103rd Street. In The Mood For Luxury

I was reading a special edition of Time Magazine’s Style and Design for Winter 2005, which is incidentally not about what’s up in the world of fashion and design, but it is really about the best products to get and give for Christmas this year. The only problem apparently is that all of the products featured in the magazine are LUXURIOUS goods, which means you can forget about getting any of the featured items in the magazine if you are not willing to part with $5,000 or more.

The Style and Design magazine if anything, offers a perspective of what it means to live luxuriously. Clearly, what is meant my luxurious has changed over the years. Currently, as Fendi’s CEO Michael Burke notes, luxurious today doesn’t mean being the biggest, it’s about being “intimate and unique”. Luxury is therefore, able to own something that says a lot about you, and at the same time gives you a mark sense of distinction that few (or none at all) share. More inescapably, luxury is a mark of wealth; luxury is what you get when you are rich.

The Style and Design Magazine therefore performs an additional function, it makes people who are not exactly really, really rich to aspire towards what it means to live the life of the rich, to live the life of luxury. People feel compelled to get the goods featured in the magazine because they feel that by getting it, they are much closer towards living life luxuriously. The product has moved from being a product of desire, it has become a product that determines a lifestyle, notably, the lifestyle of the bourgeois class.

There is nothing wrong with the bourgeois way of life, in fact all of us are in one way or the other living the bourgeois life! Reading literature, sipping coffee in cafés, attending functions and conventions – all these are a mark of a good life, and that is exactly the mantra of the bourgeoisie, to live a good life. Problems only occur when people aspire too desperately for a bourgeois lifestyle, and they begin to bend laws just so that they could taste luxury. These people become the thieves, the robbers and the deviants of our society. These people are not monsters, on the contrary, they are products of the society; the same society that teaches people to live life luxuriously.

We recognize what it means to live luxuriously, but what’s crucial at this point is that we too know when to step back and look at it perceptively, that even though what we see in the magazine is desirable, it is not something that we should enslave ourselves for. Is having really awesome cell phones, handbags and watches the ONLY way in which we can determine luxury? In that case, everything is material, and the root of human happiness is material goods. Somewhere deep in ourselves we know that is not true. Sure, the material stuff is important, I am not going to deny that, but that is, and should not be the sole importance of our life. Very simply, what is the point of getting a Vertu cell phone worth $8,600 if there is NO ONE you can talk over the phone with? As we look deeper, the luxury goods only mean something if there are special people you can really share it with.