TO MOST of us the Alexa satchel is the item we’re going to buy for ourselves when we win the lottery. To those who can afford to shop luxe, it’s a ‘must-have’ which gathered a 1,000-strong waiting list when it was first launched.

The Alexa – named after TV host Alexa Chung -- and a host of other covetable accessories have helped its maker, Mulberry, to quadruple its profits last year.

The £785 price-tag is nothing to its high net worth customers who are just as happy to pay £695 for a wool cashmere Burberry trench – not unlike the one Kate Middleton sported at her earliest public engagements.

Like Mulberry, Burberry is flying high, seeing profits jump 40 per cent last year and these two are just the tip of the luxury iceberg.

Certainly there has always been a market for goods and services for which demand increases more than proportionally as income rises – the official definition of luxury.

But why now, in the middle of a worldwide recession when most of us feel our income is disappearing?

Well, for starters, the recession is not worldwide. Many countries and high-income individuals are not suffering one jot.

According to the Walpole organisation, which furthers the interests of the British luxury industry, something called ‘luxury shame’ is also fading away. Not only are customers buying less discreetly, but, says Walpole: “The industry is now less reliant on selling via private parties and trunk shows compared to last year.”

Walpole’s members include British Airways, the New Forest’s Chewton Glen hotel, Coutts & Co, DAKS Simpson, the Financial Times, The Savoy Group and William Grant & Sons.

Only this week they published the results of a major survey of luxury in the UK, the Luxury Market Model.

According to this research the UK luxury goods market is due to grow 10% from £6billion in 2010 to £6.5billion in 2011 and that by 2015, it will have grown a further 57% to stand at £9.4billion.

Even more astonishing to those fearing the economic future was that the benchmark study found that British luxury brands remain confident for the future, with 91% of those surveyed forecasting sales growth for 2011.

The luxe trend has been spotted by many, not the least Georgie Coleridge Cole who spotted a gap in the market for a website devoted to premium brands and in 2006 founded SheerLuxe.com to sell, as she puts it ‘the finest’ brands.

Now the outlet features some 1,400 brands, selling everything from food to shoes and jewellery.

But there’s another very important reason we value these luxury brands, as the BBC points out in its new series on ‘Luxury’, starting next week.

It’s because they are good. You’d be hard-pushed to find a better-made car than a Rolls-Royce. Or a finer Wellington Boot than a Hunter. Or a Saville Row suit. But it’s not just quality that’s driving this success, it’s reinvention and renewal.

Many of the most recognisable luxe brands have a proud heritage. What’s happened now is that these companies have acquired innovative creative directors, such as Samantha Cameron at stationer’s and leather goods emporium, Smythson.

Much of Mulberry’s success is credited to their creative director, Emma Hill, who joined the firm in 2008 and was named Accessory Designer of the Year in 2010.

Amidst all this, however, it’s easy to wonder what’s in it for those for whom £600 is not a coat but a holiday?

Well, there’s foreign money flowing in, and there are also jobs. Dorset is home to more than a few premium brands.

From Poole’s Sunseeker yachts, to Farrow & Ball’s up-market paint factory in Ferndown, to Chococo on the Purbecks, this county is taking its own slice of the luxury pie.

And with foreign tourists accounting for £1 in every four spent on luxe goods in the UK, Dorset would do well to cash in.