Protecting a Luxury Label's Good Name.(Savile Row suits and Swiss watches)

Byline: Nick Foulkes

The French are notoriously hot on protectionism, and they do it so well: the system of appellations d'origine controlees, originally put in place during the 1930s to eradicate wine fraud, is the model for similar systems around the world. Now two other luxury items are seeking to create standards to protect their reputations: Savile Row suits and Swiss watches. In June the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry convened at the amusingly named Elite Hotel in Biel with the purpose of making it more difficult for a watch to describe itself as "Swiss made." At the moment, a watch can call itself Swiss made if 50 percent of its production takes place in Switzerland. The FSWI proposed upping the percentage "attributable to operations carried out in Switzerland" to 80 percent for mechanical watches and 60 percent for battery-powered.

Six months earlier, an association of London tailors under the name Savile Row Bespoke announced what amounted to a set of standards that would identify their products as unique--in part as a defense against the bewildering panoply of nomenclature encroaching on their territory: "semi-bespoke," "made to measure," "made to order," "hand finished " and so on.

I am all for higher standards, but I also believe that real luxury cannot be created by legislation. At the highest level a brand should be its own micro-appellation, an expression of its own characteristics. Is a bottle of La Tache enhanced by its appellation ...