Chinese labor, European craftsman prices
Many old-world European “luxury fashion” brands are merely “hawking low-cost, high-profit items wrapped in logo,” says Dana Thomas in The New York Times. We are told that the luxury prices on these Italian, French, and British products are “worth it” because they “are handmade in Europe by artisans,” but in fact many of them are made “on assembly lines in developing nations” like China. How do Prada, Gucci, and their peers get away with this “bait-and-switch”? Some hide the “Made in China” label in impossible places, others assemble the final 10 percent of a good in Europe, and some just import the Chinese workers. “They know better, and so should we.”
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