The Quality Question

Prices have gone up. Have the bags?

I’ve spent enough time inside the scarcity mechanics of this industry to know the usual script. A house raises its prices, and the story that comes with it is always the same one: rarer materials, more hours in the atelier, a craft too precious to keep cheap. I believed that story for a long time, because for a long time it was mostly true.

It isn’t anymore, and the people paying attention to their own handbags noticed before the trade press did.

Walk into the resale forums, the authentication groups, the comment sections under any Chanel unboxing from the last two years, and you’ll find the same complaint surfacing in different words: the stitching is looser, the leather is thinner, the hardware doesn’t sit the way it used to. Meanwhile the price tag has climbed, in some categories, by more than double what it was a decade ago. That gap — between what a house charges and what a house delivers — is the real story, and it’s a different story than the one I told in France’s Two Luxuries. It’s closer, in spirit, to what I traced in Scarcity, Not Story — where American scarcity mechanics were being studied and reverse-engineered by European luxury. This is what happens after the mechanics are already in place.

There is scarcity you can feel, and scarcity you’re only told about. The first is the waitlist, the discontinued shade, the atelier that can only produce so many bags a year because a human being is still cutting the leather by hand. That scarcity costs something to maintain, and the price reflects the cost.

The second kind is manufactured. It’s the waitlist that exists to create urgency, not to manage true capacity. It’s the price increase timed to press releases rather than material costs. And when a house needs to protect its margins while still projecting the first kind of scarcity, something has to give quietly, somewhere the customer won’t immediately see. Often, that’s the build.

This is the part I think gets missed when people frame this as a simple “luxury brands are getting greedy” complaint. It isn’t only greed. It’s that manufactured scarcity and declining quality are frequently the same decision wearing two different faces — one visible in the price, one visible only once the bag is in your hands.

When someone types “is Chanel declining in quality” into a search bar, they’re rarely asking a craftsmanship question in isolation. They’re asking whether the transaction still makes sense — whether the premium they’re paying still buys what luxury used to promise: permanence, rarity, a thing built to outlast the person who bought it.

That question is spreading well past Chanel. It’s in the conversation around Louis Vuitton’s canvas, around Dior’s saddle stitching, around nearly every heritage house that scaled production to meet a global appetite it spent a century cultivating. The paradox is almost elegant, in a bleak way: the more successfully a house sells the idea of scarcity, the more volume it needs to produce to meet the demand that idea creates, and the harder true scarcity becomes to sustain.

Something eventually loses. Right now, it looks like it’s quality.

I don’t think this is a scandal so much as a maturing. Every scarcity story eventually meets its own math. What’s changing now is that the buyer has better tools than the house does — resale platforms, authentication communities, side-by-side comparison threads — to check whether the story and the object still match. For decades, the house controlled that comparison. It doesn’t anymore.

The houses that will hold their position aren’t the ones issuing the loudest scarcity narratives. They’re the ones willing to let true scarcity cost them something — fewer units, slower production, a smaller and more expensive circle — rather than manufacturing the appearance of it while quietly cutting what’s underneath.

— Hana