Eliza video 6 : Story of luxury Fashion.

 When it comes to admiring the trappings of other peoples’ lives—autumnal sweaters and doe-eyed dogs curled up on plush duvets, the deep suntans of exotic vacations, artfully arrayed homegrown tomatoes—there’s no medium quite like Instagram. Scrolling through can feel like catching glimpses through windows of the charmed, well-lit luxuries of other people’s lives—making one’s own feel lacking in comparison.

Instagram envy is a wholly modern phenomenon, but a deeply conflicted attitude toward luxury is not. What is it about luxury that inspires both our deep desire and derision? And how did we get here?

Luxury is a performance

The clothes make the man. Perhaps no historical figure lived this concept quite like Louis XIV. With his dizzying renovation of Versailles in the late 1600s, and his establishment of a court culture with a strict and lavish dress code, the French king equated a man’s possessions with his power.

“The king stood in for the nation, and his things stood in for him,” write Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello in Luxury: A Rich History. Louis, for example, possessed a “ship-like vessel that contained the king’s knife, fork, and napkin,” and he compelled courtiers to bow before it. (Perhaps bending a knee before a boat full of flatware was a 17th-century version of double-tapping a photo of a place-setting at a candle-lit dinner party on Instagram?)

The lavish furnishings and fashion that Louis XIV required—much of which was supplied by state-supported royal manufacturers—established the French luxury sector as we know it, and with it the idea that the lifestyle of European aristocrats represented the pinnacle of luxury.

The economist Thorstein Veblen laid out the social forces that shaped such behavior in his 1899 treatise, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Here, he coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how people exempt from manual labor bought goods whose primary function was to confer status. When it came to high fashion, an item of clothing sought to demonstrate both that it was expensive and that it would impede physical labor—a man’s high hat, for example, or a woman’s high heel.

We see this today in the marketing of high-end watches. A plastic Swatch might well tell you the hour, but a Rolex Daytona tells you something else entirely. Such a watch tells you, for starters, that the owner spent upwards of $12,000 on it.

Well, yeah, ostensibly, you might say. It might also just tell you that the owner is a poser who wears a Rolex because that’s what rich people do.

 And this is where the language of luxury breaks down.

We hate luxury, even as we aspire to it

But even as her diamond-encrusted gowns and masquerade balls personified the vast inequality that drove France to bloody revolution, they also inspired imitators all over Europe. The Queen’s yard-high hairdos, in particular, drew widespread attention, wrote Judith Thurman in the New Yorker in 2006.

“The pouf was a cross between a topiary and a Christmas tree, and each creation, about a yard high, had a sentimental or political theme, depending on the wearer and the occasion,” she wrote. “This amusingly freakish coiffure became the rage all over Europe, and, like most of the Queen’s fashion fantasias, it proved particularly ruinous to her plebeian imitators, who, it was said, sacrificed their dowries on the altar of the Austrian’s frivolity, and thus their chances of marriage.”

Today, we have modern-day Marie Antoinettes inspiring—or “influencing,” in the parlance of our times—millions of such imitators via social media.

Our fascination with Jenner’s offspring—obsessively following details such as the $320,000 Ferrari Kylie received on her birthday, or the $10,000, crystal-studded Saint Laurent boots Kendall wore to celebrate hers—has helped keep their reality show on television for 14 seasons (and counting), and given them the platform from which to launch spinoff products and projects, and secure endorsements making them millionaires many times over.

That feeling, as anyone who has ever pined for a pair of shoes or handbag beyond their budget can attest, is not necessarily a good one. And in the midst of a new Gilded Age, when the world’s super-rich hold their greatest concentration of wealth since the heyday of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt, it stands to reason that it’s rampant. As are the knockoffs of those shoes and handbags.

Luxury has a new, covert language

For as long as the concept of luxury has existed, so has a societal uneasiness—disgust, even—with the performance of wealth. That disgust has come not only from the poor, but also from the wealthy, horrified when the luxuries that once signified their class become more widely available.

“In its origins, luxury was not a term to describe consumption by elites, but one used to denigrate the consumer practices of newly emerging wealthy classes,” writes historian Catherine Kovesi, of luxury in ancient Rome. “It was the Italians who were the first to revive the ancient use of luxury as a term of denigration for the aspirational consumption of non-elites, and it was also the Italians who were the first to invent a new word in the vernacular to describe this consumption—lusso, or luxury.” (Lusso was coined by a poet in 1441, who paired it with pomp and pride, and called it “revolting” some 500 years before anyone mocked a person pairing pointy-toed loafers with distressed denim and oversized aviators as “Eurotrash.”)

Meanwhile, a rising set of Western elites are abandoning the old-school trappings of wealth and instead finding new markers of luxury—locally raised eggs, yoga classes, organic cotton t-shirts. To this new “aspirational class” the tote bag that comes free with a New Yorker subscription is more impressive than even the rarest of Birkins. That’s because their idea of luxury is defined less by expensive possessions than by a set of cultural values.

“They distance themselves from conventional material goods not because they are uncomfortable with wealth … but rather because material goods are no longer a a clear signal of social position or a good conduit to reveal cultural capital or knowledge,” author Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writes in her 2017 book, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. “Today, material goods are plentiful but their ability to reveal or enable social mobility is increasingly limited.”

The “new elites” have cultivated a value system based on social, environmental, and cultural awareness—which has proven an effective way to reveal their social position. Rather than displaying the top hats and heels of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, they opt for signifiers that reveal their intellectual depth and values, a distinction hilariously captured in a Portlandia bit entitled “Did You Read It?” that ends with the stars literally consuming—as in, eating—a copy of Portland Monthly magazine in a competition for cultural superiority.

Luxury makes us human

Truth told, it’s a nice-looking sweater. And if I did long to curl up in it, that wouldn’t make me an asshole. It would just make me human.

In Plato’s Republic, the dialogue on civilization recorded some 2,400 years ago, Socrates laid out a picture of an ideal and peaceful city, in which every citizen’s needs—food, clothing, and shelter—would be met in a simple style:

As Quartz’s Olivia Goldhill wrote, “Far from being an indulgence only of those who are supremely wealthy, luxuries are often most valuable precisely to those who struggle the most to afford them.”

In 381 BC, it assured the citizens of Socrates’ luxurious state that they were more than pigs. In the productivity-obsessed 21st century, a personal luxury might remind us that we’re more than machines.

Christian Dior made this argument when he debuted his “New Look” in the aftermath of World War II. Then a new couturier, he was lambasted as unpatriotic for opening a luxury label in Paris during such grim times. But he defended a personal sense of luxury in lofty terms: “In a time as dark as our own, where luxury consists of guns and airplanes, our sense of luxury must be defended at all costs,” he wrote. “I believe that in it there’s something essential. Everything that goes beyond the simple fact of food, clothing and shelter is luxury; the civilization we defend is luxury.”

In other words: Luxury—with all the aspiration, ambivalence, and envy we feel for it—isn’t just a bug of society. It’s a feature, fundamental to what makes us human.

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