As seen in a previous post, the definition of luxury is pretty wide at the moment. While many decades ago it was about specific goods and items made following high craftsmanship and quality standards, "luxury" embarked onto a very strange mutating journey in the 1990s when free-wheeling deal makers such as Bernard Arnault and François Pinault began their rise to the top of their groups by acquiring and merging one historical luxury brand after the other. Trained to manage corporations and work the stock market, but unskilled when it came to actually making luxurious things, the managers of such multibillion-dollar conglomerates de-skilled processes, forgot the original definition of luxury and imposed their own definition, based on mergers and acquisition strategies.
This process also implied cutting out the craftspeople and the artisans - and therefore lowering the human cost - while increasing the sales volume, generating higher profits. Luxury therefore assumed other meanings, disconnecting itself from the handmade/high quality categories to find more connections with finance and profit. In a nutshell, if you wanted to learn more about what used to be a hand-crafted art producing fashionable products, you had to read business and finance magazines rather than fashion and style publications.
If you're a wealthy fashionista and you speak the language of the stock markets, you can also pick among a list of luxury shares - LVMH, Kering, Ralph Lauren Corp., Michael Kors Holdings Ltd., Tiffany and Co., Burberry, Prada SpA, Tod's SpA, Salvatore Ferragamo SpA and Brunello Cucinelli, to mention a few of them - or just wait for the next luxury fashion label to file for an I.P.O. and float itself on the stock market. Art is also being reinvented as a luxury item to add prestige to your persona, though the art market is currently strictly intertwined with luxury fashion brands.
Nowadays luxury is more or less explained by the thirst for many beautiful gorgeous things: think about the superficial protagonists of Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring who want to be part of the lifestyle and own as many clothes and accessories as possible, so it has mainly got to do with quantity rather than quality. But there is also what can be defined as layered luxury: read any kind of article - from financial magazines to blogs by teenagers - and you'll find them talking about luxury markets and businesses; luxury conferences; "luxe sportswear" (think sneakers encrusted with sparkling jewels and bejewelled Teva-like sandals matched with Haute Couture pieces); sleek homeware luxury, possibly designed by an architect such as Dame Zaha Hadid; hard (high-end watches and jewellery) and high-tech luxury. Last but not least, the most oxymoronic definition - "High Street luxury collaborations": the much-trumpeted Alexander Wang for H&M's collection is allegedly defined by the designer's signature "sports luxe vibe".
If you think about all these connections you realise it's only natural for luxury to become the protagonist of 2015, as also proved by an exhibition dedicated to it at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Entitled "What is Luxury?" (opening in April), the free event co-curated by Jana Scholze, curator of Contemporary Furniture and Product Design at the V&A and Leanne Wierzba, V&A/Winchester School of Art Research Fellow, will include over 100 examples of contemporary design and craftsmanship plus conceptual projects focused on the ideas of luxury. The choice will be particularly wide and at times rather bizarre, incorporating among the others a diamond made from roadkill, a vending machine stocked with DNA and a golden crown for ecclesiastical use.
The event will open with luxurious objects in which design and craftsmanship excel, such as the Space Travellers' Watch, an entirely hand-crafted mechanical timepiece by British watchmaker George Daniels, a laser-cut haute couture dress by fashion designer Iris van Herpen, a chandelier by Studio Drift featuring real dandelion seeds applied by hand to LED lights, a Hermès Talaris saddle which combines traditional leather craftsmanship with a technologically innovative structure, and the Bubble Bath necklace by Nora Fok, made from more than 1000 hand-knitted nylon bubbles.
All these labour-intensive items take a lot of hours to make and this concept will be represented by "Time Elapsed", a spirograph designed by Philippe Malouin for glassware company Lobmeyr which rotates to draw patterns made of sand.
Further concepts linked with luxury - such as expertise and exquisite details - will be investigated through objects hinting at different types and levels of luxury: bowls by artist Chung Hae-Cho created entirely through building up multiple layers of lacquer will be juxtaposed to a menswear ensemble by designer Carol Christian Poell, a perfect example of the art of tailoring.
There will also be time for an ironic take on luxury with "Time for Yourself", a playful toolkit for misdirection which features a watch with no dial and a compass which spins to random co-ordinates, to suggest visitors that the idea of getting lost and enjoy time and space could be a welcomed luxury in a world in which we are perennially connected to some constantly trackable device.
An interesting point of the exhibition will be the future interpretations of the concept of luxury: the curators wonder what luxury will be like in a few years' time through projects that tackle this issue via new and innovative materials, like "Hair Highway" by Studio Swine. Human hair are set in resin to create highly decorative pieces of furniture and accessories that look as if they were made with tortoiseshell, horn and exotic wood, but are made of one of the few natural resources which increases along with the world's population.
Aram Mooradian's A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions re-examines instead our relationship with gold presenting a series of everyday objects made with gold mined in Australia, including a headphone jack and a pendant, engraved with personal local histories to encode them with a new cultural value.
These objects questioning luxury in controversial ways are actually the most interesting pieces: work by Unknown Fields Division, including vessels made from toxic mud collected on a recent expedition to the Rare Earth Elements' mines in Inner Mongolia, American artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo's DNA Vending Machine containing pre-packaged DNA samples and the installation The Boltham Legacy by artist Henrik Nieratschker telling the fictional story of a British billionaire who sends altered bacteria into space in an attempt to find valuable metals on distant planets, will provoke visitors and prompt them to think about resources, access, privacy and ownership.
This will probably be the most interesting part of the event, as it will challenge common interpretations of luxury and reveal us that, no, luxury is definitely not just about expensive clothes and accessories, and in future it may be about natural resources and very basic human needs. Time will tell, but starting to consider certain natural resources as luxury and therefore trying not to waste but preserve them, may be really the key to a new lifestyle in 2015.
Image credits for this post
1. - 2. The Second Space Travellers Watch, Front and Back, George Daniels, 1983, © Jasper Gough, Sotheby’s
3. Ecclesiastical crown, ca. 1750, © The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
4. Fragile Future 3 Concrete Chandelier, Studio Drift, 2011, © Studio Drift, Courtesy of Carpenters Workshop Gallery
5. Voltage Dress, Iris van Herpen, 2013, Paris © M. Zoeter x Iris van Herpen
6. - 7. Necklace, Bubble Bath, Nora Fok, 2001, Photo by Heini Schneebeli, Courtesy of the Crafts Council
8. Time for Yourself, Marcin Rusak and Iona Inglesby, 2013 © Marcin Rusak
9. Combs, Hair Highway, Studio Swine, 2014 © Studio Swine
10. Headphone Jack, A Comprehensive Atlas of Gold Fictions, Aram Mooradian, 2011 © Aram Mooradian
11. The Boltham Legacy, Henrik Nieratschker, 2014, © Henrik Nieratschker
12. Body 1, Re-materialisation of Systems, El Ultimo Grito, 2014 © Photos by POI
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