Picked up Esquire's new Big Black Book of Style this weekend and was perusing it. I noticed in the section on sweaters they had a Nordic-looking chap modelling an Icelandic sweater, with which he was wearing a pair of Dolce & Gabbana fine-wale blue corduroy pants that carried a suggested retail tab of $1,050!

Now, I have in the recent past bought some similar fine-wale cords from L.L. Bean that currently retail for $40. I note that Lands' End offers similar pants for $50 (but, unlike Bean, they offer hemming in quarter-inch increments, which I like). Lands' End also have some super-high-grade corduroys for $175. In the current Carroll & Co. catalog, their best corduroys are $245. (I tend regard Carroll & Co.'s offerings as very high-quality but rather presposterously pricey, for the most part.)

S-o-o-o, what is it about D&G's corduroy pants that make them worth 26X the price of Bean's? I tend to regard corduroy as an inherently cheap fabric, and how much difference can there be in workmanship, etc., between machine-made pants to warrant this enormous price differential? (And I thought the $40 Bean's cord were perfectly decent pants). Or, for that matter, why the D&G's should be more than 4X the cost of Carroll & Co.'s very pricey cords? Is this some sort Cruiser-esque philistinism on my part that renders me incapable of discerning what makes D&G worth so much more, or is this, as I suspect, just an outrageous rip-off based on trading on a designer name?

Last edited by captainpreppy (2008-10-06 13:45:02)