My friend Bernard Cova offers BrandWatch this fascinating paper, first published in March 2010 in “Les Cahiers Européens de l’Imaginaire (No. 2)”. A big thanks to Bernard and the publishers of the “Cahiers”, which I can only encourage you to read regularly. This article will appear on BrandWatch in two instalments – the second instalment next Saturday, April 10.
Bernard Cova lives in Marseille. He teaches and conducts research on consumption at Euromed Management in Marseille and Bocconi University in Milan. He aspires to define as accurately as possible the role of consumption in contemporary life. His latest work (to be published shortly) questions the recurring discussions about the “new consumer”, creative and responsible.

Does the crisis we are facing since the end of 2008 – and which seems to be just another spasm in the slow fall into the hellhole of a consumer society that many observers seem to suggest – mean the end of luxury as we know it until today? Three concordant trends elicit a response in the affirmative: The end of consumerism, the emergence of new luxury and the need for sustainable luxury that also addresses environmental concerns with regard to the future of the planet. However, luxury, extreme luxury, seems impervious to these developments. But this extreme luxury, is it really luxury to our fellow citizens?

The end of hyper-consumerism: low-key luxury

The February 26 edition of the French weekly, Challenges, is categorical: “The era of even-more is over. A halt to immoderation was already in our minds; the crisis only served to reveal it. We can now reinvent everything”. It is the end of hyper-consumerism and, with it, the wanton spending that has marked the past twenty years. The party is over! We are experiencing, according to Robert Rochefort, director of CREDOC, a rejection of the insatiable, polluting and often excessive consumer society of the past years, “consumers over-satiated in recent years, want more simple things; beautiful, useful and good are back”. For consumers, the time for cutting back has arrived. They must now do penance and repent for the outrageous spending of the past years. We are entering an era of consumer frugality. And it is not only purchasing power that is at half-mast; it is also the desire to spend. The economic crisis therefore serves as an incantation, if not inquisitor, for the various commentators on our society. According to them, the Apocalypse is at hand if we do not reduce our consumption, restrict ourselves and become more virtuous. The main target of these discourses – luxury!

In fact, behind the attacks on excessive spending, saturated consumers and glorification of consumption, is a condemnation of the superfluous and of spending, as defined by Georges Bataille, a denunciation of luxury. Significantly, a recent analysis from the market research firm GFK shows that consumers now permit themselves only minor luxuries, petty luxury, and refrain from lavish spending, an echo of the sermons of the inquisitors. We should keep in mind here that the crisis merely legitimized the anti-luxury discourses that previously existed at both the academic and professional level. The book of Professor Benoit Duguay of the UQAM in Montreal, “Consumption and Luxury: The Path of Excess and Illusion”, is a significant example. Specialist in sales and marketing, Benoit Duguay, in this book, questions the overspending linked to this new and widespread attitude, the taste for luxury in all its forms. “We are witnessing today in both the producer and the consumer, a demonstration of exaggerated behaviour, selfish, often irresponsible, even destructive, widely adopted in the name of luxury”, he writes. He warns against certain pernicious consequences – and excesses – of luxury: “One year, you buy a high-end gadget. The next time, this gadget is no longer a luxury for you, and you will want to get something even more luxurious and expensive. Step by step, it creates a phenomenon of inflation that can lead to a serious debt problem”. “I am not against luxury. It is normal to seek it. I am against excesses”, he concludes. The end of hyper-consumerism is therefore the death knell of the excesses of luxury.

The emergence of “masstige”: Affordable luxury.

For several years, the concept of luxury has been evolving; it has turned more democratic under the effects of what the North American academic James Twitchell calls “the new luxury”. According to two experts from the firm for strategic research BCG (Boston Consulting Group), Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske, the boom in the luxury market in the early 2000s has largely been due to this new luxury, a luxury that is more accessible than traditional luxury. This new luxury is conveyed by brands that position themselves above mass-market brands, but at prices similar or slightly higher, hence the idea of “masstige” – a neologism from a contraction of “mass” and “prestige”. Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren are the most typical examples. A recent (2009) issue of the Journal of Brand Management dedicated to luxury brands shows how these two brands, placed between traditional luxury brands such as Armani, Gucci or Versace, and consumer brands such as H & M, Mango and Zara, enjoy the prestige of luxury but are still accessible to ordinary consumers. By doing so, these “new luxury” brands make it difficult to categorize and demarcate brand types.

This complexity is amplified by the strategies of traditional luxury brands that offer additional versions that are less elitist, such as Armani Jeans in relation to Armani Haute Couture. At the same time, the strategies of low-cost brands – H & M and Zara – that have a tendency of offering exclusive products signed by the big names in luxury such as Karl Lagerfeld or Stella McCartney, only accentuate this complexity. These products allow a larger circle of clients to access a less expensive version of a luxury brand product, affordable luxury, causing a kind of luxufification of society. However, by the same token, they dilute the very idea of luxury. Consumers of this new luxury, termed affordable, belong to the middle class. Though a few decades ago, there were only two types of consumers: the rich and the poor. Today, the boundary has become increasingly blurred, as more and more people are able to afford luxury products from the big names. The idea of new luxury however is not new. Historians Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford identified, terming it semi-luxury, the makers of imitations of ceramics, luxury glassware and other decorative originals among English manufacturers of the eighteenth century, for a larger clientele than just the English nobility. Every era had its methods and reasons to try and democratize luxury; we are experiencing a new attempt.

One layer more: Sustainable luxury

In spring 2009, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris hosted the first edition of the Sustainable Luxury Fair. The organizers hoped to bring together the stakeholders in new luxury to envisage, along with artists, how it could be combined with sustainable development. In a relatively sober setting, thirty exhibitors displayed, on stands made of reusable and recyclable paper, a number of sustainable luxury goods: From a mahogany catamaran to jewellery in “organic gold”. To explain the latter, the precious metal is extracted from a mine in Colombia without detergent, mercury or cyanide, contrary to intensive and mechanized gold processing. And this gold is also fair trade: the Oro Verde program in Colombia does away with middlemen in order to sell the gold directly to twenty-two jeweller partners; thus the artisan miners are better paid and they undertake to preserve the soil by using traditional techniques and developing agriculture. The British jeweller, Vivien Johnston, uses only sustainable and ethical products such as Oro Verde gold to create her jewellery collection, Fifi jewellery.

The Sustainable Luxury Fair wished to demonstrate that, in many areas, a new form of luxury is emerging, where the individual is no longer the unique centre of the universe. Ostentation is always allowed, but with a respect for one’s entourage and the environment. And to promote the word “ecoluxury”, a name to be sported as a label, which aims eventually to take all areas of industry and commerce into account. Other initiatives, such as the Internet portal FairLuxe, reinforces this concept of sustainable luxury, “the FairLuxe portal ushers in a new luxury, a luxury which corresponds to high-end products with flawless design, and still conforms to the criteria of fair trade, sustainable development and organic agriculture. This combination of interpretations which may seem paradoxical reveals a new approach to luxury: a luxury that cares about its environment and improving the living conditions of underpriviledged populations (www.fairluxe.com)”. It even appears that LVMH is working on a vegetal leather bag and fish skin. And Suzy Menkes, the English guru who observes and has been making fashion for 30 years, heralds the era of sustainable luxury in the columns of the International Herald Tribune. Sustainable luxury is spending without excess, without the overuse of natural resources or exploitation of individuals. If applied to Christmas, a perfect example of excessive consumerism, superficial and inconsiderate as some say, the idea of sustainable luxury urges us to rethink our wantonness in energy-consuming decorations, food and liquor with waste that is difficult to recycle, and especially superfluous luxury gifts. It is as though by trying to limit the excesses of luxury consumption, we are also fighting against the excesses that pollute our planet.

Michel Gutsatz – BrandWatch