Prologue Luxury Brands Are Successful Because They

Prologue Luxury brands are successful because they enable customers to project an image that may not be a true reflection of themselves. Tod's bags uses the concept of piccolo sogno, a little dream, to help customers bridge the gap between who they really are and who they want to be. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia uses the concept of piccolo sogno, a little dream, to help customers become the person they want to be…a little at a time. A Little Dream -- A Little Lie Diego Della Valle understands me.

That is the main reason I would buy a pair of his shoes or think I have to have one of his luscious bags. Sure, the soft crushable caramel-colored leather is seductive, but not as seductive as the image the products can convey. Once, in the span of two terrible weeks, I was laid off from a job I loved and left a man I once loved.

I no longer felt like a valuable employee (I wasn't anymore, apparently); I no longer felt valued by a man I had trusted (I shouldn't have, clearly). My daughter, a young woman with less experience than I -- except in the area of lost jobs and lost loves -- had absorbed that special knowledge that women have forever possessed. Something new and glamorous can take away almost any sting. An extravagant item is the manifestation of a piccolo sogno, a little dream.

With a chunk of my severance money, I followed the siren -- my piccolo sogno, right into Nordstrom. I bought a pair of Prada sunglasses -- the lenses dark enough to hide teary red-rimmed eyes, while conveying that sense of mystery and aloofness the very rich or the very famous display, and that we all covet. I bought two bags. An over -- the shoulder classic caramel-colored bag that could never be mistaken for anything but a Tod's product.

And, at half the price of the Tod's bag, a glossy black back with an impractical tassel on the motorcycle-leather style zipper, and a metal tag that flashed Cole Haan. Sporting these items, not only would I not be recognized as a wronged woman, I would evoke a degree of envy from women I passed and curiosity from men.

In buying these products, I had admitted to myself that I wanted "something a little higher" than I am; I had wanted "something…[I]…want to be." And so I love Della Valle in the same way that I love my hairdresser when he accomplishes an impossible transformation, turning me into the sort of woman who can devastate a man -- and would never be obvious of the breadcrumbs that lead to the discovery of a betrayal.

Diego Della Valle does not have a monopoly on piccolo sogno, though his is decidedly the Italian version of a little dream that transports and transforms. Italian seduction, it seems, is in a special category of its own. Quite apart, it would seem, from the little dreams that Martha Stewart peddles on Martha Steward Living Omnimedia channels. Martha's brand of piccolo sogno is less of a little lie than Della Valle's since anyone can choose a small part of the Omnimedia universe and authentically bring it home.

In doing a craft or using a tip, in is added to a woman's repertoire -- it becomes part of her. The play-acting and pretending is no less an element of the lives of Martha's follower's than for Della Valle's: hiding behind the glossy how-to magazine that could support her climb to the position of social entertainer of the year, may be a woman who lives in a plain Jane rambler in suburbia. Construction paper cutouts her children made at school are.