As in the ’30s, high-end brands are playing down bling and playing up value.

They have the sepulchral feel of rediscovered tombs. Lavish. Silent. Undisturbed. Visiting luxury boutiques these days can seem like stepping into a time capsule, and in a sense, you are, as retail and marketing plans and products conceived during the bully days of early 2008 are still on display and feel, in this post-luxury age, as anachronistic and appealing as Zeppelin travel after the Hindenburg disaster. A recent afternoon visit to several luxury boutiques in New York's SoHo confirms this brand and consumer disconnect. Luxury firms seem adrift and lost amid the deepest and most brutal falloff in sales since the Great Depression. Suddenly, the acres of rare hardwoods, the vast yardage of animal skins, the bling, the gaudy logos everywhere, the suggestion by one Prada salesman that he would recommend a particular crocodile skin suitcase "only if you fly privately"—it all seems so 2007.

"How many of these are you selling?" I asked that Prada salesman, my hand on the crocodile skin. ("From the belly of a Nile Crocodile," I was assured. "Caught in the wild but with no battle scars.")

"In 2009?" He paused. "None."

Firms like Prada relied on the halo of that $36,000 piece of luggage to diffuse through the brand and inspire those who could never afford such ostentation to purchase, perhaps, a bottle of fragrance, a pair of sunglasses, a T-shirt, some small piece of the brand so that they, too, could bask in the reflected glory of such splendor. But with the American consumer facing unprecedented wealth destruction—home values plummeting, 401(k)s halved, credit card debt interest surging, unemployment booming—that emulation of the haves by the have-slightly-lesses seems to have gone the way of liar-loan-backed CDOs. Part of the problem is that we have seen a generation of the ultrawealthy exposed for unbecoming behavior; the rich just don't seem as cool as they used to, so why should we all aspire to look and act like them? "It's like the French monarchy is falling," says David Wolfe of the Donneger Group. "Who wants to look like the old regime? The core of the problem is that luxury needs luxury wannabes, and those folks are all jumping ship."

The numbers are frightening: Retail sales at luxury retailers are down 30 percent. Luxury brands now confront a consumer who is earning less and saving more in a marketplace where, for the first time in several generations, there is actually some populist revulsion with conspicuous consumption. If we are really living through, as Time magazine proclaimed, "The End of Excess," then how do companies—indeed, an entire economy—geared toward excess and aspiration retool and convince weary, debt-burdened consumers disgusted by their own previous spending that their brands are really not about excess at all?