She is the author of the New York Times bestsellerDeluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, published by The Penguin Press in 2007.[3] The book addresses the disparity between the rarefied world that luxury once represented- populated by private, family-owned businesses that catered to the aristocracy and the billion-dollar, mass-producing and mass-marketing industry it is today. The New York Times called the Deluxe, "a crisp, witty social history that's as entertaining as it is informative."[4]
In February 2015, Penguin Press published Thomas's second book, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano,[5] an investigative double biography of two monumental British fashion designers who succumbed to the pressures of corporate luxury fashion in a globalized world. In 2010, McQueen killed himself; a year later Galliano was fired from the creative helm of Christian Dior for a drunken anti-Semitic outburst in a Paris café.
In September 2019, Penguin Press published Thomas's third book, Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes,[6] an investigation into the damage wrought by the colossal clothing industry and the grassroots, high-tech, international movement fighting to reform it. The New Yorker called it "a glimpse into how consumerism, slowed to a less ferocious pace, might be reconciled with sustainability.” The New York Review of Books said it was a "Marley's Ghost-style warning of the irrevocable destructions to come . . . Thomas is engaging and vital.”
