Needing the unnecessary: the democratization of luxury

Reason, August, 2002 by James B. Twitchell

So here is the Cashmere Company hawking something it calls pashmina. The word is a linguistic trick. Cashmere is goat hair from Kashmir, an area between India and Pakistan, whereas pashmina is simply the Persian word for the same goat in the same area. In other words, it's the same stuff. But that's not what is interesting. It is that pashmina has been introduced precisely because places like Kmart have too much cashmere. So what we have is a top-of-the-line product topped because too many people were in the checkout line.

But then again, what of Michael Graves-designed toasters for Target, Ralph Lauren house paint, and Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter brand furniture at Ethan Allen Furniture stores? This tectonic shift in consumption is why the designer Lynette Jennings, host of the Discovery Channel's Lynette Jennings Design and HouseSmart, is peddling doorknobs at Home Depot.

If you want to see how varied the consumers of the new luxuries are, just take a tour of your local Costco or Sam's Club parking lot. Observe the shiny new imported sedans and SUVs alongside aging subcompacts. Or spend an hour watching what is being sold on the Home Shopping Network, a televised flea market for impulse buyers. The system now has 23,000 incoming phone lines capable of handling up to 20,000 calls a minute. Home Shopping no longer sells just cubic zirconium rings. Not when the real money is in designer handbags.

In the older culture, my dad's culture, the limited production capacity of the economy sharply reduced aspirations to material comfort. In the modern world, my culture, much greater material satisfactions lie within the reach of even those of modest means. Thus a producer culture becomes a consumer culture, a hoarding culture becomes a surplus culture, a work culture becomes a therapeutic culture. Because what you buy becomes more important than what you make, luxury is not a goal; for many it is a necessity.

Luxury Creep

Michael J. Apter, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has studied why we do things and, by extension, why we buy things. In The Experience of Motivation: The Theory of Psychological Reversals, he divides general orientations into telic (arousal reducing) and paratelic (arousal seeking). A telic motivation starts with isolating a need and then feeling anxious about resolving it. The experience ends, if successful, with a feeling of relaxation. If the ending does not satisfy the need (postdecision dissonance), the anxiety continues, and the process is repeated until it abates. A paratelic tendency, however, begins in a state of well-being that edges over into boredom. The person seeks excitement and judges the act by the experience. Does it resolve boredom? Not to put too fine a point on it, but consuming luxury for many Americans has gone from telic to paratelic, from product to process, from problem resolution to emotion seeking, from object to experience.

The one characteristic of modern luxe is its profound oxymoronic nature: If everyone can have it, is it still luxury? If you want to see the difference that a generation makes in downshifting luxury, just look at how top-of-the-line domestic automobiles are advertised. Compare Cadillac in the early part of the 20th century with Lincoln at the end of the century, and you'll get the idea.