Now Buick does have a luxury car, the Park Avenue. But the Century is an underling, now positioned as "a luxury car for everyone." Never mind that the tag line is an oxymoron. The problem is more fundamental. This car is just a standard Buick, which is just a jazzed-up Chevy, which is just a dumbed-down Cadillac, which is just an Oldsmobile, which is just like tons of Fords and Chryslers, as well as most Japanese midrange cars. The only luxury about it is the pretension of saying this is luxurious.
Punk Luxe?
In the last few years I have spent hours flipping through a new genre of magazine -- The Robb Report, Millionaire, Indulgence, Flaunt, Luxe, Icon, Self: The Best of Everything, Ornament: The Art of Personal Adornment -- as well as standard glossy pulp from Condé Nast like GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and, most recently, Lucky. I have trolled Rodeo Drive, Worth Avenue, and upper Madison Avenue and traveled to Las Vegas, where I stood agog for hours in the Bellagio and Venetian hotels.
I admit from the start that you could argue that this is not real luxury but a kind of ersatz variety, punk luxe, and maybe you would be correct. My father would have argued that real luxury is characterized not by shine but by patina, that its allure comes from inborn aesthetics, not from glitzy advertising, that it is passed from generation to generation and cannot be bought at the mall, and, most of all, that its consumption is private, not conspicuous. His words for modern luxury would have included gauche, vulgar, nouveau, tasteless, and, most interestingly, offensive.
In fact, maybe the rich have only two genuine luxury items left: time and philanthropy. The rest of us are having a go at all their stuff, albeit for a knockoff to be held only a short time. I can't afford a casita on Bermuda, but my timeshare can get it for me at least for a week. I can't own a limo, but I can rent one. If I can't fly on the Concorde, I can upgrade to first class with the miles I "earn" by using my American Express card. I can lease a Lexus.
In a sense luxury objects don't exist anymore as they used to be-cause "real" luxury used to be for the "happy few," and in the world of the jubilant Dow there is no more "happy few." The world that we live in, as John Seabrook recently argued in Nobrow: The Marketing of Culture and the Culture of Marketing, and as David Brooks explored in Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, no longer easily fits into intellectual classes. It now fits into consumption communities. So, for instance, we don't talk about high class, upper middle class, and middle class. Instead we talk about boomers, yuppies, Generation X, echo-boomers, nobrows, bobos (short for bourgeois bohemians), and the rest, who show what they are buying for themselves, not what they do for a living. And that's why each of these groups has its own luxury markers -- positional goods, in marketing jargon -- to be bought, not made.
High Brow to Nobrow
In a way, the new luxury is the ineluctable result of a market economy and a democratic political system. As journalist Thomas Beer wrote, "Money does not rule democracy. Money is democracy." Back in the late 1940s Russell Lynes, editor of Harper's, concocted a taxonomy of taste: high-brow, upper middle-brow, lower middle-brow, and low-brow. His system, as gleefully celebrated in the April 11, 1949, issue of Life magazine, was scandalous when published, the topic of much cocktail party concern.
Lynes knew even then that Americans were no longer divided by "wealth, birth, or political eminence" but by consumption. These material distinctions were further explored in the 1980s in Paul Fussell's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Tongue almost in cheek, Fussell even proposed a new class, what he called "category X people," to be based not on material consumption but on a shared taste for the better life. Fussell got the phenomenon of the "massification" of the upper class correct, and he certainly understood how the democratizing of luxury was a mixed blessing, but he missed the materiality of this confluence. Instead of superfluous stuff being pushed aside, it became even more central. You had to buy your way out, one Volvo, one glass of merlot, one bow tie, one Sub-Zero refrigerator, one granite countertop at a time.
From time to time in Western history there is vociferous antipathy toward high-end consumption. From Plato to the early Christians to the Renaissance, luxury was thought to effeminize and weaken. But this was hardly a pressing problem, because just getting to the necessities of life was a full-time job for most.
With increasing affluence this view shifted. Luxury became dangerous not because of de-basement but because it was a sign of overreaching, of getting out of place. An interesting transformation shows how fluid this category can be. In the Renaissance, luxury objects became those things thought worthy of being painted. Such objects were called objets d'art. Now, of course, the luxury object is the painting itself. But you can see that even before the industrial revolution there was a growing desire to show stuff off, to use the material world as marker of social dominance, to strut, to flaunt.
By the 18th century, social critics like Bernard Mandeville and economists like Adam Smith were beginning to suggest that, for improving the weal of humanity, the promise of consuming luxury might be a better carrot than the stick of shame. Yet there was still deep resentment for consuming out of your class, beyond your means.
This suspicion about consuming beyond your class continued well into the 19th century. In fact, ancient sumptuary laws, explaining exactly what objects were forbidden by church and state, were read from the Anglican pulpit until the 1860s. Reading these laws took two hours of church time to complete, and the laws kept people in their places, if only to have to listen to them.
Clerics, clearly supported by the aristocracy, were not alone in stiff-arming luxury. With the onset of industrial surpluses, secular pundits like Henry David Thoreau railed against what they took to be the excesses of mass production. "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts, of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind," he pointed out in Walden.
By the fin de siècle this view of high-end consumption had so exploded that Thorstein Veblen unloosed the first modern sustained attack on luxury in his thoroughly entertaining Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Coining all manner of nifty concepts like conspicuous consumption, invidious comparison, bandwagon effect, symbolic pantomime, vicarious leisure, and parodic display, Veblen had at the excesses of robber-baron shopping.
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