Rising Japanese wealth made East Asia the engine of luxury brand growth

Evidence

Asian consumers, meanwhile, taught these conglomerates how to tap into middle-class markets. In the mid-1970s, rising incomes and a strong yen encouraged the most wealthy Japanese to travel to Europe, where they snapped up Louis Vuitton bags as souvenirs. Japanese shoppers mobbed Louis Vuitton’s Paris flagship, and the company struggled with parallel importers. To address the chaos, Louis Vuitton hired a Japanese consultant who successfully placed Vuitton boutiques in Japan’s major department stores. By the early 1980s, there were only two Louis Vuitton stores in France but five in Japan. As Japan’s economy flourished, it became the world’s largest market for European luxury goods, with East Asian consumers at one point accounting for half of Louis Vuitton’s sales. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 758

Categorization

• XREF: This pattern of emerging-market wealth adopting Western status markers is a mechanism central to Marx’s account—relevant to the reader’s counter-case about the era’s genuine signature.