I’ve had a busy few months which, from a financial perspective at least, has been no bad thing. The downside is that the writing has rather suffered in frequency. Oddly though, I find the opposite happens in my head. When work is busy I seem to notice more. Every train journey, client meeting, conversation and aimless wander through London gets mentally filed under “there’s probably a piece in that.” The vast majority stay there.
During quieter periods, visibility anxiety has an unfortunate habit of convincing me that almost every observation deserves to become a LinkedIn post. I don’t think I publish complete nonsense, but there is probably a regression to the mean. Which is all to say that this was one of the ideas that escaped the notebook. You can decide whether it should have.
I’ve always liked the contrast between elite athletes and their coaches. You see someone with the physique of a middle-aged middle manager calmly explaining to a twenty-two-year-old Olympic hopeful why their hips are opening half a degree too early. It feels faintly absurd but of course the coach isn’t there to run the race. They’re there because they’ve developed the judgement over time and perhaps their own career to notice things the athlete no longer can.
I occasionally wonder whether writing about luxury is a bit like that. Unlike some of LinkedIn’s more glamorous commentators, I’m not bouncing between Aman resorts, Formula One paddocks and yacht launches in Como. My natural habitat remains Esher, the quiet south Cornish coast, RHS Chelsea and occasionally Regent Street if I’m feeling particularly in need of retail.
Then again, most athletics coaches aren’t still running the 110m hurdles.
A few weeks ago I found myself walking through Belgravia. It’s one of the few places in London where almost every version of wealth seems to coexist. You see extraordinary money, of course, but what I noticed wasn’t the value of it but it was that everyone appeared to be speaking slightly different ‘languages’.
A Ferrari slipped past me on Audley Street. I didn’t know what it was, as is typical it carried no model badge. On Burlington and Bond Street there are shops where the bags in the window carry no logo or at least logos so small as to be unreadable from a distance.
And then, a few streets later, came a Rolls-Royce Cullinan in a vulgar magenta with the kind of chrome accents that wouldn’t be out of place on a 50s Cadillac.
None of the people owning these goods, I suspect, would consider themselves to have anything other than luxury tastes and certainly not bad taste. They would consider themselves discerning. Yet each are signalling entirely different things.
To return to Ferrari. I’ve always found it fascinating that a company capable of building a bright red, mid-engined supercar, loud enough to be described as “an operatic rhinoceros trapped inside a tumble dryer”, draws the line at six scripted letters across the boot line. Reader, it is many things, but subtle isn’t one of them.
And yet somebody inside Ferrari decided that “296 GTB” didn’t need telegraphing. If you know, you know. If you don’t, a badge ain’t going to change you.
Porsche on the other hand seems to have reached the opposite conclusion. Their model names have that daft run-on suffixing , but worse than that is their love of decals and special edition badging and stitching. Range Rover briefly lost its mind too. During my time around the brand it seemed every derivative acquired another flourish of nomenclature until the back of the car resembled one of those late-90s PCs covered in stickers announcing Intel Inside and “Designed for Microsoft Office.” BMW, meanwhile, has scattered M badges across the range with the enthusiasm of a toddler decorating a birthday card.
None of which makes them wrong, but it does make me wonder whether luxury itself is beginning to diverge. There is one version wants to be recognised and another that only needs to be recognised by the right people.
At this point somebody with a proper strategy background and much cleverer than me would probably invoke Pierre Bourdieu, so I’ll save them the trouble. Bourdieu argued that status isn’t simply about money, but rather what he called cultural capital: the accumulation of taste, knowledge and judgement that subtly tells other people where you belong.
Owning an expensive watch tells me you have money. Recognising an expensive watch that almost nobody else notices tells me something rather different. One is a demonstration of wealth, the other a demonstration of fluency. Unfortunately, Instagram rather complicated the whole affair.
Online, luxury became something performed for people scrolling past in fractions of a second. In this environment logos and monograms work brilliantly. A Louis Vuitton bought in Tenerife because everyone back home will recognise it. The Balenciaga hoodie bought on Vinted because the logo is more important than the drop-season, also works.
At the opposite end of the wealth spectrum, exactly the same instinct produces superyachts like shopping centres and watches that look capable of summoning a medevac. Different bank balances, remarkably similar behaviour.
The trouble is, cameras are hopeless at photographing ambiguity and judgement; design lines and proportions rarely survive a thumbnail. Neither does impeccable tailoring nor hospitality that is anticipatory and personal rather than performative. My vision of luxury might be a beautifully balanced Hoek yacht easing through Scandinavian waters while the owner wears a twenty-year-old jumper because they genuinely couldn’t care less. I covet the brands and experiences that show curation and restraint.
And before anyone starts sharpening the comments, I don’t think one version is morally superior to the other. Vulgarity, after all, is culturally relative. To the Emirati collector, a two-tone Phantom with intricate marquetry might represent extraordinary craftsmanship and generosity. To a Nordic architect it may feel grotesque. Neither is objectively right, they they’re simply speaking different aesthetic languages.
Diagnostically, I wonder whether we simply misunderstand the people buying these things. Which speaks to my own scepticism and misgivings of traditional personas in luxury.
Male.
Fifty-four.
£250m family office.
Owns homes in London and Verbier.
Fine.
Now tell me whether he commissions a floating palace with a cinema, helipad and c., or spends the next decade restoring a Swan 65 because the joinery is beautiful and he likes crossing the North Sea under sail. Those are completely different people in a way that doesn’t show up demographically but culturally.
Traditional segmentation along these lines has remarkably little to say about such distinctions because it’s looking in entirely the wrong place. So, as I jumped on the train home that warm evening in London, I jotted down a few thoughts that tried to unpick why I still see brands spending a great deal of time asking who customers are: their age, income, their geography and profession, perhaps so anchored in media buying. Whereas I believe in this sector the more insightful question is something else entirely. Who do they imagine they’re speaking to?
Because somewhere between that clean-lined Ferrari and the bling-trimmed Cullinan, it occurred to me that luxury isn’t one language or culture at all. It’s a collection of dialects.
John Gibbard 