What's That Worth
I am asking everyone who reads this to answer the question at the end about their own personal acquisition values! I have never done a survey before and I’m looking forward to reading everyone’s answers.
One of the things I discuss a lot with clients, here on this newsletter, with friends… incessantly I guess? is how people create and understand value.
In my neighborhood there is an intersection where the concentration of designer knock-off bag sellers tends to congregate, especially on nice weekend days and holidays, when people travel here to shop all day. Dior, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Goyard - a veritable smogasbord of plastic leather displayed in carts or on tables or on blankets on the sidewalk, and shopped for by hordes of people all day.
When I was a kid I saved up and bought a knock off Kate Spade bag from a hidden room behind one of the souvenir shops on Canal Street. It was all very clandestine, they used a secret knock and I had a limited amount of time to shop, and I chose a copy of one of her classic box bags in a cheerful stripe that was entirely incongruous with my personality, and I remember paying something like $60. The unmistakable Kate Spade label that sat on the top front of her bags was glued on instead of stitched, and on one hot day the glue loosened and it started to droop and slide down the canvas with a sad glue snail trail in its wake. I understood irrefutably that the real thing would be better, but I was 15 and it was more important to me personally to fit in than it was to save up for another year or two for the real bag.
Not all of those shops backdoor wares were fake though! In the early 2000s, Prada invested a significant amount of time and money into protecting their store merchandise deliveries because the prevalence of robbery-for-resale while delivering fresh batches of Prada Sport Car Shoes (which are now back at four times the price that they originally were).
There was more awareness attached to buying fakes in the late 90s - LVMH put considerable money and time into smoking out fakes, versus the way, in 2025, the intersection of Canal and Broadway shamelessly transforms into a designer-imposter sidewalk market for all to see.
A year or two ago I got to go to the Kering Sustainability summit, where they presented their progress toward their short and long term environmental goals, and the head of sustainability for Gucci discussed a slide that really stuck with me. On it was their Value Wheel, where they map out the core principles of what their product stands for and what sort of feelings they are trying to inspire in their clients.
In “Durability”, there were two pieces. One was the Physical Durability of the product (we’ll call it a handbag). Will it last for decades? Will it stand up to a life well-lived? Will it come apart after a certain amount of wear? And how?
The second piece was “Emotional Durability”. This questioned: alongside the bag’s strength and quality, will it inspire an emotional connection in the user? It is going to be used for years, decades, gifted to a beloved child or niece? Is it a prized and valued possession?
Since then, I have passed perhaps hundreds of thousands of fake Gucci bags on the sidewalk in my neighborhood. It’s easy to be annoyed with the behavior of the people buying them, particularly as they occupy the whole sidewalk and have a general lack of awareness of their surroundings that - while we are on the topic of the 90s - would have nearly guaranteed they’d be robbed in the NYC of days passed. However, reducing it to math, it’s a stampede of people who are buying something that has been communicated to them as a status symbol, and however crass or inconsiderate or wasteful it might be, it’s worth interrogating why they want it.
Last year Christian Dior drew the scandal of having their production practices exposed when the Italian government penalized them for selling handbags at retail for nearly $3k that cost approximately $57 using illegal labor practices. Most of luxury fashion is in fact priced based on “perceived value”, or: what a brand thinks you’ll be willing to pay for something. There are of course, cost to markup to wholesale baselines, but for brands so large as Dior or Fendi or dare-I-say-even Kate Spade, the math is much more about comparing their prices to other brands they consider adjacent to them (or to whom they would like to be considered adjacent), and then finding some competitive landscape pricing that will maximize their margin, and their overall mixed margin goal for the brand.
It is no shock to you that Hermes bags cost a lot of money because the brand is invested in cultivating an air of exclusivity. This is how they - and much of the luxury industry - have determined their value, by truly committing to excluding the vast majority of the population from owning their goods. And the people shopping knock offs from blankets on Canal Street heard that message, and are having a very human reaction.
In a country with no social safety net, culturally invested in cultivating a “less than” mentality, holding up the false identity of a Meritocracy with weary, tired arms, it is absolutely normal to want to purchase a hand bag that, based on all of the information you have received from the world, will keep you socially safe. Will help identify you as successful, or important, or intimidating - because those are the ideals we hold up here every day. The Emotional Durability could be questionable, but the immediate motivation for buying one of those bags is that you hope it will protect you from being treated as poorly as you know this place to treat people who do not conspicuously communicate wealth with their every move.
The luxury market was once known for exceptional craftsmanship, fine, durable goods, high-minded design. In 2025, most of the luxury market has reorganized itself around communicating that their value proposition is no longer exquisite craftsmanship, but social protection in a landscape where most people are constantly worried they will fall to a lower rung of the class ladder.
And backing up, if there exists any desire to train people not to feel compulsion toward Shein hauls or shopping at Zara or even buying those fake Gucci bags, I believe it needs to come from somewhere other than projecting safety. But I don’t know what that is yet! So I am asking this forum for help.
Please answer for me: when you’re buying a thing - it could be makeup, clothing, shoes, whatever you want to focus on - what is the motivating factor that inspires you to try it? Honestly over everything, and anonymity is promised.
I’ll start: in aesthetics, what inspires me to actually purchase most of what I do buy is the promise of feeling elegant, confident, and fun, which is a super small and difficult trine to navigate your way into. But from a consumer motivation standpoint, as someone who has always felt like an absolute outsider in nearly any room she has entered, I’m also looking for a sense of belonging and security that might improve the odds that I am treated with respect and humanity in my day to day life, just like the people a few blocks from me buying fake Gucci bags right now. I just like different stuff.
Leaving you with this quote that stuck out for me from a piece in NYT last week:
“Revolution is the dynamic process of transforming individual virtues into social values.”
Yours, invaluably,
Anja