I cannot for the life of me think why I put this on hold at the library; it's not in my database of To-Read, and I doubt it was referred to by anything else I read recently. On the other hand, how convenient, a serendipitous view into marketing thought, which I don't normally read. I found it disingenuously creepy, but I can't tell if it's honest disingenuity or artifice.
The 'new American luxury' is, as I understand it, to spend extravagantly on some types of goods while making do with mass-market functionality in others. I am surprised that this is thought new; I thought it was long-held knowledge that, for instance, luxury lipstick has a bigger market than luxury soap, partly because lipstick is used in public. It may be that what this book is really about is selling soap as though it were lipstick. Victoria's Secret is one of their favorite examples; since I've never found their goods very good, and this book says they have much higher profit margins than department stores do for similar goods, I became pretty suspicious that the idea was to sell mediocre goods with fancy branding to people who couldn't really afford it.
The evidence adduced to explain the new habits of consumption included some very depressing stuff, e.g. that income for the top quintile in the US is up ~70% in real terms in the last 30 years, considerably better than the income of the bottom four-fifths; the cheery rhetoric is that 'everyone' can buy luxury goods in their favorite category, but their studies refer to households with income of more than $50k annually, often more than $75k. It does matter whether luxury spending depends on 'everyone' or the $75k crowds; and then it further matters how much of it is supported by consumer credit.
The less suspicious explanations include women's different spending patterns, now that women mostly work and don't have time to be as thrifty as our grandmothers were; and that every efficiency improvement in production makes bare survival cheaper, leaving more income for fashion. I certainly agree that both are largely true and partly beneficial, although we don't account for all the costs in either case.
I completely fail to see why the 'new luxury' is more democratic than the 'old luxury', unless Prada is cheaper than Gucci was, which I kind of doubt. I don't think it's true that 'real' designers working for mass-market producers is new; I vaguely remember it happening in the '70s, and I read that it did in the '30s, especially in England. I'm a little dubious that Michael Graves laundry baskets are going to be a net benefit for the body politic, since they can go painfully out of fashion, which a laundry-basket that has no fashion can't do. I don't know how we'd match the fashion cycle of goods to their natural useful lifespan, so's to not induce extra trash; well, actually, of course I know: if everyone is thrifty and doesn't throw away their perfectly good laughably outdated stuff, cycles of style will either slow down or become shallower. Not the marketing ideal, either one.
I was somewhat entertained that a book on the 'new American luxury' kept referring to European food and craftsmanship, and European engineering of both design and production, as luxuries Americans can now democratically provide to everyone (in $50k/annum households). The three explanations that come immediately to mind are that the richer parts of Europe are still supporting 35-hour workweeks and serious recycling laws, so they've built some traditional thrift into their economy that we haven't protected at all; that the mass market in Europe lives on US-designed temporary stuff made in the developing world (but for anything more long-term than a shirt that didn't look true to me: Swedish-designed semitemporary stuff made everywhere, maybe); or that it's a habitual tic of marketers.
The last chapter is on luxury and philosophy, consumption and guilt, as mutual drivers of production; and production as a driver of social conditions; not very deep, but not a cheese metaphor.
ISBN: 1591840139
So wrote clew in History (21st c.). | TrackBack