive clothes weren’t actually that much nicer. But it is nice to walk into your closet and know you have guaranteed compliments on the rack.
It’s my theory that there are certain stores and certain products that are essentially decoys, intended to lure the nouveau riche, the wannabes and pretenders away from the REAL rich people stuff. Saks has to be one, because there just aren’t enough really rich people to support a retail chain that widespread. But there are enough middle class people willing to blow big wads of cash on the fantasy that they are mingling with the 1%.
The other theory I have associated with this is that none of us have any real idea where the real rich people shops are or what they have. We hear about the stuff once in a while, when some rich guy gets too greedy (almost impossible in America), crashes and burns, and the media reports on the bizarre stuff lying around his mansion – sold gold dog houses, 5 thousand dollar shower curtains and the like. I’m pretty sure you can’t buy either of these at Saks.
Also, it’s not like the majority of the “truly rich” actually go do their own shopping. Wouldn’t they have some sort of hired hand (or spouse?) to do these things for them while they’re out making millions?
My niece has a casual (as opposed to show) riding jacket that cost her all of her €100+ birthday money.
I have an ‘identical’ jacket that I bought in a supermarket for €15. The only difference between them is the one she has is a brand name, mine isn’t. And mine isn’t a knock-off cheap version for the high street, mine is a hiking jacket. They are so similar she wore mine by mistake.
I recently picked up a copy of GQ while in a waiting room. Having been out of the fashion loop for a while, I was flabbergasted at the price of men’s clothing. $200 for a frigging T-shirt? $500 for a
pair of moccasins? I haven’t spent that much money on clothes in the last decade. Needless to say I’m no fashion plate, but I know that if I had the money, you’re not going to get me shell out that much.
More of the Us vs Them thing I guess.
I accompanied my gf the last time she shopped for a new bathing suit. She bought a tiny little bikini, and I was shocked when the cashier rang her up and it was $150.00.
Then, I saw her in the suit and realized it was worth every penny.
