What is Luxury? - GD02

One of the questions that has been thrown up at the start of my new design project, one focusing on selling items in a rather middle-class shop, is this; What is Luxury? Anything aiming for added-value sales must go beyond meeting functional requirements (or ignore them) and seek to extract value in some other, more mysterious way, one commonly defined as 'luxury'.

Google image search is no help:

What we see here is actually quite a maximum of variety in style, from ultra-functional aeroplanes and sports cars to ultra-modernist building to classical architecture and car styling. What we do see is a range of images that stop at nothing to display wealth. What comes first, style, luxury or wealth? Is it possible to obtain luxury on the cheap?

In a more rounbdabout way, I get close to this question in one of my series of kettle posts (it still isn't over!), my answer being that the price gap between functional product and anything more expensive is by definition design, or at least the result of 'Design' with a capital 'D'.

A key theme of one my often-referred blogs, Misfits Architecture, goes more accurately to the question of wealth and luxury by considering the history of canonical Architecture and Design (classical - gothic - modernist - high tech - postmodern.. ect..) as a history of styles that are necessarily expensive displays of wealth and ownership.

“Aesthetics give shape to our values and aspirations. This is not necessarily a good thing.

An aesthetic loses its usefulness when its connotations of status are lost, and any process of refinement stops.

Buildings require money and land to build. The history of architectural aesthetics is the history of articulating the ownership of wealth and property.”

It considers the canonical history of ‘meta-aesthetics’ - movements such as high-modernism, high-tech, post-modern and minimalism as styles that contain inherent status as they yearn towards results that are neccecarily expensive. We can observe ourselves that nearly every canonical 'Design' style of the last century overt displays of wealth:

The awe-inspiring Looshaus in vienna, despite being a rejection of traditional form and style, is gladly assisted aesthetically through it's use of ostentatious marble cladding.

Corbu's Villa Savoye, despite it's enthusiastically poetic interior, is assisted externally by the fact that it has a 'stance' which dominates and indicates ownership of a large, flat piece of land, and in it's day would have presented ownership of the river-view as well. These might not be the core reason for it's aesthetic value, but they are certainly what mark it out as an object of luxury. The same can be said for FLW's Fallingwater.

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Postmodernism isn't hard to debunk as a style of materialism and ostentation, but it's easy re-emergence into relevance on dezeen these days tells us a lot about how it gains it's weight as a cerebral, intellectual adventure into 'fun' expression. If this was the natural style of human expression then it would be what all the chavs would be doing. No, it relies very heavily on it's middle-class understanding as something of artistic and philosophical merit, and it is this potential for subtle bourgeois inter-communication from which it derives its value.

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Minimalism seems to perhaps be the antithesis of showy 'Design', but look deeper, what does it rely on? Fundamentally it relies on lack of panel gaps and honest, plain materials; removal of the real, inconvinient details such as mechanisms and handles. Rumours suggest that an apple store table in all it's solid-wood, seamless glory costs in the region of $10,000 - 20,000. Seamless 'extrusions' of real stone cost orders of magnitude more than Corian, not to mention the half-assed coated chipboard that we have to put up with. Imagine being able to actually keep a house clean too, no John Pawson house could last 5 minutes past it's photographed state without an army of housekeepers, think of the status that demonstates.

High-Tech is another style that has failed to keep to it's socialist roots, the star-status of Rodger's NEO Bankside is enough to make it premium property on it's own, not to mention the well-communicated view over the thames (despite stares from Tate Modern guests) afforded by it's expensive massive plate glass windows and it's probably-useless exterior 'structure'.

Brutalism proved (up until the last few years) as something which legitimately was a canonical 'Design' style which avoided luxury. It communicated honesty to materials, but the subject of that honesty was thick pre-cast concrete, decidedly cheap and ugly (especially in wet climates). It managed to make this into an aesthetic, but due to the medium, the only aesthetic available was one of strength and despair in equal measure. It found it's outlet in social housing schemes in and in monumental public building, the heavy hand of the government giving us what we want? Maybe, but certainly not luxury until millennials realised that any dream of housing at all was a luxury and decided that the only way to retain their self-identity was to re-brand brutalism as aspirational.

A guide that will take us away from the already-done architectural criticism and towards a more Product Design scale is the good example of car interiors. These are all designed for exactly the same human interaction, but do it in completely different ways. All still communicate 'luxury' but their version of what luxury is is "same same but different". We also all have a well established internal hierarchy with regards to the social degree of car brands, as these have been heavily enforced by marketing during the course of our lives.

BMW - Premium Materials, but notably the prentention of ‘attention to detail’ and ‘german engineering’ conveyed by it’s accurate detailing.

BMWi - Luxury because it uses premium materials and new technologies.

Rolls Royce - Luxury because it uses premium materials, is hand-crafted, and would be inconvenient for anyone who had to maintain the cleanliness of the car themselves.

Range Rover - Luxury because it uses premium materials and because it is an fetishistic object of functionally overconstrained overkill.

Ferrari F40- Bare bones, but obvious overkill, and the weight savings are the result of things like carbon fibre and Kevlar, which were ridiculously expensive.

Ford by Marc Newson - Okay, not a production car, but we can clearly see another example of hard-to achieve minimalism identified by lack of panel gaps. More importantly it was ‘Designed by the guy who made the lockheed lounge’, giving it middle-class cultural relevance.

Now this isn't the most mainstream study of luxury design ever, one could focus on Rolex, Mulberry and Burberry, all of which are on an even more basic level defined by 'craftmanship' and 'quality (read: cost) of materials'. The question gets more tentative when we introduce Etihad first class flights, Four Seasons hotels and Vegas Casinos but in the same way that Design is an added cost that pays for itself, so is 'premium customer service', always.

Is it possible to generate real luxury with cheap materials? Plastic leather, diamonds and chrome are actually considered cheaper than honest use of real materials in my opinion. If there was a very cheap way of making shiny, seamless, polished, hard, cold and strong door-handles then such an idea would be relentlessly copied in the lower market and would quickly lose sight of any concept of exclusivity. Therefore, luxury is not a style or an objective in itself, but any style which is honest and, more importantly, doubles over on making sure that the end result is expensive.

In conclusion then, Luxury is about display of wealth, however subtle. It is the pursuit of expensive materiality, service and production.

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What does this mean for the definition of good design then? Well, the question really is of what we want to use design for. Strictly, effective 'Design' is something that creates a complete aesthetic whole, but only in the context of that whole adding value and being good value for business.

I make clear here my separation in the use of 'design' and 'Design' (with a capital 'D') there are no two words that say these things more effectively, but there is a massive difference between 'design', which I believe to be mainly a planning, productive process; and 'Design' which is the target and pursuit of aesthetic ends in a functional context. The exact graphical definition of these terms will be saved for a later date.

Everyone 'designs' whether they like it or not - they make a cake, they write their signature, they paint the walls - the question is, what do us Übermensch who have developed the ability to bring 'Design' to it's fulfilment do?