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

How do you sell luxury in a post-luxury age?

The last time luxury faced such a reckoning was the 1930s, when the American consumer, facing an even worse cataclysm than today's, revolted and rejected the gaudy glamour of the previous decade. Luxury brands built during that earlier profligate era of debt creation and financial chicanery entered the '30s trapped in a similar time warp to today's luxury brands. It is striking to go back and look through magazine advertising of the period to see how the message of those luxury brands that did survive changed from the heady days of 1929 to the dark, Depression depths of 1932. The first 10 pages of the 112-page, July 1, 1929, Vogue, for example, features ads from Raleigh Cigarettes, Tiffany & Co. (TIF), Barbara Lee Costumes, Dunlap Hats, Vici Kid Shoes, the Shelton Looms, Ocean Bathing Suits, Bon Ton, Frigidaire, and International Exposition Barcelona. Typical is the aspirational tone of the Vici Kid Shoes ad: "In Europe—where feet aren't built on the American plan—the lucky traveler who never gets museum legs or a Riviera limp is the one who brings over plenty of shoes of Vici kid." Vanity Fair's first 10 pages of a 110-page, January 1929 issue included Crane Fixtures, Tiffany & Co., Caron Fragrance, B. Altman, Guerlan, Best & Co., Walk-Over Shoes for Gentlemen, Marcus & Co. Jewelers, and Lord & Taylor. The tone was similar, all aspiration and the idea that somehow, by purchasing these brands, one could join the leisure class.

At the beginning of the Depression, wrote Jackson Lears in Fables of Abundance, "The business strategy of dealing with hard times was systematic denial." Unable to adapt to the new reality, luxury fashion brands as eminent as Callot Seours, Vionnet and Poiret, and premium carmakers like Hispano-Suiza and Pierce-Arrow were among the high-enders who didn't make it through the depression. By July 1932, Vogue was down to 81 pages and the only surviving front-of-the-book advertiser was Tiffany & Co. Vanity Fair, by 1934, was at 72 pages and had become a venue for consumer goods like Listerine (which was then, curiously, an anti-dandruff treatment) and Heinz (HNZ) tomato juice. The luxury advertiser had nearly vanished, as would Vanity Fair itself a few years later, a victim of the very same trend. (Vanity Fair, of course, was relaunched in 1983.) The eventual response, derived in part from consumer focus groups and widespread surveying—both innovations of the 1930s and part of the advertising industry's response to the Depression—was the selling of utility over luxury, craftsmanship over status, quality over excess. There is a reason Tiffany & Co. survived as an advertiser and enterprise: Its message was always based on heritage and history. It was running the same ads in 1932 it ran in 1929, an austere white page featuring its logo and its address. Tiffany, which was a 90-year-old firm during the Great Depression, will certainly emphasize its heritage during this recession. "In times like this, people go home," says Caroline Naggiar, chief marketing officer for Tiffany. "Certainly we will be listing up our core values and traditional values. ... We are not moving or going anywhere, there are so few institutions left which have held up the test of time, all of that works so well in this environment."

The Tiffany approach, then, seems the paradigm. It is remarkable how little has changed from Great Depression to Great Recession. It turns out, we have lived through the End of Excess before—luxury firms hope that excess is like a zombie that you can't really kill—and so we have some idea how luxury firms survive. Luxury brands today, one after another, are making this "flight to quality," lest they fall away like so many Vionnets. "We are seeing the consumer move away from the prestige purchase, the blingy, the flash, to quality," says Mary Beth Whitfield, senior vice president of the consulting firm Retail Forward. "Consumers will still resonate with something that is marketed as premium or classic."

That is the playbook: Find your heritage, your traditional values, your long commitment to craft and quality—or make up those attributes if you have to—and then retire the marketing campaign of shirtless models sipping Cristal in the back of a G4, and replace that with an austere, calligraphy typeface of your brand logo and then, below that, something like, "Family Owned Since the Reign of Xerxes." Or, expect more shots of the product, less of the luxury lifestyle. The goal becomes to communicate the workmanship and quality of that $5,000 handbag, rather than just the buy-in to a cooler class. Thomas Frank, author of the advertising cultural history The Conquest of Cool, observes that "What happens in hard times, traditionally, is the advertising switches to product centric quality, some really tangible aspect of the product." Hermes, which has traditionally featured its product prominently in its campaigns, often at the exclusion of models and celebrities, would seem to have beaten its competition to showing the Birkin. "Hermes will be fine," says David Wolfe. "They're in the right place. But I don't know how a luxury brand that has been chasing that whole red-carpet thing is going to reposition itself."

Gucci and Prada would seem to fall into the latter category. So what's a Gucci to do? "We are going to emphasize family values passed down from generation to generation," says Robert Triefus, director of worldwide marketing for Gucci. "We believe our clients are wanting the reassurance of that near-90-year history." Can Gucci really make that work? The Gucci group eked out a 4.5 percent increase in sales in the fourth quarter of 2008, and fell 3.4 percent in the first quarter of 2009. But the outlook is less sanguine, even with this renewed belief in its own history, and there were troubling numbers buried amid the generally solid performance: The Gucci Group's superluxury leather-goods maker Bottega Venetta posted a 2.3 percent decline in the fourth quarter. Bottega Venetta, which dates to the mid-'60s yet has only been introduced to global consumers by Gucci in the last decade, faces a difficult challenge. Even Gucci insiders wonder how you position yourself as having stood for quality and history when your history, in most consumers' minds, goes back to W's first term.