Walk down Madison Avenue in New York, the Bund in Shanghai, and avenues Montaigne and Georges V in Paris, and you will see the same luxury stores teeming with the same luxury products. No matter where you go, there are Balenciaga bags, Jimmy Choo shoes and Dior Homme suits on offer.  It’s no wonder then that everyone’s talking about limited edition products from established companies like Neiman Marcus and Martin Margiela to start-ups like 20ltd and couturelab. Customers, it seems, are looking for something a little bit special.

The phenomenon has the fashion business media chattering too. The Financial Times covered the phenomenon over the weekend with a particular focus on men’s luxury products and this week, WWD gave us a laundry list of limited edition collaborations to show the degree to which scarcity is proliferating as a perceived selling point for luxury brands. The Business of Fashion has been in the fray as well, exploring the renaissance of haute couture and the unappealing ubiquity of Tory Burch and Goyard in Upper East side styletribes.

So, is there a viable business model here?

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Earlier this year, Tyler Brûlé, famous for launching Wallpaper* magazine and for his now defunct Fast Lane column in the weekend Financial Times, launched Monocle magazine, a self-described briefing on global affairs, business, culture and design.

In the Brûlé days, Wallpaper* was a large format glossy magazine with a black logo printed on a white cover, with plenty of photos and little text. While it was pretty to look at, you could get through the magazine in less than 20 minutes of page-turning, and the website offered nothing extra — in fact, it was pretty much an empty shell.

Monocle couldn’t be more different. It is a smaller format magazine with a white logo printed on a black cover and plenty of text printed on matte (almost dull) paper. The focus is on the written content, which is rich, varied and quirky. The magazine did get off to a slightly slow start, but it has picked up steam over the past few issues and is beginning to find its voice. The business content is a bit random (an interview in Issue 01 with the CEO of Lego left me underwhelmed, for example) but the fashion content while light, is spot on.

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The Business of Fashion is on the road. Our first stop is in Nassau, the capital city of The Bahamas, an archipelago of islands which has long been a stopping off point for people cruising around the Caribbean. San Salvador Island is where Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World in 1492 to trade with the Lucayan people. When British loyalists came over in 1717, the islands fell under British control and did not gain full independence until more than 250 years later.

Today, the Bahamas is a rich country, with the 3rd highest GDP per capita in the Western Hemisphere and an economy driven primarily by tourism and offshore banking. A recent mega real-estate development called The Atlantis, financed by Sol Kerzner, the titan known for his over-the-top casinos and hotels in South Africa’s Sun City, has further boosted the Bahamas as a tourist destination, primarily for sun-seeking Americans with money to spend and gamble away in the cavernous casinos.

With more than 5 million tourists visiting the islands every year, it’s not surprising that many of the luxury brands have set up shop to entice these visitors to do a little shopping. What is surprising is that some of them have allowed their brands to be diluted by haphazard merchandising, market-style bargaining, and poorly-outfitted stores under the control of local franchisees. That said, there are still signs that the luxury industry in Nassau is alive and well.

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I couldn’t get over the irony of this quote from Giorgio Armani in todays WWD, which announced Emporio Armani’s upcoming  e-commerce launch in the United States

"In the last seven years, I have seen mounting enthusiasm for online fashion shopping in the United States through the growing success we have had with our A|X Armani Exchange site," Armani said. "Over this same period I have also observed the increasing sophistication of fashion consumers shopping online, which has encouraged me to develop this new site for my Emporio Armani lifestyle."

Seven years! This is a remarkably long time for a reputed business genius to finally see the opportunity in selling luxury and fashion online to customers beyond his teeny-bopper A|X customers. In the meantime, Dior, Gucci and Coach have all discovered that an online store rapidly becomes one of the top (if not the top) store in a brand’s store network.

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