The opposite of luxury is not poverty because in the houses of the poor you can smell a good “pot au feu.” The opposite is not simplicity for there is beauty in the corn-stall and barn, often great simplicity in luxury, but there is nothing vulgarity, its complete opposite.
Those who actually can afford or already own all of these are much more philosophical and recount that their “true” luxury is time (“quality time” to be precise).
Ours is to make the long history of luxury accessible, and to convince the reader that what we today think of as luxury is not an immutable category.
Luxury is contingent: it depends on what a society assumes to be “beyond” the expected.
Luxuries effectively signify rarity, cost, change, transformation, expenditure, distinction, excess… and, we should not forget, pleasure.
Luxury has been linked throughout history to a series of concepts, including: authenticity and truthfulness; depth; acculturation; self-realization; and eroticism (the sheer pleasure of texture and material allure).
This is because the Queen is the state and the state uses luxury as one of the tools of its facade. It would be considered unforgivable if the Queen were forced to travel in a Mini metro or go to Topshop for her suits. By contrast, a pop star who is chauffeured in a Bentley, wears custom-made dresses is considered extravagant by many and also immoral, dissolute, and decadent by the same press that hold the Queen up as an example of the nation.
This attitude towards the old, and the cultural propensity to value it, are linked to the greatest luxury of them all: to be able to play with time. If we are rich, we might afford to travel around the world, but no one can travel in time. Yet some of us might be able to surround ourselves and acquire the best that the past had to offer: splendid textiles, luxurious furnishings, works of art, and expensive leather-bound books.
Crueller than war, vice fell upon Rome and avenged the conquered world.
Just as today is a divisive issue, so it was in antiquity. Because of its alluring qualities, luxury was seen as the ultimate temptation. To resist luxury meant to show firmness of character; to embrace it was a sign of feebleness and at times degeneracy and effeminacy. To the democratic Greeks, luxury was simultaneously troubling but also a type of evidence that their society was “doing well” and expanding its borders.
The simplicity of past times versus the sophistication (and corruption) of the present was a them dear to those who lamented the decline and loss of mos maiorum (the customs of the ancestors). The critique of luxury played no small part in this.
But they all agreed that the Orient was to be blamed for having introduced new and appealing goods, another recurrent theme in the history of luxury. The range of artefacts cricized — rich furnishings, spices and foods, textiles, vessels and cloths — remain fairly constant until our own times as the most desirable luxuries.
The expenditure on food reached such levels that laws were introduced setting limits in relation to one’s position and wealth. Sumptuary laws — laws governing the expenditure on luxuries — come about from a mismatch between economic wealth and political power. Newly enriched people attempted to challenge the power of traditional elites through conspicuous consumption and the magnificence of their parties. Men displayed their riches in order to impress the electorate and secure the offices that were their due.
Precious metals held and continue to exert an important cultural value in society. Gold and silver, but also gemstones, are both items of decoration and object of intrinsic worth: they are beautiful and expensive. While they are often invested with deep meaning, they can also serve as a visible expression of wealth.
Spolia often are superb examples of “archeological luxury” that connect a ruler or powerful person to the past for various political or dynastic reasons. They are generally Greek or Roman artefacts.
Such objects also conferred cultural value to newly acquired wealth. “New money” acquired a lineage in time through the possession of antiquities. They became “necessary luxuries” to endorse one’s social position. And for those whose nobility and place on the social ladder was not questioned, they were a tool of competition. Many of these collections were a good way to make other powerful and rich people green with envy.
The less wealthy British aristocrats started relatively late in collecting antiques.
In fact, the aesthetic of the “modern” in the 18th century borrowed fulsomely from that of the ancient.
The problem was that rich grand tourists neither knew nor minded that they were being defrauded and that copies were frequently passed off as the originals. In fact they generally preferred the “improved” versions of classical antiques.
Egypt represented something that was opulent and grand, albeit for many too nouveau riche.
The story of the Egyptian Sevres set indicates that it is not jus the intrinsic value of an object that makes it an item of luxury. Many collectors today emphasize that an object’s provenance adds financial and cultural value. Large diamonds, for instance, draw their value from rarity but also from their previous owners.
Walpole pursued what art historian Charles Smith calls an “exercise in archeology, recreating different periods of architecture from room to room.”
The term “toy-shop” strongly suggested that luxury was here at the service not of magnificence and status, but of fashion and surfaces.
Rather than aspiring to immortal reputation and the longevity of their creation, they saw luxury as ephemeral and mainly for the duration of their indulged lives. “My buildings are paper, like my writings, and both will be blown away in 10 years after I am dead.”
Roman authors complained about the decline of ancient mores, yet the splendor of private and civic building in Pompeii and Herculaneum did not fail to astonish contemporaries as well as their discoverers in the mid-18th century.
The Middle Ages are often portrayed as the “dark ages.” Yet, in many ways they could have not been more splendid. Rich, glossy silks imported from China and the Middle East were made into liturgical vestments and draped the statues of Madonnas in splendid churches and cathedrals decorated with enormously expensive glass windows.
By the 15th century, luxury was also visible in the choice of food and in the degree of formalized manners used at table and in social interactions.
To Suger, beautiful and precious objects were not just material artefacts, but conveyed the spiritual power of God. Beauty could therefore be framed as divine, and splendor for the Church was no longer considered to be an aberration.
The rise of the printed book played an important role in this: through the printed page architecture could now be studied independently of buildings themselves. Ancient architecture and inscriptions and ideal cities were all topics available to the professional and amateur.
Carpets were probably as important as silks in exciting the superrich of this time. Until the 18th century a carpet meant something covering furniture and only later applied to floors. It was generally the most decorative element in any room for from the 15th to the 17th centuries, on tables and cupboards.
Even if Elizabeth I had embodied splendor, at her death in 1603 she left only $40K debt. However, just 5 years later, James I had accumulated debts worth $600K. At the end of his reign in 1625, he owed a staggering $1M (equivalent to $200M in 2015 money). Most of this money had been used not in waging war, but in a public and flamboyant display of conspicuous consumption.
The pursuit of luxury among early modern rulers and their retinue was predicated around the acquisition of enormously expensive artefacts, but experience of the mind and body was also valued: “The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music , fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity and the intoxication of the senses.”
The beauty of things is fleet and swift, more fugitive than the passing of flowers in Spring. There might be a delight in worldly things, which must always perish, at the same time as there must be a profound melancholy and focus upon the transcendental nature of death.
Simply being known as a collector was prestigious, according to this humanist formula. To collect was not simply to accumulate but to generate knowledge and inter-connection between things.
The aim of the Gobelins workshop under Le Brun was “to unify all the arts and to establish an ensemble of formulas in which the rules of Absolute Beauty would be fixed forever.”
In 1689 Louis XIV decreed that all silver was to be melted to finance the war against the League of Augsburg. He melted down rather than sell his furniture. It has been argued that, had he sold his furniture, symbolically he would have sold a measure of his own power.
The “chicken cup” — and indeed several other prodigiously expensive Chinese and Asian antiques — have come to challenge the established idea that Western art, and to be precise modern art, was the pinnacle of collecting.
Copies of Asian goods such as Indian cottons, Chinese porcelains, and Japanese lacquer were invented; completely novel goods created by new inventions or the application of new technologies were also introduced in the 18th century. These rarely required enormous financial investment, which made it easier for the new popular luxuries to be replaced on a regular basis. They became part of the world of fashion, with their shapes, patterns, and decoration changing regularly and reported in the newly established fashion periodicals, some of which came out monthly. Luxury was no longer about possessing something expensive and unique; it was about owning something a la mode.
Color and surface decoration, for instance — which in the pre-modern era had served as the principal markers of status secured by the sumptuary laws and the sheer expense of obtaining purple, red, green, and glossy black dyes and intricate designs — were democratized.
Ancien regime societies had a sense of color and chromatic nuance far greater than the vocabulary that exists today.
The taste for the exotic was linked to the licentiousness and vice connected with the world of women. For some it posed the threat of a rejection of a male world of scientific order with a new world of disorder and fantasy.
Turkish luxury was associated with sensual pleasure.
The Japanese for the time being, or up until now, are the only people to have remained within the sound tradition provided by nature. What’s certain is that they’re the only people to take the time to find pleasure from their eyes. They go see how birds fly, how fish swim, and have even captured the foam that the sea makes atop its waves, in order to fix them in bronze, on porcelain, and add them even to their unmatched embroidery.
Part of the appeal of Japanese art and material culture was it exquisite workmanship as well as its subtle beauty. The Japanese artisan can give a priceless value to the commonest and least costly materials.
As well as motor cars, men like buying wristwatches, ironically once the preserve of ladies until airplane pilots required them in the 1920s for ease of access.
Country houses in Britain and chateaux in France were sometimes as splendid and large as royal palaces.
By the mid-19th century, wealth from new industries created enormous fortunes at a time when taxation and labor costs were low. Large cities in NA, Australia, and South America still had enough space to enable very large townhouses to be built, and a country residence was also de rigeur for the rich.
A gentleman who only recently has come into money wishes to have a castle. He inquires what style is the most in vogue.
Who’s to blame? It’s society, then, that must be addressed, and must elevate his taste. To have a beautiful palace you must be worthy of it, otherwise you can address yourself to anyone at all and you’ll have nothing. The artists, knowing how empty you are, won’t dare to be personal.
In America money is a thing less valued in the spending than in the earning. It is less a symbol of luxury than of success, less of corruption than of virtue.
Quality’s nice, but quantity makes a show.
While Americans were good at making money, they seemed to need Europeans to spend it quickly.
“The Great Unrest” or the Great Strike of 1912 further unsettled those with means, and the sinking of the “unsinkable” luxury liner Titanic that year, with so many English and American plutocrats losing their lives, has often been seen as a metaphor for the end of a whole world before the catastrophe of WW in 1914.
Boni’s father-in-law once innocently enquired why Boni was purchasing so many “second-hand” objects from the 18th century. Boni explained in his memoir: “I preferred to exist in a dream world of past splendor, pretty women and interesting people.”
During the 19th century, wealth was predominantly generated in new occupations, professions, and industries, and in the financial sector of the economy.
Despite the glamor of 19th-century London and Paris, the money was and still is in NA.
It takes 3 generations to wash off oil and 2 to exterminate the smell of hogs.
To get rich, you sell to the poor.
Paris of the mid-18th century supplied one of the most elegant templates for sophisticated living, dining, and sleeping that there has ever been, and the super-wealthy of the New World always understood that fact.
A great deal of money was required to cultivate taste, to purchase expensive objects, and to outdo the neighbors.
Renoir was born into the working class, but he derided the materialism of his age. He advocated a return to the “haut luxe” that had characterized France before the Revolution, to shift the emphasis of French design away from the industrial and back towards the decorative.
To receive a bunch of roses still commands a respect that plays on older understandings of luxury and sensuality, as they cannot last more than a few days and their beauty fades as one looks.
Throughout the 20th century, luxury thrived on a set of contradictions — for instance, between revealing vs concealing wealth, between knowledge and erudition vs vulgarity and crassness, and, most of all, between opulence and understatement.
WW1 brought with it the deaths of millions of young men, the disruption of succession in the great landed estates, and the destruction of huge swathes of Europe. A certain cultural pessimism also set in, as well as modernist aesthetics that rejected the lavishness and historicism of the Belle Epoque. Luxury underwent a redefinition, losing much of its former opulence. But can luxury be “poor”? Modernist ideas minted in the first part of the 20th century argued for a notion of luxury that transcended intrinsic value.
We associate Chanel with the term chic, although this was not her invention. With Chanel, chic came to mean an approach to style that was not simply dependent on money, although money always helps. This explains her use of simple materials, muted colors, and rigid lines.
An age of magnificence, but of decadence, the last reflections of a baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture, just as parasites smother trees in tropical forests.
Chanel’s own anti-Semitism, not uncommon for high-society elites of the time, came to stand as a dark shadow over the subtlety of her designs later in life.
The decline of ocean-liner in the 1950s and the introduction and popularity of the safe and quiet Boeing 707 (introduced in 1958) meant a whole raft of luggage types such as trunks and heavy suitcases were no longer suitable or even possible. Clothing, luggage, and accessories lightened up.
Roland Barthes, in that prose of his that manages to be bald and poetic at the same time, wrote of plastic: “it is the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic. The hierarchy of substances is abolished. A single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.”
Meikle notes of the post-war materials, the “more novel an object’s form became, the more artificial and thus totally controlled it seemed.” The vast majority of plastic mouldings were meant to simulate wood.
Instead it was conceived as a modernist set: “If you create the stage setting and it’s grand, everyone who enters will play their part.”
If she had not been so terribly rich, she might, with her vast talent and unlimited generosity, have become a great artist.
The interwar period brought forth new and bold ideas about luxury and the luxurious. It was an era that faced forward optimistically with a phalanx of new science, medicine, and technology that improved daily life, but was always marked by anxiety and paranoia connected with geopolitics, the cold war, and massive and divisive social change, particularly regarding the place of women and minorities. The excesses of the previous generation were seen as both decadent and old-fashioned. Luxury for the new era had to be provided with a new veneer of respectability and acceptance. Yet the tension between restraint and opulence always remained beneath the surface. By the 1950s, this could be seen in the diverging notions of luxury emerging from America: one democratic and participatory, as proposed by Hollywood films and the printed media; the other still staunchly elitist and connected to wealth and power, as in the case of continental and English luxury and the Manhattan society that could afford to access it.
In a society in which welfare and economic achievement for the masses was more than a dream, luxury came to be perceived as something of marginal importance, a little irritating or even embarrassing, a niche hobby for the rich or — worse still — the pretentious. The counterculture of the 1960s suggested that cheap wine, good drugs, and lots of sexual relations were much more exciting and desirable than sitting at a fancy restaurant eating foreign food.
“The rich” versus “the rest.” This opposition used to be a topic of concern in the differential between the developed West and the rest of the world, but after a generation of growth for the emerging countries, wealth disparity has become a home debate for countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia, bringing a new set of concepts and concerns regarding luxury.
The tolerance band of human ability simply isn’t wide enough for any one person to be 202 times better than anyone else.
Share ownership of yachts was on the up after the economic crises, as for gilded millionaires struggling to manage declining fortunes and bruised egos, it is the prudent way to keep up appearances.
The true achievement of luxury in the 21st century has been its ability to beguile as many people as possible in much the same way as mass consumption did in the post-war Western world. It plays on our inner feeling of wanting “something better,” and nurtures the rampant individualism of self-fashioning (inauthenticity, or narcissism perhaps?) that has come so much to shape our societies since the 1980s. Perhaps we all secretly dream of being little Russian oligarchs who can shop for antiques at Steinitz and take over the whole floors of hotels.
Today the client most crucial to luxury goods purveyors is no longer a Rockefeller but a Real Housewife.
The top end of the luxury market now needs to be extravagant (or elitist) beyond belief, because basic luxury is within the reach of too many today. It is no longer sufficient to go to the best restaurants; one has to have a top chef employed privately at home; it is not enough to take holidays in some of the best resorts; one needs to buy or rent an entire island.
If economists with a social conscience warned us against the peril of overconsumption, they did not foresee that one of the strategies used by corporations would be not to try to sell us 20 jumpers when we need only 2. They prefer to sell us 2 sweaters that cost as much as 20. The sweater or jumper is no longer an undifferentiated piece of knitwear, but is a finely woven, ethically sourced, environmentally friendly garment produced by a famous brand, often backed by a great deal of advertising.
And this explains why commodities are presented to us as luxuries and we are asked to pay prices that confirm that they are indeed luxuries.
In a world in which extravagance has become a mass phenomenon, how does luxury retain its appeal? Notwithstanding the fact that luxury is often accused of being about material overindulgence, since the early 2000s the nature — but also the value — of luxury has increasingly become immaterial, paradoxical as this might sound. In the words of one contemporary commentator, “luxury is today more a condition than an object.” In other words, luxury is not just about acquiring an object, but is rather a way of living, of thinking, and of aspiring. Luxury aims to recover its uniqueness not by offering expensive and exclusive goods, but by providing an experience that is unique in the acquisition and enjoyment of such goods (and increasingly services) that might not necessarily be exceptional per se. Michaud talks about the need of individuals to experience the intensity of emotions via luxury. He argues that luxury is presented as the key to “authenticity” against a world that is increasingly dull.
A different interpretation of “no logo luxury” comes instead from retailers who have realized that in order to keep sales high they need to have a more discreet approach to branding. Therefore, they are investing more in highly visible retail spaces rather than on the placement of their logo. For the customer, this means that the “luxury element” comes not from the logo but from the experience of having purchased the good from a luxury shop, sometimes in a prominent location, an experience that is worth as much if not more than the product itself.
A different kind of customized service is that of the “genie on call”: the concierge. An omnipresent figure in all high-society films, the concierge used to be the man in the lobby of a posh hotel, often accommodating impossible requests from his wealthy customers. Today, the concierge is a large part of the “lifestyle management services” industry, catering to the needs of the super-rich.
While most watchmakers will not service models produced before the 1960s, the world-leading horological firm Patek is able to offer a service by which each of its watches (going back to 1839) can be maintained through an archive of 5M components and the use of original tools going back 175 years. The acquisition of a Patek product is only the start of a relationship between customer and firm that will continue over the years and across generations. The Patek business lineage acts as an insurance that this is going to continue over the next 175 years, and this is precisely how all their advertising campaigns are structured.
The need to appear different from others, was not just achieved through the purchase and use of luxurious and expensive objects. It was also performed through the conspicuous expenditure of time in what we might call useless activities. Instead of working and earning money, those who can afford it simply spend money in activities that are financially unrewarding, such as playing golf, going to parties, driving around in luxury cars, and enjoying long holidays in exotic locations.
Leisure and service activities also require knowledge, sometimes very specialized. When such activities wish to signal distinction, they must be as exclusive as possible. The example of golf is fitting: it is not simply a matter of paying enormous sums to join a private club; one has also to be able to play the game. The same applies to other leisure sports such as tennis or polo. A dinner in a fancy restaurant requires good knowledge of etiquette, of ingredients and wines, plus a bit of French, the lingua franca of luxury food. Going to an auction similarly requires the need to know something about art as well as the process of bidding. One has to spend an inordinate amount of time to be able to engage in a proper way in useless activities. Luxury requires culture. Those who do not know how to behave might be as rich as Midas but will not go very far in society.
In the 20th century any American billionaire worth of the name had to have a Manhattan tower, from Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s to the Rockefellers to Donald Trump.
The cost of a 100sqm apartment in central Beijing ($450K) was equivalent to a salary of 1K years for a Chinese peasant.
The crowding of our cities is instantly deleted, in an act that summons a very traditional view of luxury as extreme elitism — the ivory tower one might say — oblivious of others, of social concerns, and of collective awareness.
And this is why time too has been “luxurified” in the form of “quality time,” intensity of experience, and short injections of pampering (spas, luxury retreats for weekends, and so on) as an antidote to the “bad” time (stressful, busy, and unsatisfactory) spent indoors in offices, with annoying bosses, noisy shop floors, and other workplaces. This allows us to distinguish between people who simply have free time and those instead whose free time is rendered “meaningful” by being packed with activities considered “positive.”
What emerges is a picture of China with at least 3 competing notions of luxury. First, there are consumer goods that are now common among all consumers. For this category of goods, luxury consists of owning upgraded versions (larger flat TVs, smart phones, and so on). Second, there are goods whose ownership is not yet widespread among the Chinese “affluent society.” This is the case with cars, and therefore they retain a luxury appeal — at least until they come to fall into the previous category. Finally, marketing is creating new luxuries by generating new needs. This is the case with dishwashers.
China is considered the best at everything, apart from producing its own luxury goods and luxury brands.
Figures alone cannot capture the fact that in India luxury is something very different from in China or other parts of Asia. The subcontinent has a very long tradition of luxury production and consumption. For centuries India produced the best of cotton cloth, fine muslin, and beautiful jewellery. The riches of the Mughal court were second to none.
By contrast, some of the best known luxury producers (including LV, Gucci, and Cartier) at this time retained their traditional small scale — often as a family business — positioning themselves as bastions of tradition in both their production and their business models. By the 1970s, several of them were in financial trouble. Notwithstanding the fact that they produced excellent products of undisputed quality, they were unable to market them effectively and to seize the opportunities presented by expanding international markets.
Among the best-known luxury brands in 2009, 4 were French (LV, Chanel, Hermes, and Cartier), 4 were Italian (Gucci, Prada, Ferrari, and Bulgari), 1 Swiss (Rolex), and 1 American (Tiffany).
According to Pinault: “People tend to associate luxury brands with Fashion Week, which showcase design, but the reality is that to succeed, a company needs a logistics system that can deliver finished products to stores in the world very quickly.” Responsiveness is key to the long-term wellbeing of the luxury brands and can be secured only by large and complex organizations.
At this point, we need to pause and ask a rather banal question: what is a luxury brand? Luxury brands are like any other consumer brand, but their aim is to convey exclusivity and excellence by the quality and the look of their products. This is achieved by drawing the attention of consumers to the high quality or novelty of materials used, or the detailed workmanship employed.
Each of the watch parts is produced from beginning to end by one worker, who spends up to 6 months on a single timepiece. This comes at a cost in terms of product development and the sourcing of materials. Above all, it is something that needs to be hammered home to consumers, who might otherwise entirely miss such facts and have only a very superficial appreciation of the time, care, and sheer quality of the materials that have gone into making such a product. Here marketing campaigns and advertising play a key role in educating consumers, for better or for worse.
Exclusivity is even more difficult to achieve. It also requires the very clearest communication with the potential consumer. And other subtle strategies are here at play. Luxury brands might, for instance, create a sense of exclusivity by limiting production. Luxury brands understand that it is better to create a sense of absence, to convince their consumers to pay more to obtain one of the rare goods that they sell. Failure to do so might lead to disaster and “brand inflation.”
The aura of luxury.
A great deal of the power of luxury brands is based on their reputation. Such reputation is not built just by producing high-quality goods or created through advertising and skillful image-building. It has to be protected. The protection of luxury today is first and foremost a protection of the “allure and prestigious image” of the luxury brands.
The existing law establishes that no one else can use the logo LV or the Vuitton name, even if there is no risk of confusion between a leather bag and dogs’ toys. This happened because the luxury brands successfully convinced legislators that their “aura” is potentially limitless and indeed might one day include products as different as fashionable accessories and cereals. While trademarks connect to specific products, the aura of luxury extends to the entire realm of notions and ideas.
The luxury economy is founded upon a specific model of consumption. It constructs a series of dreams through advertising and, for example, rarefied shop interiors, and communicates to us all via television, glossy magazines, and, increasingly, the Internet. By the very action of creating desire, luxury becomes a marker of social identities.
The expansion and industrialization of luxury have created a kind of “luxury invasion” of our everyday lives. But at the same time one of the dangers for luxury brands is that of overexposure.
These reasons are mostly to do with perception: the Chinese think that the luxury goods that they purchase in Paris or Milan are of better quality than what they can get in Beijing or Shanghai. They trust that, away from the world center of counterfeiting, the probability of buying a fake is lower, and, above all, they like buying the product in or near to its place of origin.
There is an apparent contradiction in the fact that, in an age of globalization, brands are deeply national, indeed often regional and subnational.
The preservation of a close relationship between manufacturing and origin is important when brands rely on an identity that associates them with key values of their country of origin. By contrast, no one cares or even is surprised that Nike, iPhones, and even Land Rover cars are produced in Asia, because it is their technological features and attributes that bestow upon them the “luxury” label.
Luxury find its raison d’etre in quality (real or perceived), aesthetics, expense, and the past. The past is often invoked in luxury brands’ marketing campaigns as a quest for “authenticity.” It is claimed that products “embody” skills, quality, and traditions that have been passed down from generation to generation of craftsmen and skilled producers. “Authenticity” means appropriating the “thickness” of the past, its tradition and patina, all of which are key to an “aura of luxury.”
Prada’s attachment to royal symbols is indicative of how luxury capitalism wishes to hide carefully its modern organization behind the veneer of history. Unlike high fashion in clothing, which is now often future oriented, luxury often sees value in the past, even if that is simply understood as “timelessness.”
Rising levels of consumption were eroding the traditional luxury of the upper and the more privileged sections of the middle classes. Power and privacy remained as the only real surviving luxuries, according to Priestley.
Indeed, as we have seen in our journey through the history of luxury in this book, the concept of luxury and the material forms that it assumes have never been fixed in time. The notion of luxury is always historically contingent.