Luxury

Fashion, Lifestyle and Excess

Patrizia Calefato, Lisa Adams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857853332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Luxury has been both celebrated and condemned throughout history right up to the present day. This groundbreaking text examines luxury and its relationship with desire, status, consumption and economic value, exploring why luxury remains prominent even in the context of a global recession. Using approaches from cultural studies, semiotic research and aesthetics, Luxury presents a wide range of case studies including urban space and new technologies, travel, interior design, cars, fashion ads and jewellery to explore what luxury represents, and why, in the contemporary world. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars across a range of fashion studies, cultural studies and sociology, and anyone interested in the power and allure of luxury today.

–1–

Uniqueness

NEW LUXURY

The word luxury has never seemed more irrelevant than now, in a time of crisis, as our consciences view the theater and players of global poverty and wealth. Without doubt, while civilizations and cultures engage in new conflicts and while the need for solidarity with another possible world grows, we can only view with disdain a concept that condones the possession and ownership of things. Luxury is based on painful expropriations and makes even more explicit the global dislocations of production processes today, which result in new forms of impoverishment and enslavement. These production processes, on the one hand, and the serial standardization of objects and bodies-as-cash, where technological biopower is exercised, on the other, mean that an “irrelevant” concept like luxury is now associated more with the idea of a rupture in the midst of life than with the idea of ostentatious expenditure denoting social status. Biopower, in Michel Foucault’s definition, includes all the strategies and techniques of the management and regulation of power over life and death that were devised in the second half of the eighteenth century and that have replaced the sovereign’s power over life and death. Biopower is articulated in disciplines that control and legislate the individual’s everyday gestures, attitudes, and behavior, as well as in forms of social control over biological aspects, sexuality, procreation, illness, and accidents; in short, over the whole living human body (see Foucault [1997] 2003: 239). The classical forms of biopower described by Foucault, together with the new global configurations of domination and the new technologies (including reproductive technologies), are today confirmed and empowered by the social order.

In his Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen gives us the classic definition of “conspicuous consumption” as symbolically honorific behavior denoting wealth:

Throughout the entire evolution of conspicuous expenditure, whether of goods or of services or human life, runs the obvious implication that in order to effectually mend the consumer’s good fame it must be an expenditure of superfluities. In order to be reputable it must be wasteful. ([1899] 2007: 49)

Veblen also coined the expression “conspicuous waste,” which carries an implicit sense of blame (51). With the notion of “leisure class” Veblen basically refers to the upper-middle class of his day, in which he also identifies traits, tastes, and lifestyles rooted in earlier periods. While display and conspicuous consumption remain an ignominious brand for those who exploit expensive commodities as a mark of prestige and power, the notion of luxury in the twenty-first century has to do instead with subtler categories and with emotions that are conscious of the play of signs in which luxury is placed. Luxury is not inclined to be trapped in the affectation of the newly rich; luxury goods are quite disconnected from labor.

In the name of reason, frugality, morality, or rhetoric, the enemies of luxury have condemned its excesses throughout history and across social boundaries, thereby attacking the essence of luxury itself, which arises from the idea of an expenditure that cannot be contained either in equal forms of exchange or as the response to a necessity. However, great turning points in history have always been accompanied by a perception of the importance (or indeed necessity) of luxury. In the modern age, eighteenth-century Europe witnessed a philosophical debate in France on the meaning of luxury in which intellectuals such as Denis Diderot, Charles-Louis de Montesquieu, and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac took part. There was even an entry on luxury in the Encyclopédie, attributed to Jean-François de Saint-Lambert. At the root of the philosophical debate on the reasons for the social necessity of luxury there is, as Carlo Borghero suggests, the metaphor in the “Fable of the Bees,” recounted at the beginning of the eighteenth century by the Dutch physician and philosopher Bernard de Mandeville and later translated into French: “The fable tells of a rich and prosperous beehive in which the bees live in ease and luxury. The insects do everything that men do: they exercise the same professions, have the same institutions that regulate their lives and their actions are motivated by the same passions: greed, lust and pride” (Borghero 1974: xviii). At a certain point some of the insects appeal to Jove and ask him to end this state of affairs and to set up rules akin to sumptuary laws; once set up, however, these laws create a situation of complete deprivation in the beehive. The paradoxical moral of the fable is that luxury is necessary for the good of a nation; it is not waste, hedonism, or wantonness, but is profoundly tied to the very nature of humankind.

The breadth and peculiarity of this debate may be explained by the fact that, perhaps for the first time in Western history, morality was no longer able to comprehend or stigmatize luxury. Luxury had become a social and symbolic phenomenon, which—in that moment and in that part of the world—explicitly involved the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation and which therefore needed to be legitimized and justified with the benefit of reason, in the passage from the old to the new dominant classes. This also happened during the crucial passage of capitalism to its ultimate phase of the mass production of commodities and signs, between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. In this epoch, perhaps due to its peculiar sensibility, the rise of the social sciences focused attention on the deeper motives that had animated luxury since the advent of capitalist means of production, as the analyses of Max Weber (1904–5) and Werner Sombart ([1913] 1967) demonstrate, albeit from different perspectives. In a strictly economic sense, luxury is thought to have had a fundamental social and cultural function in favoring the modes of capitalist production ever since the phase of the original accumulation of wealth under capitalism. Sombart was cynically “cool” in showing the conspicuously wasteful spirit of capitalism, unlike Weber, who instead celebrated the Calvinistic rigor of such modes of production.¹ From another perspective, however, luxury—viewed anthropologically as expenditure, futile excess, and the realm of the nonfunctional—is not only specifically associated with capitalism but is an essential component of being human.

François Pouillon (1979: 584) writes that today the notion of luxury exists on the fringes of economic research and has been disappearing in contemporary thought. This theory is based on Weber’s vision of the capitalist ethic as the ethic of bourgeois Calvinist thrift, as opposed to the ostentation and waste typical of the aristocracy. The Protestant ethic that Weber saw as the basis of capitalist accumulation does not contemplate squandering, waste, or enjoyment as an end in itself, which are all typical of luxury in its most canonical forms. Instead, it is oriented toward frugality, utility, and duration. However, Sombart rather than Weber turns out to be more long-sighted with his unusual yet illuminating theory of the necessity of luxury. He anticipated what would happen in the twentieth century, as products have become signs in an increasingly massified society, and as values like ostentation and distinction (closely related to luxury) have assumed a leading role in the irreversible epoch-making transitions we are experiencing today.

DISLOCATIONS

Luxury is a word that comes into play in language already charged with a historical value rooted in moralistic barriers and sumptuary laws. The Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso by Tullio De Mauro, based on the theoretical conviction that meaning is constructed by the social use of language, gives the following definitions of luxury:

1a. ostentation, display of wealth, esp. in clothing, furniture, or architectural grandeur … 1b. wealth, prosperity …; (pl.) facilities, services, furnishings that make a locality or a home a pleasant place to stay …; 1c. (fig.) profusion, superabundance … 2. anything that, in relation to utility, economic means, or habitual lifestyle, is considered superfluous or nonessential. (De Mauro 1999: 3:1059–60)²

If words are a repository of meanings in their history and usage, as well as in the transformations and contaminations to which they are subjected through interlinguistic and intercultural exchange, we may ask ourselves what we mean when we use the expression “to indulge in the luxury of something.” In common usage this expression has to do with Charles Baudelaire’s “voluptuousness,” in the sense of a pleasure that goes beyond the everyday and invites us to embark on a real or metaphorical journey in which our routine is interrupted and the exceptional is a modus vivendi. The Baudelairian motifs of travel and distance as transfiguring experiences—giving things a luxurious patina but also a reassuring one, connected to the idea of possession and contemplation—are in part the same ones that today feed the new myths of luxury based on notions of taste, personal style, and refined culture. In other words, luxury is anything that can “dislocate” the serial and massified dimension of living.

Etymologically, the word for “dislocate” in Italian (lussare) should not really be associated with “luxury” (lusso). In Ferruccio Calonghi’s Dizionario latino-italiano, luxus-a-um, in the sense of “dislocated” or “askew,” comes from the Greek luo (“to undo, release”), whence luxus-us in the sense of “dislocation” or “sprain.” In contrast, luxus-us in the sense of “luxury” comes from luxuria-ae, which indicates exuberance, excess, or superabundance in vegetation (Calonghi 1969: 1622).

Nevertheless, the free play between verbal signifiers (in this case lussare/lusso) often manages to tell us more than traditional etymology does, and it at least suggests that lussare can cover a range of meanings in which something “dislocates” the uniform discourse of a flat and massified technical reproducibility of living. It is here, in this bending of meanings, that Baudelairian voluptuousness and the measured exceptionality of contemporary luxury show their other side: they forget calm and order and upset the balance.

“Castaway!” is the title of the May 2003 issue of Wallpaper* dedicated to luxury, displaying a full-page photo of a young couple adrift on a raft in the Indian Ocean. The woman is lying on a fur rug and is wearing a gold-colored silk kimono and high-heeled sandals. The man is standing, barefoot, next to an improvised mast and is wearing a white shirt and trousers. In the background is a set of white leather luggage. This is the vessel of luxury on which the castaways of the twenty-first century set sail toward the best a trip can offer—clubs, shops, spas, safari lodges—that is, the best at the highest price or, rather, that which is priceless. It is not just money that grounds the exceptional value distinguishing the luxury castaway from the desperate immigrants on an overloaded boat or the passersby in a crowded nonplace. It’s the idea of luxury as a measureless measure.

In this sense, the themes of contemporary luxury are still close to that form of distinction which Georg Simmel ([1895] 1904) discerned a century ago as something independent of wealth, morality, and beauty. These themes appeal to a way of enacting the relation between the individual and the risk of the exceptional, the challenge of profligacy and waste, and everything that escapes the bounds of utility and functionality. There are semiotic, aesthetic, and cultural strategies that produce the idea of luxuriousness itself; for example, the strategy of the amplification, hyperbole, and sumptuousness of forms, characteristic of the baroque, returns today in synergy with new technologies, sometimes verging on the kitsch, in architecture, fashion, interior design, and tourism. This strategy creates a new aura of uniqueness around the luxury object, in which the ownership or enjoyment of a luxury good becomes exceptional and dislocates (remember the Italian lussare!) the serial mass production of commodities and signs: a palm-shaped artificial island off the coast of Dubai, a space voyage for an eccentric billionaire, the Shanghai Centre by John Portman & Associates,³ an over-the-top hotel in Las Vegas, or the setting for a film like Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Castaway? Yes, but aboard the Queen Mary II, which until 2010 was the largest and most expensive ocean liner in the world.

Moreover, luxury gives access to some of its contemporary signs and objects by recourse to a device that recalls metonymy: a piece, a color, or a part evokes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Uniqueness
• 2 Wastefulness
• 3 Eternity
• 4 Leisure and Travel
• 5 Wellness
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index