Saks Fifth Ave on 70% Discount

The handbags, like a lot else at the Fifth Avenue retailer, had been marked down 40 percent and are likely to go lower as seasonal sale days wear on. “Sixty percent off is the new black,” as Patricia Marx wryly noted in the Dec. 8 issue of The New Yorker.

By cutting prices radically, Saks’s chief merchant, Ron Frasch, turned his chain’s flagship emporium into a swank Fifth Avenue version of a discount outlet, moving merchandise in volume and spooking the competition as it struggled to hold on to a traditional mark-down sequence, and even to continue selling certain brands at full price.

 Was one reading the $329 tag right on a cashmere men’s blazer from the elite Italian woolen house Loro Piana, a jacket that typically costs $2,000 or more? What about the $129 price for a black satin skirt from Comme des Garçons? Was the tagged price a misprint? It was not.

On Wednesday, customers of Barneys New York received an e-mail message promoting a “designer freak-out sale.” The savings of up to 50 percent encompassed goods like Christian Louboutin suede booties (marked down to $720 from $1,195) and coveted Marc Jacobs totes (reduced to $629 from $1,250).

That question gives rise to another: once consumers become acquainted with slash-and-burn prices, how can designer fashion regain its mystique? Will shoppers ever again want to buy luxury goods at full price? The depth of the challenge was suggested by the incongruity this week of seeing Prada wallets, usually kept under glass at Saks, dumped into display stands that at Wal-Mart are known as “end-caps”; lizard handbags at Bergdorf Goodman jumbled on counters as if that Fifth Avenue landmark were an outlet of Loehmann’s; and Ralph Lauren dress shirts at Lord & Taylor thrown together and offered at prices roughly equivalent to the cost of two McDonald’s Happy Meals.