It was a time warp, for sure, but I couldn't decide if I was hurtling back to the past or off into the future.
I was wandering through the Louis Vuitton store that opened last week at Towson Town Center, a jewel box of a shop in the mall's "luxury wing" that was quiet as a museum on this particular weekday morning.
Museum, indeed. During what seems like the permafrost of this recession, I wonder if someday we'll go to museums to see the kinds of luxuries we used to buy, or at least imagined buying.
Or maybe the recession will end, and we'll all go back to those designer desires that fueled the whole shopping-as-entertainment phenomenon of decades past, not to mention all that credit card debt.
In its first week, the Louis Vuitton store seems as much gallery as retailer: Exquisitely crafted handbags are on display, perfectly centered on recessed shelves or under glass. Every variation of the theme, the famous LV logo, is explored, in leather, silk and even fur. With light traffic on this particular day, it felt very Breakfast at Tiffany's, minus the pastry.
There are no back-to-the-real-world price tags anywhere. After a nice saleswoman showed me a pair of sunglasses, she had to go into a drawer to get the price, which she discreetly murmured to me.
Suffice to say, it was more than anything currently in my closet, with the possible exception of my wedding dress. If you include the alterations.
But then, I guess you could call me a recessionista, except I think I was like that before the recession came along to give bargain-hunting some cachet. Suddenly there's a certain reverse chic to not flaunting the latest designer duds.
"I think there's social pressure not to spend now," says Janet Wagner, the associate chair of marketing at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Which made the opening of such a high-end store as Louis Vuitton during such down-economy times such a "huh?" moment. Given ever-rising unemployment rates and wallet-freezing fears of the future, it's been a long time since I've heard much talk about having to have this year's It bag or this week's shoe. Does anyone shop till they drop any more?
It really does seem like another era, when even the modestly salaried hankered for and sometimes spent a couple paychecks on, say, that Dior that Carrie wore on the last Sex and the City episode, or at least a pretty good knockoff. Observers even came up with trendy names for the trend: "masstige," the masses trading up to prestige brands; or "aspirational shopping," buying a bit more upmarket than your station in life's economic continuum.
