There’s a popular article in The New York Times about the trend toward expensive jeans.
Apart from 19th century antiques, the current leader seems to be a Japanese brand Evisu that’s $625 for a hand-painted pair of jeans. That’s up there with the current record high price to gas up your SUV. The company was founded in 1991 by a Japanese tailor tired of paying high prices for classic US jeans.
“Every consumer decision now carries with it class and status implications in a way it didn’t used to,” according to Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, flipping Mies van de Rohe’s maxim around. This multiplying of choices turns the customer into an endless, frustrated seeker of status and cool.
The only advertising for these luxury goods I’ve found is on the Evisu website itself. By the way, the name and logo come from the Buddhist god of money (and fishing.)
Both seeking for status and money seem to me, as a non-Buddhist, so against Buddhist teachings. Where is the meditation in search of deep and transforming insight?
By the way, is this product so buzz worthy that there is no advertising for it? (I do not read women’s fashion magazines that would be the most likely advertising medium.)