Why Is Luxury So Boring?


Why is luxury so boring? This question occurs to me whenever I pass a duty-free shop or walk down the P.C. Hooftstraat, Amsterdam’s luxury shopping street. I once spent a day in a client store there and came away with only one memorable observation which was the word STULTIFYING written in capital letters across the top of the page. Despite the very occasional customer and the ever-present scent of finished leather (the signature base note of all luxury retail scentology), it felt airless and uninhabited, like the vacant stare of luxury models who always look as though they’ve been beaten on the head with a mallet then asked to mentally calculate the cube root of an 8-digit number.


Unlike its cousin, fashion, which regularly indulges in high/low visual incongruities in order to titillate if not actually interest, luxury tends to just sit there, with the same product detail shots and mallet-stunned models inhabiting the same empty-ish space. Of course, interest lies in the eye of the beholder and I am a fairly curmudgeonly beholder, but luxury seems to be making a determined effort to be static and to depict stasis. Behind the desultory, borrowed interest of the latest ‘street collab’ yawns an endless ecru cyclorama smelling vaguely of leather and linen.

PC Hooftstraat lies just inside Zuid (South), the wealthiest part of the city (https://lnkd.in/df5RaJks). But while I avoid the PC Hooftstraat whenever possible, I have always been secretly attracted to the quiet, leafy, monied, residential side of Zuid, with its heavy oak doors leading through a series of dark, never-remodeled rooms to unsuspected and overgrown walled gardens designed (I imagine) for sipping jenever and re-reading favorite books, forever.

And as I stand at the intersection of PC Hooftstraat and Van Baerlestraat, between the public and private sides of Zuid, I’m struck by how closely related timelessness and boredom are. Maybe that’s the point of luxury. Boredom isn’t a bug, but a feature. What you’re buying is timelessness, a sign of immortality. Men (and I do mean, *men*) have always thrown money at immortality once they had enough to eat. But as everyone who has thought seriously about the possibility of eternal life has told us, from the Greeks to the Canadians (https://lnkd.in/dxwnGNzJ), immortality looks beautiful, but it will bore you to madness.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is the Dove-Nike Collaboration Interesting?

Image
This collaboration makes sense, but is it interesting? It has signs of interestingness: when we see something that we appraise as likely to be interesting: Both Dove and Nike have done interesting things in the past and, while not always true, interesting x interesting usually equals interesting. And both have established a pattern of marketing that aims to empower girls/women. So teaming up on an important social mission, using sports participation to build confidence in girls, reinforces both brand patterns. And if this is as deep as the causal viewer goes into this collaboration, the appraisal is likely to be: "That's great! Good on both of these brands for doing something positive in the world." But there is more to being interesting than just the signs. The signs of being interesting alone have less of a chance of creating long-term memories and mental availability than a deeper level of thought generates. Finding something 'interesting' is also an assessme...
Read more

Creative Efficiency Overlooked, Again

Image
In May, Gartner released their CMO survey results, revealing a significant reduction in average marketing budgets for 2024. Budgets have decreased by 15%, now constituting a mere 7.7% of overall company revenues. In response, CMOs are reallocating resources in an era of scarcity, and many believe that AI will come to the rescue delivering increased efficiency. This echoes previous thinking touting digital channels as the solution for efficiency, despite ample evidence suggesting otherwise. Amidst discussions on budget reallocations, there is a glaring omission: investing in higher-quality creative. It's surprising that the creative aspect remains overlooked in driving efficiency, especially years after Binet & Field demonstrated that award-winning creative is 11+ times more efficient than non-award-winning creative. High-quality creative is the most efficient investment a marketer can make to enhance the impact of their ad budget, yet its value is consistently neglected. Advert...
Read more

I guess this proves the 'what gets measured gets managed' quote.

Image
Ian Gibbs Ian Gibbs • Following • Following The DMA, JICMAIL and PAMCo - Data and Insight Director / Technical Consultant The DMA, JICMAIL and PAMCo - Data and Insight Director / Technical Consultant 1w • Edited • 1 week ago 1. Performance marketing effectiveness declined for the third year running in 2023. 2. Sub-standard measurement of short-term activity was a key contributing factor. 3. 38% of the metrics being used to measure results are less meaningful campaign delivery and digital vanity metrics as opposed to meaningful business, brand and response effects. 4. Campaigns which avoid focusing on less meaningful campaign delivery effects record a 67% uplift in business effects on average. 5. Those who invest in best practice measurement (such as MMM, MTA, brand measurement and incrementality tests) generate 42% more effects on average. 6. Best practice measurement is linked to a culture of effectiveness and drives future campaign performance through shar...
Read more