Fiat Fashion: An Exploratory Study on the Construction of a Price Index for Luxury Fashion Sold at Auction

Abstract

This study situates fashion history in the context of art market research to explore the assetization of luxury clothing. Art markets and the luxury fashion industry developed in tandem and yet there have been no cultural economic studies on fashion as a form of art. This study takes a data driven approach to assessing the monetary value of clothing sold at auction at Christie’s primarily in the twenty first century. The results of this study confirm with a high degree of statistical significance that fashion auctions at Christie’s, Inc. auction house have become increasingly lucrative since the twentieth century. Moreover, the results of this study show that there is a statistically significant financial incentive to purchase and hold onto certain luxury clothing items from the canons of fashion history. This study provides a baseline on which to explore increasingly atomized configurations of value with respect to material culture from fashion history.