A rose by many names Why luxury is so hard to pin down WHAT EXACTLY IS luxury? The concept is both slippery and divisive, not least because so many purveyors wish to lay claim to it. It is adjacent to excess, enjoyment of it may bespeak shallowness, and those who possess it are often undeserving. Luxury makers need to dissipate such doubts. As luxury has become more widespread, defining it has got harder. The language associated with it is replete with qualifiers. It can be “authentic”, “absolute”, “aspirational” or “affordable”. Jean Cassegrain, the chief executive of Longchamp, a leather-goods and clothing company, positions his “optimistic luxury” brand between affordable Americans such as Coach and the more upmarket Louis Vuitton. Parts of this universe, like haute couture and haute horlogerie (the watchmaking version), have organisations to back them up, but they leave a lot out, such as ready-to-wear clothing. Altagamma, which produces annual reports on luxury along with Bain, applies a simple price standard: a luxury handbag costs €850 or more. But that leaves the question of why you might want to spend that kind of money. Brunello Cucinelli, who turned his idea of enlivening cashmere with bright colours into a clothing business with revenues of €322m and a stockmarket capitalisation of around €1 billion, provides one answer. He runs his company from Solomeo, a timeless village perched on an Umbrian hilltop. There, Mr Cucinelli has set up schools dedicated to crafts such as tailoring and gardening and a “neo-humanist academy”. Mr Cucinelli considers his products to be “absolute luxury”, and not many would disagree. A men’s cardigan knitted from Mongolian cashmere can cost more than €1,600, not least because it is made in his hilltop Utopia. Italian manufacture is not merely an assurance of quality; without it the business would lose its point, Mr Cucinelli suggests. Europe is of “inestimable value” to the company and, he believes, to its customers. He adds to the aura by insisting that his workers take a 90-minute lunch break. With Mr Cucinelli selling it, that cardigan will feel as good to the soul as it does to the touch. All luxury makers like to tell some version of this story, and some have longer histories. Breguet, part of Switzerland’s Swatch Group since 1999, boasts that Napoleon was one of the “most faithful clients” for its watches. Karl Lagerfeld, a pony-tailed German fashion designer, is the spiritual son of Coco Chanel. Burberry, which was founded in 1856, calls itself an “old new company”. It is “the combination of timelessness and modernity [that] makes these brands successful”, says Mr Arnault of LVMH. Tell me a story Craft and a sense of place are almost always part of the narrative. Hermès attractively defines luxury as “that which can be repaired”. The company keeps expatriate repairers in centres such as New York, Shanghai and Tokyo. Vertu, a company that makes handsets costing ten times as much as an iPhone, justifies the price by pointing out they are “handmade in England”. For some of the most discerning customers, the products of pretty much any company you have ever heard of fall short of real luxury, which is defined by extreme rarity. Breguet produces perhaps 15,000 watches a year. Greubel Forsey makes a mere 100, one for each employee. Rolls-Royce makes 4,000 cars a year, many of them to order. But they are commonplace compared with the 38 that will roll out of the “atelier” of Pagani, an Italian manufacturer, this year. The quality of such “meta-luxury” objects may be no better than those produced by slightly less exclusive marques, but they come over as more intimate and closer to their creators. At the other end of the scale, companies bristle when their credentials are questioned because their prices are less exalted or they manufacture in China. Coach, which mainly sells leather goods, uses the same materials as European brands, but its soul is in New York, its creative hub. Manufacture is a collaboration between designers there and craftsmen in China, says Coach’s boss, Victor Luis. He thinks the idea that luxury and approachability don’t go together is “almost offensive”. Similarly, Longchamp’s Mr Cassegrain argues that it is “almost racist to characterise made in China as bad”. The broad conclusion from all this may be that luxury is in the eye of the beholder. To qualify, it seems to demand a stretch from those who would claim it. For the rich, that exertion may take the form not of scattering money but of spending time or learning about an object or an experience. The acquisition of luxury is both an attempt at transcendence and an act of appropriation, like the picking of the apple in the garden of Eden. Perhaps that was mankind’s first luxury good.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 21:50:15 +0000
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