In October 2021, a friend of mine forwarded an email from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist, with the subject line: “Is China in Big Trouble?” I knew why he was sending it my way. The luxury industry, like so many others, has relied on China for the past 20 years to fuel its growth, somewhat blindly adopting the quixotic notion that there would be more and more rich people there for all eternity, mindlessly buying whatever they were told, ensuring revenue and margins to offset whatever happened in the U.S. or Europe. When I first started covering fashion in the mid-2000s, the economic rhetoric was focused around the opportunity in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—but by 2012 or so, Brazil, Russia, and India’s prospects were dimming, and the industry redoubled its efforts in China.