The Business of Fashion has landed in South America and our first stop is São Paulo, a city whose population is second only to Tokyo. But while Tokyo is one of the world’s undisputed capitals of luxury and fashion, Sao Paulo is a city still on the rise, with a budding indigenous retail scene to complement the recent arrival of international luxury brands.
As friends told us over dinner last night, nobody is thinking about recessions or credit crunches here. The Brazilian economy is on fire and the top end of the market in particular is being fuelled by cash generated from a record number of IPO’s on São Paulo’s stock market. There are months-long waiting lists for Porsche Cayennes and executive helicopters, which jet the well-to-do from home to work to play, thereby avoiding the traffic gridlock in the heaving city below. Today, the size of São Paulo’s private helicopter fleet is thought to be one of the largest in the world.
