Vuitton and Burberry are the foreign labels the Japanese love best

According to a survey carried out by Nikkei on a representative sample of 2000 men and women in Japan, the most popular foreign brands are Louis Vuitton for women and Burberry for men.

The biggest buyers of international labels in both cases appear to be forty-year-olds: the women are mostly professionals or part-time employees with a monthly purchasing power of over 100 thousand yen for clothing and 'discretional articles', and with yearly incomes that fall short of 5 million yen; the men are specialist middle-management and directors, they earn over 10 million yen a year, more than 200 thousand of which is spent every month on various forms of shopping.

36.7% of the women interviewed by Nikkei expressed their liking for Louis Vuitton purses; it is followed closely by Coach (33.9%), Gucci (31%) and Hermes (26.1%). It seems that Louis Vuitton has established a brand loyalty relationship with its Japanese clients, so much so that its fans declare that they possess 10 or more articles by the fashion house.

With 42.6% of the votes, Burberry is ahead of Ralph Lauren and Dunhill.

The data collected by Nikkei also show that 14.7% of the women and 12.9% of the men go to a foreign label's mono-brand or shop-in-shop at least once a month. A high percentage of the interviewees (59.1% of women and 42.4% of men) stated that they enjoy buying foreign luxury articles; a trend that will continue in the future and which saw 212.2% of the men interviewed and 30.1% of the women buying one or more products in the category in 2004.

(Source: Modaonline)