Good morning from the Financial Times.
Today is Monday, April 21st and this is your FT News Briefing.
I'm Misha Frankl DuVal and today we're doing something a little bit different on the briefing.
We're going to be focusing on one big topic, the state of the luxury industry.
Things are looking pretty rough for the sector right now and to help us understand why we've invited the FT's fashion editor,
Lauren Indvik.
So Lauren, let's start this conversation a few years back, maybe 2021, 2022.
Luxury goods were doing really well at that point.
Why was that?
2020 was supposed to be,
in 2021 were supposed to be disastrous years for luxury with the pandemic and people weren't supposed to be going,
and weren't going to stores, which 95% of luxury goods are still sold in stores, not online.
And instead, people stay at home.
A lot of people save money on their paychecks and they treated themselves to luxury goods.
And then when things started opening up again,
they went out and bought war drops again and handbags and had all these savings and there was sort of like FOMO and yeah,
they treated themselves.
First, you had the comeback in the US and in China,
you had two different lockdown lift periods and that market came back both times quite strongly as well.
But luxury had a great couple of years just because of that sort of post-COVID effect.