The Price of Prestige: How Designer Labels Gave Quality Clothing a Bad Name

November 12, 2026

There is a reasonable case for spending more on clothing. A better fabric, a more considered cut, careful construction: these are things a person can experience, even when nobody else recognizes the label. Paying extra can make sense when the difference survives beyond the fitting room.

Yet a higher price now invites another question: how much of this is simply the brand getting away with it? Luxury fashion has helped make that suspicion understandable. When labels use price to advertise status, protect exclusivity at the expense of usefulness, and sell an idealized picture of how their products are made, they weaken the meaning of their own premiums.

The damage reaches beyond their boutiques. These practices make the entire category of “premium” clothing harder to trust, including garments whose prices reflect meaningful investment in the product. Fashion’s most visible labels have taught shoppers to doubt the simple premise that paying more means getting more in return…

Selling Social Distance as Part of the Product

Exclusivity is a peculiar benefit. A shirt can become softer or fit better without anyone else’s wardrobe changing. Its exclusivity, however, depends on other people being unable to obtain it. When that becomes a central selling point, the relationship between price and product takes a different shape.

A recognizable label offers a form of social communication. It tells an audience something about the wearer’s spending power or affiliations. Luxury marketing cultivates that recognition, and higher prices can strengthen the message by narrowing who can participate. This is the logic behind Veblen goods: a higher price can itself make a product more desirable.

There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying design, a brand’s history, or the emotional pleasure of a purchase. Nor does visible branding establish that a garment is poorly made. The problem comes when the social meaning of the label does the work that product quality is supposed to do.

Imagine removing every identifying mark from a garment. Would its materials, construction, and fit still make the price understandable? That is a useful test because it separates what the wearer experiences from what an audience recognizes.

Exclusivity can be part of a brand’s appeal. But when it becomes the defining feature of premium clothing, it encourages a damaging assumption: paying more buys a more exclusive label, with little assurance of a better garment. The person seeking a better everyday shirt is left wondering how much of the price reflects the product itself...

Shoppers view a T-shirt displayed behind glass and a velvet rope in a luxury boutique.

Raising Prices Without Giving Customers Enough in Return

Higher production costs can justify higher retail prices. Paying skilled workers properly, maintaining demanding specifications, and sourcing more expensive materials all require investment. A responsible business also needs enough margin to keep operating and scale over time.

The trouble begins when a price increase becomes a positioning strategy rather than a response to a better or more costly product. In 2024, a Gucci wool skort (yes, skort = skirt and shorts combined) priced at nearly $3,000 drew criticism online for its price. Yet a personal shopper reported receiving numerous requests after sharing it on social media. The example illustrates how a price that raises questions about value can still attract willing buyers.

That price alone does not prove poor workmanship. It does, however, place an extraordinary burden on the explanation of value. When a product costs dramatically more, customers deserve more than the suggestion that a different class of person can afford it.

By November 2024, HSBC analysis put the average luxury product’s price around 60 percent above its 2019 level – more than double the increase in U.S. consumer prices over that period. A year later, Bain estimated that steep price increases and insufficiently compelling products had helped cost the sector 60 million to 70 million customers over two years. Its researchers described shoppers seeking better value from more accessible brands.

Those findings do not mean every lost sale reflects disappointment; economic conditions also matter. They do show why dismissing frustration as an inability to appreciate luxury is inadequate. A brand cannot indefinitely raise the financial commitment while treating the customer’s demand for a corresponding benefit as unsophisticated.

A runway model wearing a dark skort beside textured fabric and a $3,000 price tag.

Protecting Exclusivity by Destroying Useful Goods

Perhaps the clearest expression of distorted priorities is the destruction of products that have already been made. Materials have been sourced, people have performed the work, and a usable item exists. Yet allowing somebody to buy it more cheaply can be treated as a greater threat than destroying it.

Burberry became a prominent example in 2018, when its destruction of £28.6 million (approx. $38.2 million) worth of unsold goods drew public attention. Reporting on the practice explained the commercial logic: discounting unsold stock could weaken exclusivity and the prices brands wanted customers to accept. Shortly after the report surfaced, Burberry announced that it would stop destroying unsold products. While the practice ended (for Burberry at least), the underlying logic that drove those decisions remains significant.

If a garment’s value rests principally in its usefulness and workmanship, finding it a wearer should count as a success. If its commercial value depends heavily on maintaining distance between the brand and bargain hunters, the same outcome can become a problem.

For shoppers drawn to luxury labels by a love of fine materials and craftsmanship, the lesson is corrosive. It is difficult to reconcile that reverence for the product with a brand’s willingness to destroy it simply to protect an image of exclusivity.

Folded clothing and a coat in a boutique beside unsold garments burning in a furnace.

Selling a Production Story That Cannot Replace Oversight

Luxury’s appeal also rests on a picture of how things are made. Country-of-origin labels and references to artisanal expertise invite customers to imagine careful work performed under conditions worthy of the price. Those associations deserve scrutiny whenever they substitute for specific information.

Investigations into Italian suppliers producing leather goods for Dior and Armani exposed a gap between that image and documented working conditions. Reporting described exploited workers, inadequate supply-chain oversight, and subcontracting arrangements that made responsibility harder to follow.

One widely repeated figure became shorthand for the controversy: Dior paid a supplier €53 (approx. $57) to assemble a bag retailing for €2,600 (approx. $2,800). That figure excluded materials and other business costs, but the gap still raises a reasonable question: how much of the price reflects care in the actual making of the product? Customers paying for that care should be able to expect both skilled workmanship and decent conditions for the people performing it. A prestigious name cannot stand in for effective oversight.

In August 2025, Italy’s competition authority fined Giorgio Armani and a subsidiary €3.5 million (approx. US$4 million) over ethical and social-responsibility statements it found inconsistent with supplier and subcontractor conditions. Armani disputed the decision and said it would appeal. Separately, an antitrust investigation into Dior closed in May 2025 without an infringement being established after the company agreed to financial remedies over five years for initiatives helping victims of labor exploitation.

These cases concern specific leather-goods supply chains, and working conditions alone do not establish how well a bag is made. They nevertheless challenge a broader assumption that a famous label and a high price make questions about production unnecessary. A customer paying for a carefully produced product should be able to ask what that care extends to. If brands ask customers to pay for their reputation, they must do the work required to earn it.

A Dior handbag beside a Wall Street Journal quotation comparing its €2,600 retail price with a €53 assembly cost.

Leaving Every Higher Price Under Suspicion

The wider harm is the habit of suspicion these practices encourage. A shopper does not need to buy a four-figure handbag to encounter the stories surrounding it. The impression can travel much further than the purchase.

Consider a hypothetical comparison between a $12 T-shirt and a $40 one. There may be substantial differences in their materials, construction, fit, and service. But if the shopper approaches the second shirt expecting a branding surcharge, those differences must overcome an objection before they receive a fair hearing.

This is the spillover we believe designer labels create. Their behavior encourages shoppers to judge an entire price category by its most conspicuous examples. When highly visible brands repeatedly disconnect higher prices from clear benefits, they make the language of quality less credible for everyone using it.

That matters because rejecting inflated luxury pricing should not require pretending that all clothing is interchangeable. Different fabrics and manufacturing choices can produce different results. A lower purchase price is useful, but it cannot tell the whole story of a garment any more than a higher one can.

The sensible response is to demand a defensible connection between the price and the experience. A brand should be able to explain what it chose to do better and give the customer an opportunity to judge that explanation. Greater skepticism can improve the market if it produces better questions. It becomes limiting when it turns into the conviction that every premium is a trick.

Social media comments question the value of $37 T-shirts against a luxury storefront backdrop.

Making Luxury Answer to the Person Wearing It

At IF… THEN WELL, we strive to offer a kind of luxury that can withstand those questions. We see room between fast fashion’s emphasis on low prices and designer labels’ emphasis on exclusivity for a brand that puts quality first.

Our men’s T-shirts are made from 100 percent handpicked Peruvian Pima cotton, with sourcing and manufacturing kept in the cotton’s country of origin. Intentional tailoring ensures a timeless look and the versatility to wear across occasions, with a slightly dropped shoulder and no noticeable seam around the neckline. Our shirts are made in factories certified by WRAP, an independent program that sets standards for safe, lawful, humane, and ethical working conditions. Up to 30 individuals are personally involved in the production of each shirt.

These are concrete details a customer can weigh against alternatives; they are not a request to treat our name as proof of superiority.

The distinction also must survive actual use. Our Make Sure It Fits guarantee allows customers to wear and wash their T-shirts during a 10-day trial and return them for a full refund if they do not work for them. That gives the product a chance to answer questions that photography and descriptions cannot settle.

We do not expect a restrained logo or a particular cotton specification to settle every question about quality. Our ambition is to make a shirt whose comfort, fit, and construction justify choosing it again. The standard is the customer’s experience, and the responsibility to meet it remains ours.

Designer labels have gone too far when customers are asked to accept price, prestige, and a carefully managed image as sufficient evidence of value. Rebuilding trust means giving those customers something they can assess for themselves. At IF… THEN WELL, that is what we mean by striving to be a get-what-you-pay-for luxury brand: quality you can feel, appreciate, and return to… because true prestige is earned, not declared.