AFFLUENZA
New visions of bubble-land
HINDOL SENGUPTA
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Having seen one of its worst downturns, the luxury industry now will be driven more by feel rather than show, more by the personal rather than the social…
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It will be about not so much the brand, per se, but what the quality and goods do for you, how they make you feel.
Photo: AP
Sense of touch: A creation of Bottega Veneta’s Spring/Summer 2009 collection.
This week I am in mourning.
My tailor, a gentle, venerable, god-fearing Muslim man died a few days ago. He died, as he had lived, quietly. He died in his sleep. With his death comes the end of the most valued luxury in my mind. Tailored clothes. Never before, in my Blackberry unclouded world, has the idea of bespoke been more critical.
I grew up in the world of handstitch. In a world where shirts were made from cloth bought and given to critical tailors who measured you from head to toe, getting every detail, including measuring your crotch. One of my first sexual experiences, as it were, was the measuring tape sending a slight tingle up the crotch.
This was a world of exactitude, a world where one could “alter”, not merely choose or refuse. In many ways, I am mourning the passing of my old tailor because finally bespoke is back at the forefront of the idea of fashion.
Atelier, a division of Leo Burnett, has just released “14 New Drivers of Luxury”, essentially the key ideas of that will take the luxury industry forward at a time when the world of never-ending bubble-land, otherwise known as luxury, is seeing one of its worst downturns.
One of the key ideas according to the Atelier report that will drive luxury in the future is FEEL, not merely SHOW. The idea is that luxury will become, more than ever before and after a decade of preening, more about the personal, rather than the social.
It will be about not so much the brand, per se, but what the quality and goods do for you, how they make you feel. The new idea of luxury will not derive itself from jealous stares but comfort smiles.
This is interesting. For years, of course, luxury was less the envelope of Bottega Veneta and more the titillating hedonism of Tom Ford-induced Gucci. While Gucci has become less lascivious after the departure of Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole, it is hardly quiet.
I have never been a big lover of the blazing brand. The raging double G of Gucci or the cascading C of Chanel dominating every other feature of, for instance, hand bags does nothing for me. Particularly offensive, to me aesthetically, are these metal logos on footwear.
Price, I have always believed, in luxury, like for instance in the world of wines, ought to be on critical judgement, like the rating system of Robert Parker in wines, than merely logo value. I have no qualm in saying that several things that are overpriced purely on the basis of logo do not last and should never be bought.
In artery-clogging Mumbai, where I refuse to live these days, I once saw Salvatore Ferragamo basic cotton t-shirts for Rs. 27,000. Happily, Ferragamo does rubbish business in India and I hear that while they may have some lovers of their great shoes, few buy their clothes.
Such logo extravagance means that the world of fashion and luxury has a strange issue. They happily charge the sky and moon for the logo but furiously complain when piracy takes the charm off their logo-induced goods.
So first, the luxury companies make people believe that their lives would be incomplete without some supremely overpriced stuff and then complain that their brand is being hurt by cheaper copies because clearly not everyone who is influenced by their mega-million dollar pitch can afford to buy the originals.
But the reason millions of customers are fuelling the fake market is because they have been led to believe that they cannot live without the handbags, the shoes and the clothes!
This is like the i-banking community justifying — even after what happened — 18 billion dollar payoffs and bonuses this year claiming that they need to pay up to retain the best talent. As the late night TV joke goes, they don’t HAVE good people! If they did, they wouldn’t have lost all that money!
Well, hopefully this vicious cycle will now come to an end. After all, many of the people fuelling the endless price rise of designer goods have now slunk away from their million dollar beach-houses and their turbo-charged boats and the last thing in the mind of them or their WAPS are Jimmy Choo shoes.
This all pervading power of the logo, suggests the Atelier report, might be coming to an end. Will it end our obsession of paying a fortune merely to sport a label?
Don’t we know better?
As it so happens, it seems to me, that we once did? Isn’t that the idea we all grew up with? Especially in India, where even in 1990s brands were few and even fewer people could, or did, afford them. One everlasting feeling while growing up was that every brand was a “foreign” brand. Allen Solly, I used to think as child, was foreign, so was Van Heusen, so, I thought, was Bare. Everything with grease paper packaging and flat cardboard backs and collar strips — everything seemed alien, wonderful and expensive. In short, foreign.
All that naturally has changed. Very few people now dip into the tailors for shirt or trouser fittings and in the curious reverse conundrum of capitalism, only the wealthiest are now measured lovingly for everything that touches their body.
When we were growing up, of course, the people who went to the tailors are the ones who could not afford the brands.
Will that time come back? Most likely not. The age of brands has dawned forever. But more than ever before, we will perhaps not be judged for not looking like a billboard. Which brings me back to my tailor. Last year he told me that these days more and more customers kept bringing him new designs, asking him to copy. He was not sure whether he ought to do it. He had heard about piracy and didn’t know where to draw the line. Someone had told him that a shop in Mumbai had been raided.
This was new. Never before in all the years that he had diligently made clothes exactly to measure and many a times from photos in magazines brought to him had he ever felt threatened. He had read that some people had been arrested. Arrested? This was new, scary territory.
Now this confused man is dead. With him, something made specifically to my measure has died. But this recession seems to have dawned a new age of restrained luxury. I only wish my old tailor would have been alive to see an age where very rich people and very rich brands are not scared of the poor copying them.
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