Retailers’ premium brand ambitions face US downturn test
Boyd Farrow
Could Carrie Bradshaw have her finger more firmly on the pulse than some Wall Street economists? As the aspirational, style-obsessed heroine of the television series Sex And The City crosses into cinemas for the first time, it seems some Americans share the character’s taste for countering setbacks with an upmarket fashion fix.
Excluding automotives, US consumer spending has held up better than the combination of a property slump, high oil prices and a slowing US economy might have warranted. ...