Once Asia’s luxury shopping epicentre, Japan seems to be losing its taste for luxury brand. Last year LVMH decided to can plans for a new Louis Vuitton flagship store in Tokyo’s Ginza shopping district. Now Versace has gone a step further, announcing it plans to shut down its Japanese stores. The luxury fashion label currently has outlets in Osaka, Tokyo, and Chiba.
A statement from the company says that Versace’s Japanese boutiques “no longer represented the brand image and it was felt to be more advantageous for the company to close them and start with a clean slate.”
Experts say the Japanese are following world trends for discreet luxury, without the logos and obvious branding of many mass-marketed lines. Instead, the new breed of Japanese stylistas prefer to mix and match outfits with high and low-end fashion items. Whatever the reason behind the shift, it’s bad news for a fashion industry already struggling in the face of the financial crisis.
