“The bigger an unfulfilled promise, the bigger the disappointment”
I found myself in a conversation last year, the topic of which was more or less the relationship of quality and luxury. By the end, I was left with more unanswered questions than in the beginning. It felt worthy to try and get to the bottom of it. This curiosity was met with a lack of clarity. For some reason, the answers to these new questions were not obvious. Who’d have thought something as convoluted as luxury turns out to be so opaque?
It’s easy to get cynical about “luxury” and say it’s disingenuous, fake, or any number of terms assigning inauthenticity. Somehow this doesn’t jive with me. That approach just seems too simplistic, and it undersells the importance of the problem. After all, most things in life that make it worth living are completely pointless. A simple semantic approach is of course to define luxury as anything that isn’t a necessity. This approach would turn the discussion into some kind of a Maslowian exercise. Technically correct, but it isn’t really the way people talk about these things.
And frankly, it seems like a boring exercise. The more fruitful bit is in the common ground of luxury and quality. I’m not trying to specify a definition of luxury, in terms of quality, here either. Make no mistake, this is not a philosophical exercise at its root, but some precision is, at least for now, a necessary step in the process.
The traditional meaning of luxury is fading out, because we, as a society, are moving towards material abundance. The historic sources of scarcity are disappearing, and hence it seems like the meaning of luxury has also become confused. It seems to me there’s a big divide between what luxury is in the commercial field, and what people gather it to be for themselves.
There seems to be at least three understandings of luxury floating around. The division as presented is arbitrary, but it helped me think about this and proved to be fruitful enough for the task at hand. First, the most often agreed upon: commercial luxury. Above all else, it’s characterised by a relatively high price point. It’s a private island, it’s three Michelin stars, a well-kept bottle of Krug from twenty years ago, and the list goes on. This is the part most conducive to cynicism. Second, there is personal luxury, which manifests differently per individual, but there are shared characteristics within the variation. This kind of personal luxury appears as a “less, but better” type of approach, and is usually characterised by an uncomplicated access to whatever the individual finds important. Or an uncomplicated relation to whatever is close to their heart.
Earlier this year a friend shared an image of his personal luxury, which will henceforth be dubbed as “Freshly Squeezed Luxuries”, plucked straight from the tree. Good bread, good butter, good ham, good eggs, good cheese, good wine, good water. Food is a large part of his life, and a luxurious manifestation of it is in things that are very simple, and very good quality. And for the most of it, I must agree. Anyone, who says fresh bread and good butter isn’t the best thing in the world, is vehemently lying. (Olive oil is alright too, for borderline cases [=Meds].)
And so we have stumbled upon the bridge between quality and luxury. On this bridge rests an elephant called Scarcity.
Quality is scarce, in a way that seems inbuilt. Talent, teaching, and time are usually needed to reach a resemblance of quality in anything. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it”, I’ve heard said. There’s also this joke around, with a grand kernel of truth, that between good, cheap, and fast, you can only ever choose two. Good and fast won’t be cheap; fast and cheap won’t be good; cheap and good won’t be fast. In other words, there’s something precious about good quality. For instance, it sure seems to be that some things (wine making, baking, cheese production etc.) cannot be scaled up to infinity, if the quality is to be maintained. (And if the quality stands despite that, there is a further, less obvious form of quality in the background.) Usually these simple, good quality things and experiences are tied to a particular place or time. Perhaps to some locale or perhaps specific people. To the terroir, in short.
Within this frame of understanding luxury, it looks like personal luxury and quality are quite intrinsically linked, namely through scarcity.
This relationship exists commercially also, but it isn’t straightforward. Things are sold as luxurious in a way that is often disconnected from the underlying quality of what is being sold. This happens to varying degrees, and scarcity, natural or manufactured, is of course one of the major tools for creating an image of luxury in the commercial sphere. Still, as David Ogilvy, one of the real world Mad Men, has written: “The best marketing is a better product.”
Now is the time to let go of any lingering feelings of confusion: as promised, this is not a philosophical project at its roots. Not in an academic sense, at least.
The third way of understanding luxury lives somewhere in between the previous two. It relates to hospitality, and it leans into both spheres: commercial and personal. And of course there’s a whole industry revolving around this, namely the Hospitality Industry, which is essentially aimed at solving the ongoing problem of how to exercise hospitality side-by-side to monetary transactions. People way wiser and more attuned than me have said that the most important ingredient of any meal, arguably the heart of hospitality too, is love. And as we all know, the union of love and money is a fickle thing at the best of times.
Another, almost annoyingly simple, straight-forward way to phrase the essence of hospitality is: to make people, the guests, feel welcome. Certainly a part of this welcoming is making things special, and a part of making things special sure looks a lot like luxury.
When welcoming guests to your home, there’s a good chance you’re serving them: 1) something you personally enjoy, which makes it special. 2) something you haven’t tried before, which hopefully makes it fresh and exciting, and doesn’t leave you a nervous wreck, hence special 3) something more lavish than what you’d otherwise have on that day, which makes it special. Cherry on top, if applicable, you probably set the table with a touch more attention than usually. If applicable, you dig out the finer sets of serving vessels, tableware, and cutlery. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see how this, at the very least, has an unmistakeable image of luxury.
Easier to do at home, much more difficult to do when part of the purpose is to simultaneously earn a living.