Roughly about a quarter of the way into Peter Glenville’s 1964 film version of Jean Anouilh’s play Becket, Peter O’Toole playing King Henry II of England declares to his friend and later nemesis Becket that: “French luxury is very … luxurious.”Footnote1 Although ostensibly referring to the French woman he reveals he has in bed with him, Henry, still suffering the after effects of the amount of French wine he has imbibed the night before seems, also in this simple statement, to encapsulate both his admiration and weakness for the excesses of French luxury, it’s very Frenchness, one might be tempted to say characterized here as wine, women and song. For the English, but Norman king anxious to regain his French territories one could be forgiven for thinking that for Henry, at least French land and its luxuries are indivisible and as ruler he has an implicit right to both.
Figure 1 Cunard Line Promotional Brochure for the 1931 World Cruise of the Franconia. Photograph by Design Pics Inc/REX Shutterstock
This brief but revealing cinematic moment manages to condense a number of discussions concerning the relationship between luxury and nationalism, which is the pervading theme of this issue of Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption. An issue, which I am very pleased to announce, sees the introduction of a new co-editor Thomaï Serdari, a new reviews editor Dellores Laing and a number of additions to the editorial advisory board. These exciting additions in tandem with a new publisher will ensure that Luxury continues along the path already taken by its first two issues and continue to explore the field of what is now swiftly becoming recognized as Critical Luxury Studies, providing a forum for the discussion of the term that remains as much indisciplinary (to borrow the art historian W.J.T. Mitchell’s term) as it is interdisciplinary, welcoming voices from academia, business, art, design and literature, both established and new.
Returning to the concept of nationalism (as elusive and contested a term as indeed luxury continues to be), the articles and reviews included in this issue represent a number of debates concerning luxury’s correlation to our ideas of place, people and culture, what in short we might understand as a definition of “national luxury,” but which remains as hard to define and establish as Henry found when trying to find the right adjective to describe French luxury. Is luxury specifically related to place? The debates, especially those exercising contemporary luxury producers and consumers, concerning the importance of the place of origin and manufacture of present-day luxury goods, the importance of understanding a product as “Made in Italy” or “Made in England” for example, continue. Understanding and proclaiming an object, experience or service as being intrinsically connected to a specific locale is as vital to today’s luxury providers as it has been throughout the history of what we might understand as luxury consumption, but place, and more specifically nation, is of course a construct and dependant on the position of the consumer at any given time. So luxury has often been, and continues to be, at its most luxurious when it originates from “somewhere else”; the “foreign” the “exotic” the “novel” as luxurious, and yet this view has been tempered by the equally persistent understanding of luxury as “traditional,” “recognizable” and “reassuring” all qualities one might attach to one’s own place of origin. This age-old dialogue between far and near, innovative and enduring, desirable and undesirable even, is to a large degree the dialogue of luxury itself, and includes in its discourse concepts as wide ranging as fashion, prohibition and revolution.
Whether there remains in today’s globalized, mediated and digital societies any significance in thinking about luxury in terms of nationalism is unclear, and revelations concerning manufacturers’ expanded and flexible understanding of what and how much of a certain product needs to originate from a specific location in order to bear the “Made in …” label has highlighted this. The articles in this issue reflect this current state of uncertainty and indeed in some cases anxieties about luxury’s relationship to the idea of place, asking questions such as whether it still matters where luxury emerges, how it might be transforming nationally, how it impacts on a country’s sense of self, whether the way luxury is consumed is culturally specific. Big questions such as these, as with all forays into luxury’s vast dominions, remain challengingly elusive, possibly unanswered and take us further into uncharted territories where we need to take full advantage of the wide range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches deployed in the articles and reviews here in order to begin to establish the burgeoning and stimulating field of Critical Luxury Studies.
Commencing with Patricia Nickel’s thought provoking article on Haute Philanthropy we are asked to consider how the traditional understanding of benevolence, charity, or more precisely, philanthropy, is providing new possibilities for the display of luxury for an American elite, whose innovative use of the growing contemporary consumption of branded and mediated luxury reinforces what she terms the reification of the pecuniary subject. Following this, Luxury’s new co-editor Thomaï Serdari draws upon her considerable experience in the fields of luxury brand marketing and strategy to draw a picture of a specifically German example of luxury production, the publishing house of Steidl, and how, she argues, it exemplifies a model of business strategy that both draws upon a tradition of German technical luxury innovation and more contemporary creative approaches to luxury. New French Luxury is the subject of Silvano Mendes and Nick Rees-Roberts’ paper and provides some possible conceptions of French luxury that escaped Henry II. Their article proposes that increasingly French luxury, especially luxury fashion is utilizing the strategies and discourses of fine art in order to capitalize on potential new markets. As they develop their argument they simultaneously revisit and challenge a central historical debate concerning the hierarchical relationship between art, craft and luxury and indeed France as the preeminent producer of luxury fashion.
Adopting an ethnoconsumerist methodology Yasmin Sekhon in her article Sacred and Treasured Luxury, takes a specific cultural group, namely second generation Indian consumers living in the UK to explore the desire, consumption and display of globally branded, increasingly homogenized luxury goods as a form of ritual behavior of self-fashioning and as an expression of bi-cultural identity. Utilizing extensive interviews she reveals a process of luxury consumption that negotiates universal aspiration with personal experiences of cultural boundary crossing. The final article from Paula von Wachenfeldt returns us once again to the subject of luxury as an expression of national identity. In her paper The Taste of the Good Life, she discusses the role that luxury media, particularly lifestyle magazines and programmes, are playing in shaping twenty-first-century Swedish attitudes to indulgence and excess. The discourses used in these promotional and, she argues, didactic luxury productions are instrumental in challenging entrenched notions of Swedish socialist and democratic ideals, and at its most revealing reveals an uneasy alliance between luxurious indulgence and Swedish abstinence.
Returning to the twelfth century and Becket, for Luxury is fervent in its championing not only of history as a means of understanding contemporary luxury, but also the representation of that knowledge in whatever form be that cinema, television and newer forms of popular cultural knowledge, we might conclude with another conversation between Henry II and Becket. Becket is inviting Henry to a banquet at which he will unveil his latest acquisition; the fork:
“Yes, from Florence. New little invention. It’s for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves you dirtying your fingers.”
“But then you dirty the fork.”
“Yes, but it’s washable.”
“So are your fingers. I don’t see the point.”
“Well, it hasn’t any, practically speaking, but it’s refined, it’s subtle, it’s very un-Norman!”Footnote2
This exchange while played for laughs and the product of a cinematic simplification of a complex literary text, nevertheless crystallizes a range of opinions and indeed suspicions that orbit both a fictional twelfth-century genesis of European luxury and our contemporary reality. Ideas of the superfluity and pointlessness of luxury, the association of luxury with innovation, the long tradition of centers of luxury here typified by Florence and indeed the concept of luxury as a weapon of distinction that demarcates nation from nation, knowledge and ignorance, privilege and want.
Concluding this issue of Luxury, Dellores Laing has compiled three reviews of very recently published books pertaining to luxury, as part of the aim for the journal to present reviews of books (and in the future other productions including film, theatre and exhibitions), that become available as near as possible to the date of publication, performance or exhibition so as to address the all too common problem of reading reviews in academic journals of productions that are no longer available to see or books that have already been extensively reviewed. To that end the first two reviews are of books published in late 2015 and the third earlier that year, but of special significance to the field of luxury business studies.
Christopher Breward reviews The First Book of Fashion, a work that details the remarkable record of early modern self-fashioning, constructed by one Matthaeus Schwarz of Augsburg who recorded himself from birth to old age in a series of exquisite drawings, a sixteenth-century sartorial catalogue of the fashioned body. Some five centuries after Schwartz’s fashionable display of class and nationality, London Couture 1923-1975 brings together for the first time current research into another form of ritual dressing that can seem almost as remote to us today as sixteenth-century Germany. Noel Chapman’s review of the book discusses this all but vanished expression of British luxury, fashion as both the product and producer of a notion of Britishness that persists even today in our climate of globalized, mega-branded luxury fashion. The final review of Kapferer on Luxury by Thomaï Serdari puts what might be understood as the collected thoughts of Jean-Noel Kapferer, one of the foremost strategists of contemporary luxury brand management, into context, offering us an invaluable guide to current thinking in this area of luxury business studies and to return us to the theme of this issue commends especially Kapferer’s belief that delocalization kills luxury.
Notes on contributor
Jonathan Faiers is Reader in Fashion Theory, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, UK.
University of Southampton
[email protected]
Notes
1 Dialogue from Becket, 1964. Directed by Peter Glenville.
2 Ibid.