You'd be amazed at the effect of good product placement. Waxed cotton jackets were for fuddy-duddy hunters in the UK, and then the fashion mags published pics of George Clooney in a Belstaff trials jacket, and Kate Moss in a black cross-zip that looked like leather but was waxed cotton. Sales of all waxed cotton zoomed. And that was before social media influencers really took off.

Some of Ralph Lauren's stuff was just copies of vintage styles, like a denim trucker jacket lined with red wool blanket cloth, nothing special by old standards, but he was amazingly good at marketing that stuff, with said jacket selling in higher-end stores for $350. There are people in this world that read Vogue and buy new clothes every season. That's the target demographic. Oh and Lauren also had a waxed cotton jacket, dead ringer of an old smallgame hunting jacket, $600 in the 1990s. I know because I bought it dirt-cheap the following season at a retailer that sells stuff on clearance, original tag still on it.

Judging from all the relatively cheap C&V I see celebs on in the pic thread, where a modern quality bike would function better and is well within their price range, I figure there's a reason they are riding C&V.

Bromptons used to be cool when they were hard to get in the US.

The Concorde flights were losing money, priced only 20% over subsonic first class. A couple pilots for British Airways recommended they price the seats based on actual value, higher, and the planes were actually more full, the higher price equating to higher cachet of the product. Logical price/demand curves don't always apply. Suddenly, Concorde was profitable, and they (BA and Air France) had a monopoly on that market, and could control the supply.