Luxury goods were once built to last. Now, some fall apart as easily as fast fashion

Hermès has held steady as its leather goods unit benefits from a highly selective business model. (Benjamin Girette/Bloomberg/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

When New York-based model and influencer Wisdom Kaye went shopping at the Italian fashion label Miu Miu and returned home with a haul of clothes he says he spent US$18,000 on, he didn’t expect some of the items would fall apart in front of his eyes.

In now-viral videos posted to his TikTok account, where he counts over 13 million followers, Kaye can be seen unveiling his purchases from the brand. In the first clip, posted to the social media platform in early September, he calls himself a “big Miu Miu fan” before launching into a scathing blow-by-blow of how some of his new purchases fell apart as he was unpacking them, saying: “As soon as I get home, everything broke.”

Among the garments he had purchased that day, one of the gold buttons on a denim vest jacket “came off the instant I opened it,” he said on the video, demonstrating how he had unbuttoned the sleeveless garment. “I just opened it normally,” said Kaye.

He then held up a brown sweater, also by Miu Miu, with a visibly broken silver zip. Kaye said he had “never gone and gotten multiple pieces from a place and things are just breaking as soon as I get home. This is genuinely f**king abysmal.”

Three days later, Kaye popped up on TikTok feeds again. Miu Miu had offered him the choice of a refund or replacement of the broken items, he explained in the new video, noting that he chose the latter and wanted to unveil the new garments to his fans. However, as he began to undo the buttons of his vest, a button fell off once again. His mouth was wide in disbelief before exclaiming: “There’s no way! This is unbelievable.”

Kaye is not the only one taking their concerns to social media. In October, US-based dental hygienist Tiffany Kim shared a video on Instagram of a gray fleece jacket by Miu Miu and indicated that a drawstring had popped out of one of its sleeves. Some onlookers might immediately assume that it was natural wear-and-tear, but Kim said that she had only purchased it a month prior. While Miu Miu offers a repair service for its products, some store locations require customers to pay a fee. “It’s not even about the fee. I can pay the fee,” said Kim. “I don’t want to pay the fee because I literally paid $2,000 for this jacket and I only wore it twice.”

Elsewhere, on X, a video posted by Elena Qiu in November shows the Seattle-based designer attempting to squeeze various objects into the heel of her leather split-toe tabi boots, to demonstrate its surprisingly hollow interior. The shoe, by Maison Margiela, is one of the French avant-garde label’s most recognizable styles. In the caption, Qiu said she had purchased the shoes for $1,000 and expressed disappointment that the heel wasn’t made of “stacked leather” but “hollow with plastic.”

“I felt so sad and disappointed when the shoe cap came off,” Qiu later told CNN over email. “As a fashion designer myself, I understand how laborious artisanal craft is, and I don’t expect fashion to stay pristine after excessive wear, but these shoes were not worn excessively. I had worn them less than once a month, mostly for special occasions.” Asked what she ended up doing with the shoes, Qiu said she took them to a cobbler to get the heel cap replaced, but has since become more cautious about wearing them regularly and creating further damage — “which defeats the purpose of why I bought them in the first place,” she said.

These widely circulated videos have since sparked outrage among social media users, with some questioning the value of high-end goods, especially as prices have been rising exponentially over time. Others criticized the luxury industry for what they see as focusing too heavily on branding and trends, and not enough on durability. “As fashion consumers we need to put our foot down and stop buying Miu Miu until they learn how to produce clothing that doesn’t fall apart,” wrote Odunayo Ojo, the content creator better known as Fashion Roadman, as he reshared Kim’s video. “Because it’s expensive doesn’t make it luxury if the quality is not there!” commented another user in response.

Asked whether the Prada Group, which owns Miu Miu, is aware of these videos, and what it is doing to prevent future issues with product quality, the company told CNN that “These were two isolated incidents and they are not indicative of quality issues for the brand. We handled the two cases via client service, with care, as we normally do with all our clients.” The group added that “Miu Miu’s global post-purchase return rate ranges between 0.2% and 0.3%, making it one of the lowest in the luxury market.”

Maison Margiela did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

So, is the quality of luxury fashion really declining?

The recent incidents may coincide with a broader issue in luxury fashion, where some experts believe high prices no longer guarantee a certain level of craftsmanship. They have also prompted some comparisons with high street and fast fashion brands, which are often associated with trend-driven pieces that are not always built to last. Dana Thomas, an author and veteran journalist, who spent over three decades covering the luxury fashion sector for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, noted similar quality issues with luxury brands back in the 2000s when her book “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster” was published, suggesting a longstanding problem in the sector.

Speaking on the phone from her Paris apartment, Thomas recalled past trips to Milan that would result in a shopping spree at well-known luxury Italian brands. “For my meager budget of 1,000 euros (about $1,176) I could get some pants, a couple of sweaters, a pair of shoes, maybe even a handbag. It went a long way.” But then, she noticed, “One season to the next, the quality was dropping. What used to be a knitted one-piece were now pieces sewn together. The buttons fell off easily. The color was washing out.”

Thomas continued: “I thought, what’s going on here? Prices were going up pretty regularly. As a reporter, I was writing stories about how these companies were booming.” She saw sales growing minimally for brands, yet their profits were significant. “I’m terrible at math but there was an extreme difference between the two. Meanwhile, as a consumer, I could see that the quality was going down,” she said. Her suspicions that some brands were “totally focused on the bottom line” and that “they were switching their focus from beautiful products to beautiful profits” thus became the impetus for her book.

Volkan Yilmaz, a leather specialist operating under the online pseudonym Tanner Leatherstein, shares a similar view. Based in Dallas, Texas, Yilmaz has amassed 1.3 million followers on TikTok, over 780,000 on Instagram and another half a million on YouTube for ripping apart and deconstructing bags and other leather goods from luxury brands, including Louis Vuitton and Chanel, with the view to answer a simple question: “Is it worth it?”

On a video call, he acknowledged that the rise of social media platforms has made it easier for customers to share their opinions, and therefore, videos expressing disappointment with luxury purchases may seem much more frequent than in years’ past, but he believes that there has also genuinely been a shift towards lesser quality products.

Yilmaz didn’t name specific high-end brands but said that on dissecting bags that had recently been produced, he felt that older styles – and the techniques used to make them – were comparatively “more sophisticated,” the materials “more artisanal.” However, “they are harder to do and are not that quick to make in large quantities,” he said — which may not align with the needs of big companies, several of which have resorted to mass production-like methods to keep up with high consumer demand.

What shortcuts are being taken, and why?

While some production still happens in traditional luxury hubs like Italy, the final assembly or component creation of a product often occurs elsewhere, as many high-end brands outsource manufacturing to third-party factories in low-cost regions.

In 2024 and 2025, a series of investigations by Italian prosecutors exposed systemic labor exploitation within the supply chains of several luxury brands. These probes revealed that brands frequently outsourced production to a network of subcontractors — many Chinese-owned — who utilized undocumented labor in sweatshop-like conditions to maximize profit margins. Yilmaz added that the luxury sector’s exorbitant price hikes — as brands seek to navigate a global market slowdown and rising production costs — has only exacerbated the problem. He caveated: “This is not to say that everything being made is garbage, but unfortunately, increasing prices doesn’t mean an increase in quality.”

For Thomas, the cost-cutting is apparent. “I remember when brands stopped lining pants. And they were doing that because they were cutting costs and lining costs money.”

She pointed to garments with raw edges as another example, recounting a conversation with Alber Elbaz, the late designer who revitalized the French house Lanvin and founded the AZ Factory label, which he ran with the Swiss luxury conglomerate Richemont for just over three years until its closure in May 2024. “He told me that it’s cheaper to just cut a hem and leave it raw, than to fold it and press it over and over again,” she said. You’re taking four or five steps out of the process. So, it wasn’t just a style trend, but an economic one.”

In some cases, high-end brands also share the same manufacturing facilities as those on the high street. On writing “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Thomas recounted visiting a factory “with the same workers, on the same assembly line” making bags for both luxury and mall brands. “But those bags probably cost $10 or $12 and were being sold by mall brands for $100, while the luxury brand was selling it for $1,200.” The primary difference, she noted, was the materials being used.

But now, even luxury brands are seeking to reduce costs when it comes to materials. “The finishes that are being used are more commercial,” said Diana Kakkar, the co-founder of MAES London, a premium garment supplier. “Brands get away with saying something is a wool jacket, but it’s actually 30% wool and 70% polyester or acrylic.”

In the case of Maison Margiela, the brand is not alone in using plastic inside its shoe heels — this has become widespread industry practice, according to Caroline Groves, a UK-based bespoke shoemaker. “Most traditional shoes are made of heavy leather, which is cut and layered on top of one another. From the 17th century onwards, people began using wood inside a heel and then fold leather or silk over it,” she said on a call from her workshop in the Cotswolds, England. “Plastic overtook wood at some stage, because people could just churn out hundreds and thousands at a time, very cheaply.” However, she noted that “it is legitimate and gives a strong interior to a heel that is then covered.”

Kakkar said that throughout 2025 she has had several conversations with brands about cost-saving, including a reduction in fabric quality. “They’ll come to us saying, for example, ‘We want to sell this camisole for £250 (about $335) and we ideally want silk.’ But the cost of 100% silk with beautiful finishing can be quite staggering, because it is almost £50-£60 a meter now, if not more. So, they’ll ask if we can do viscose, which is like, maybe, £25. It can be even cheaper, £10, depending on the various qualities. And then, even if those margins are not hitting them, we start looking at viscose polyester blend.

“You can see how this slippery slope starts,” she said. “If there’s a cheaper option, people will probably go for the cheaper option.”

What now for brands and their customers?

For Yilmaz, the cycle of constant, often frantic, creation and consumption across the luxury sector (in the form of new collections, endless content and bigger sales) marks a shift away from historical practices of scarcity and craftmanship. He takes a cynical view, noting that a growing number of luxury products “fall apart quicker… because you need people to keep consuming. Every quarter, these corporations need to report better sales. How is that going to happen if everything lasts forever?”

It’s in part why the French luxury goods maker Hermès is often cited as a preeminent example of luxury and consistently ranks as one of the most exclusive brands in the world. Earlier this year, it even overtook LVMH as the world’s most valuable luxury company for the first time (however, the stock has since stabilized and LVMH reclaimed its top spot in late 2025).

When Hermès listed on the stock market in 1993, the founding family maintained a substantial majority ownership, listing only a small proportion of shares. “It’s sort-of to keep them responsible and make them answer to shareholders, but they still maintain control of the company. They answer to themselves first,” said Thomas. Subsequently, the company was able to emphasize craftsmanship and scarcity, and stick to a highly selective business model that has remained largely unchanged for nearly two centuries.

Companies that are 100% publicly traded, for Thomas, “feel like an oxymoron.” She explained: “If your entire raison d’etre is to bring profits to shareholders, you are no longer in the business of making luxury; you’re just in the business of making money.”

Others agree that the industry needs to be recalibrated. When John Galliano, the former creative director of Maison Margiela, contacted Groves in 2023 to collaborate on footwear that would be shown at the brand’s haute couture show in Paris a year later, it ended in “a sad but mutual acknowledgement that we could not reconcile the two worlds of fashion and craft,” Groves recalled. “He would require around 70 pairs made within a very short time frame (6-8 weeks at most). My annual production is around 40 pairs.”

Groves, who has been in business for 40 years, shared that there have been several occasions in which she considered developing footwear for retail. “But each time I’ve gone down that route, I’ve realized that I can’t be true to myself as a craftsman, because the price point of getting it to market means that the practices and the materials used in the factory are just not going to be what I want to put my name to,” she said. But not all brand founders share this sentiment, and Groves fears that shoppers “who can afford luxury are getting further and further away from the real deal and are therefore losing appreciation of what that really is.”

However, increasing scrutiny — and in some cases, distrust — of luxury brands has also created new opportunities. According to McKinsey & Company’s 2026 “State of Fashion” report with the Business of Fashion, the mid-market is “the fastest growing segment,” and through attractive price points that correspond with high product quality and elevated store experiences, brands in that range are “replacing luxury as fashion’s main value creator.” (Indeed, see the success of contemporary labels like Polene, Toteme or Studio Nicholson.)

The online backlash, Yilmaz believes, serves as “a wake-up call” for the industry. “You can only say so much to convince people that luxury is high quality. If your products are falling apart in front of them, then it’s not believable, no matter how much you spend on marketing,” he said. “So many new brands are entering the space to address this issue, and their products don’t cost thousands of dollars. I think, in the end, it’s a great time to be a customer. The quality has to start delivering again,” he noted – otherwise, why shop at all?