You can tell a lot about a person based on the brands they wear This is true, but I think you're giving these authors too much credit. A) If you're writing a Sex in the City knock off book about rich bitches anyway, we can just assume they're wearing designer. And B) I don't think you comprehend the sheer volume of time spent describing the brand and color of every item of clothing worn every day for these characters.
Brand-dropping can be used for brilliant effect (American Psycho always leaps to mind for this, but I am not the one that pointed out the above), but in most commercial fiction I've read against my will recently, it is used in the place of any character development. It's there purely for wish-fulfilment for the reader. And I think in a lot of cases because the author didn't have enough story to fill the book and filled it with a Tiffany catalog instead. It's very easy to tell books that are trying to hit that beach reading blockbuster status because they have more capitalized words on a page than lower case.
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This is true, but I think you're giving these authors too much credit. A) If you're writing a Sex in the City knock off book about rich bitches anyway, we can just assume they're wearing designer. And B) I don't think you comprehend the sheer volume of time spent describing the brand and color of every item of clothing worn every day for these characters.
Brand-dropping can be used for brilliant effect (American Psycho always leaps to mind for this, but I am not the one that pointed out the above), but in most commercial fiction I've read against my will recently, it is used in the place of any character development. It's there purely for wish-fulfilment for the reader. And I think in a lot of cases because the author didn't have enough story to fill the book and filled it with a Tiffany catalog instead. It's very easy to tell books that are trying to hit that beach reading blockbuster status because they have more capitalized words on a page than lower case.