“Our regular client was not queuing on [Jan. 3 and 4] in Milan or Rome but was on the slopes in St. Moritz or on a boat in the Caribbean,” said Versace CEO Giancarlo Di Risio. The haughty executive was quoted in an Italian financial paper last week. He was scoffing at the notion that his core clientele might care about discounts and sales.

People in the luxury business have been testy for months now. Neiman Marcus CEO Burt Tansky, who said last May that his customers don’t trade down, has probably had a headache ever since. (Tansky was also quoted last May as saying: “Remember, when our customer tightens their belt, it's generally ostrich or alligator.”)

I started compiling kooky quotes from indignant executives in the luxe biz after I read something Pier Luigi Loro Piana said to the Wall Street Journal’s Christina Binkley in an article about choosing white dress shirts. The unashamedly elitist Mr. Loro Piana says he judges men by their shirts. “The quality of clothing tells you so much of what you need to know about a person,” he tells Binkley.

It’s a tasteless comment that ignores the economic crisis we’re in while passing judgment on regular working stiffs. Besides, men who were millionaires the morning of September 29 still wore the same Charvet shirts when the Dow plunged 778 points in the afternoon.

Some of those attitudes turned to arguments at a Financo conference this week. Tansky publicly clashed with J.Crew’s Mickey Drexler, who predicted the death of parts of the luxury industry.

Even journalists got some of the heat. “I think the media have done us a terrible disservice,” Tanksy said there. “The media, I think, should start thinking about the impact they are having on retail.”

On the other hand, industrial and interior designer Philippe Starck blamed the media for just the opposite in an interview with the U.K.’s Guardian:

“We can't afford to keep changing taste so fast. Let's hope fashion in design will disappear. There is a lack of respect when the media says, ‘You must be dressed in pink,’ and some poor girl dresses in pink, and six months later when it says, ‘You must dress in green,’ she's a monster in her pink dress. We can't accept this kind of manipulation.”

What are we all to do when, deep down, so many of us suspect that we’ve been living too fast and beyond our means for too long? The wounded and sometimes willfully oblivious attitudes expressed by luxury executives are probably going to sound absurd a year from now. The ones who survive will not be the ones who blame their customers for not shopping.