Imagine no possessions

Hermes Matte Niloticus Crocodile Himalaya Kelly Retourne 32 White

$185,000 (Used)

This NYT essay on a purported crisis among the highest-end luxury fashion brands triggered the Oliver Cromwell/Mao Zedong impulse lurking in my decadent late capitalist soul. (I did spend $30 for a Martini, including tip, at an airport restaurant last night, so needless to say we are all part of the same hypocrisy, although I don’t think I can get a whole op-ed out of my own personal retail Vietnam).

This started at the source of so many modern woes: social media. For those not glued to TikTok or “The Kardashians,” social media, helped along by reality TV, has instigated a frenetic game of one-upmanship in which top social-media content makers aim to project wealth while outdoing themselves and their competition. This means flaunting luxury goods in posts that are then spread widely by algorithms. Kyle Richards, a cast member of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” has become infamous for hitting the gym with a difficult-to-get Hermès Birkin bag — which costs anywhere from five figures to hundreds of thousands of dollars — dangling from her arm.

The semiotics of fashion are quite opaque to me, so reading this kind of thing always makes me feel vaguely anthropological, although I don’t know if that makes me the headhunter or the ethnographer.

For those who aren’t comfortably in the millionaire class, technology offers a solution. The exploding popularity of financing apps such as Klarna and Afterpay — online lending services that allow users to break payments up into installments — has ushered in a whole new era of buy now, pay later. It’s stigma-free layaway for nearly any item. Nobody has to know, and you get the product upfront.

Suddenly, brands accustomed to catering to a select few found themselves pursued by a surfeit of less discerning customers — some literally children — seeking a status boost for their social media profiles. Meanwhile, the platforms continue to both stoke class anxieties and offer a seemingly unlimited amount of data on what to want next. Confronted by hordes, companies tried preserving their images the one way they knew how: jacking up prices. In doing so, they followed the longstanding Veblen goods principle. Derived from the economist Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” written in 1899, it states that demand for luxury goods will actually increase as their prices increase, because such hikes thin the herds and make scarce goods that much more desirable.

I’ve written about Veblen effects in law school tuition pricing, and I find the concept fascinating in a morbid way. Of course the whole point of luxury is to flaunt that I can afford something that you can’t. And the more money is sloshing around in a wealth-crazed society, the more of this sort of flaunting there’s going to be, because otherwise what’s the point?

What about that perfect exotic backdrop to show off your new goods? A thousand bucks for a night in a normal hotel room, once unheard-of, is surprisingly common. Rooms at the sought-after Amangiri resort in Utah started at around $1,800 a night in 2018. Now they start at $3,509. Jaclyn Sienna India, the founder of a travel and lifestyle company that caters to individuals and families with a minimum net worth of $100 million, notes that the prix fixe menu at the exclusive Ibiza restaurant Sublimotion was about $1,675 a head in 2022. Today, she said, it’s $2,380.

Under the Veblen goods principle, shoppers should view luxury brands’ higher prices as a sign that the goods are precious and hard to obtain. The problem is that neither of those is the case.

Yeah I’d say there’s a problem here, but maybe not precisely the one upon which the author is focused.

Some brands are responding by dropping prices, which risks turning a luxury label into a line that’s carried by outlet malls and desired by virtually no one. Investors shouldn’t have lauded Burberry’s new C.E.O., Joshua Schulman, when in November he announced that among other adjustments, the brand would be reducing the prices of its handbags.

Perhaps the most egregious sign of the problem is the fact that luxury goods are winding up on the shelves of discount outlet stores. Dumping excess product in less-than-glamorous locations can be so destructive to a brand’s perception that some companies used to set excess product on fire to avoid such a fate. And yet, according to Bain, at the end of 2023, that’s exactly where about 13 percent of all luxury goods were purchased, compared with 5 percent a decade earlier. . . . Like my sad Kiki boots, much of old-school luxury — the kind that was so glamorous, lush and exquisite that everyone understood it, many craved it and few could have it — is beyond repair. Once-revered establishments that prided themselves on craftsmanship, service and cultivating a discerning and loyal customer base have become mass-marketing machines that are about as elegant and exclusive as the Times Square M&M’s store.

Today, instant gratification, profit and appearances are more desirable than substance, depth or intrinsic worth.

Today and yesterday and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

A week later, passing the little street, I thought I would go in and tell him how splendidly the new boots fitted. But when I came to where his shop had been, his name was gone. Still there, in the window, were the slim pumps, the patent leathers with cloth tops, the sooty riding boots.

I went in, very much disturbed. In the two little shops—again made into one—was a young man with an English face.

“Mr. Gessler in?” I said.

He gave me a strange, ingratiating look.

“No, sir,” he said, “no. But we can attend to anything with pleasure.
We’ve taken the shop over. You’ve seen our name, no doubt, next door.
We make for some very good people.”

“Yes, Yes,” I said; “but Mr. Gessler?”

“Oh!” he answered; “dead.”

“Dead! But I only received these boots from him last Wednesday week.”

“Ah!” he said; “a shockin’ go. Poor old man starved ‘imself.”

“Good God!”

“Slow starvation, the doctor called it! You see he went to work in such a way! Would keep the shop on; wouldn’t have a soul touch his boots except himself. When he got an order, it took him such a time. People won’t wait. He lost everybody. And there he’d sit, goin’ on and on—I will say that for him not a man in London made a better boot! But look at the competition! He never advertised! Would ‘ave the best leather, too, and do it all ‘imself. Well, there it is. What could you expect with his ideas?”

“But starvation——!”

“That may be a bit flowery, as the sayin’ is—but I know myself he was sittin’ over his boots day and night, to the very last. You see I used to watch him. Never gave ‘imself time to eat; never had a penny in the house. All went in rent and leather. How he lived so long I don’t know. He regular let his fire go out. He was a character. But he made good boots.”

“Yes,” I said, “he made good boots.”

John Galsworthy, “Quality” (1912)