Needing the Unnecessary

The democratization of luxury

James B. Twitchell from the August/September 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

In our postmodern world we have, it seems, exchanged knowledge of history and science (a knowledge of production) for knowledge of products and how such products interlock to form coherent social patterns (a knowledge of consumption). Buy this and don't buy that has replaced make/learn this, don't make/learn that. After all, in the way we live now, everyone is a consumer, but not everyone is a worker. As Marcel Duchamp, sly observer of the changing scene, said, "Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes." Thus a new denomination of cultural capital.

A shift in currency has clear ramifications. A producer culture focuses on the independent self of the worker: self-help, self-discipline, self-respect, self-control, self-reliance, self-interest. Responsibility is situated in the individual: Can she get work? A consumer culture, however, focuses on community: Fit in, don't stand out. Be cool. The standard of judgment becomes the ability to interact effectively with others, to win their affection and admiration -- to merge with others of the same lifestyle. Can he consume the right brands?

Inventing Pashmina

The powerful desire to associate with recognized objects of little intrinsic but high positional value is at the heart of Luxe Americana. It is what Martha Stewart is doing down at Kmart introducing her Silver Label goods. Of her many endorsed products, one is of special interest: her line of matelassé coverlets and shams -- really, just bedcovers. They are available in yellow, white, and multicolored stripes and come in silk, linen, crushed velvet, Egyptian cotton, cotton sateens, and even cashmere. Remember three things: This is Kmart, a bedspread is something you buy not to show off to others but to please yourself, and cashmere is supposed to be something really special.

So here is the Cashmere Company hawking something it calls pashmina. The word is a linguistic trick. Cashmere is goat hair from Kashmir, an area between India and Pakistan, whereas pashmina is simply the Persian word for the same goat in the same area. In other words, it's the same stuff. But that's not what is interesting. It is that pashmina has been introduced precisely because places like Kmart have too much cashmere. So what we have is a top-of-the-line product topped because too many people were in the checkout line.

But then again, what of Michael Graves�designed toasters for Target, Ralph Lauren house paint, and Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter brand furniture at Ethan Allen Furniture stores? This tectonic shift in consumption is why the designer Lynette Jennings, host of the Discovery Channel's Lynette Jennings Design and HouseSmart, is peddling doorknobs at Home Depot.

If you want to see how varied the consumers of the new luxuries are, just take a tour of your local Costco or Sam's Club parking lot. Observe the shiny new imported sedans and SUVs alongside aging subcompacts. Or spend an hour watching what is being sold on the Home Shopping Network, a televised flea market for impulse buyers. The system now has 23,000 incoming phone lines capable of handling up to 20,000 calls a minute. Home Shopping no longer sells just cubic zirconium rings. Not when the real money is in designer handbags.

In the older culture, my dad's culture, the limited production capacity of the economy sharply reduced aspirations to material comfort. In the modern world, my culture, much greater material satisfactions lie within the reach of even those of modest means. Thus a producer culture becomes a consumer culture, a hoarding culture becomes a surplus culture, a work culture becomes a therapeutic culture. Because what you buy becomes more important than what you make, luxury is not a goal; for many it is a necessity.

Luxury Creep

Michael J. Apter, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has studied why we do things and, by extension, why we buy things. In The Experience of Motivation: The Theory of Psychological Reversals, he divides general orientations into telic (arousal reducing) and paratelic (arousal seeking). A telic motivation starts with isolating a need and then feeling anxious about resolving it. The experience ends, if successful, with a feeling of relaxation. If the ending does not satisfy the need (postdecision dissonance), the anxiety continues, and the process is repeated until it abates. A paratelic tendency, however, begins in a state of well-being that edges over into boredom. The person seeks excitement and judges the act by the experience. Does it resolve boredom? Not to put too fine a point on it, but consuming luxury for many Americans has gone from telic to paratelic, from product to process, from problem resolution to emotion seeking, from object to experience.

The one characteristic of modern luxe is its profound oxymoronic nature: If everyone can have it, is it still luxury? If you want to see the difference that a generation makes in downshifting luxury, just look at how top-of-the-line domestic automobiles are advertised. Compare Cadillac in the early part of the 20th century with Lincoln at the end of the century, and you'll get the idea.

Cadillac's pitch in a 1915 advertisement was that luxury comes at a price and that price includes humility, even mild mortification. You buy this car and you take responsibility for sharing excellence. The true price of luxury is not cheap. In fact, you will be reviled, assailed, and envied. This car is a laurel. Be careful how you wear it. The real headline is not just "The Penalty of Leadership," it is "The Penalty of Luxury."

By contrast, Lincoln's current pitch is pure indulgence: Buy this object and let your lust for comfort run wild. Lincoln is "what a luxury object should be." And after all you've been through, you deserve it. If not to own, then to lease.

Needless to say, as the 20th century faded into oblivion, Cadillac, which had a history of "owning" the luxury category, lost its vaunted place as the best-selling domestic luxury car to Lincoln. The Lincoln division of the Ford Motor Car Company has a single-word advertising motto: "Luxury."

Perhaps the best example of what I call luxury creep, in which a down-market product comes uptown solely on the basis of advertising, is the Buick Century. Buick has had a history of being a car for strivers who have not quite made it. Just look back on Buick advertising in the '60s, and you can see the company's typical reticence. In 1965 Buick advertising carried the tag line, "Wouldn't you really rather have a Buick?," which survived through the 1980s. In 1980 the company added a second theme: "The great American road belongs to Buick." Then in 1986 the McCann-Erickson ad agency positioned Buicks as "premium American motorcars."