The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Consumer Behaviour Marketing Shopping

New luxury: are we addicted to excess and waste?

By Nicholas Liddell | Director of consulting

The Clearing

|

The Drum Network article

This content is produced by The Drum Network, a paid-for membership club for CEOs and their agencies who want to share their expertise and grow their business.

Find out more

November 20, 2017 | 6 min read

Perhaps nobody epitomises old luxury quite like Imelda Marcos. 800 pairs of her shoes are now on display in the Marikina Shoe Museum – an extreme form of materialism that is tough to admire in the age of austerity.

"In Europe we consume 2.6bn pairs of shoes a year..."

"In Europe we consume 2.6 bn pairs of shoes a year..."

30 years on, luxury is supposed to have grown up and grown a conscience. Futurologists and luxury commentators frequently point out that luxury is becoming 'de-materialised'. Daniela Walker, editor at LS:N Global, puts it this way: “Simply put, buying stuff isn’t as cool as it used to be. After the recession hit, people began focusing more on intangible things and making memories.”

Bain and Farfetch recently suggested that luxury brands are facing a huge generational shift in expectations, asserting that millennials are “the first generation with radically different behaviours and attitudes towards all consumption and lifestyle to the generation before”. Luxury brands, it seems, will need to move away from their traditional business models and embrace a less material, more experiential form of consumption. So what does this new ‘experiential’ form of luxury actually look like in practice?

Burberry is arguably the epitome of luxury’s new-found obsession with ‘experience’ and its trendy friend ‘storytelling’. In a recent interview, chief creative officer David Bailey emphasised the importance of experience and storytelling to the future of the Burberry brand. “I think people are as interested in the story as in the finished thing. They start to feel it, rather than it being a remote, transactional relationship.”

In this new model of luxury, storytelling provides the romance necessary to cultivate desire while experience delivers the spontaneity required to maximise sales to a ‘want-it-now’ millennial crowd more interested in ideas than material possessions.

If Imelda Marcos is the poster girl for old luxury, Chiara Ferragni is arguably new luxury’s equivalent. Each day her 9.8 million Instagram followers are treated to fresh images of her almost impossibly glamorous life. Rather than greedily hoarding thousands of pairs of shoes, today’s luxury icons generously share moments, memories and experiences with millions of their closest followers.

But Chiara Ferragni and Imelda Marcos share at least one passion: footwear. Farfetch.com sells 71 different pairs of Chiara Ferragni designed shoes. The millennial luxury consumer may value experiences, but those experiences are only perfect when accessorised with the latest look.

The abundance of new luxury

It seems, after all, that contemporary luxury remains stubbornly wedded to excess. For all Burberry’s experiential huffing and puffing, its share price rises or falls based on the quantity of its global sales, not the quality of its experiences. Excessive material consumption is the crack cocaine of the luxury world. And the inevitable cost of this addiction to excess is waste. In Europe we consume 2.6bn pairs of shoes a year, contributing 1.5m tonnes of waste to landfill. The UK’s shoe obsession seems particularly acute – we buy an average of eight pairs a year each. We also consume 1.1m tonnes of clothes each year, at a cost of over £800 a person. The data all points in one direction – that new luxury isn’t simply about excess, it’s about excess layered upon excess.

Not everybody sees luxury this way. In his autobiography, Christian Dior describes his shock at arriving in the US for the first time and finding a completely different attitude to that of his native France – a country still suffering the scars of World War II.

“The way American women buy seems a bit hasty and does not correspond to the spirit of economy and method of the French. We usually acquire one thing because we find it beautiful or of good quality; we are concerned with its use as well as its elegance. Perhaps it must be concluded that abundance is likely to impair good taste. Poverty is an amazing wand.”

Although the comparison is desperately sweeping and unfair, the critique of hasty, wasteful consumption feels extremely relevant today: the quality of a garment doesn’t matter when novelty demands that it can only appear in a handful of Instagram posts.

A shift towards space-poverty

Will Christian Dior’s more economical concept of luxury ever catch on? There is at least one practical reason to think so: by 2030, two in three people will live in cities with at least a million inhabitants. Space is going to become extremely tight. The UK already has the smallest homes in Europe; the average newly built home is just 76 square metres and is likely to shrink further. ‘Micro apartments’ as small as 34 square metres are already under construction (that’s the size of three parking spaces). Imagine how differently you’d approach shopping for clothes if you could only store 25 items. To paraphrase Christian Dior, space poverty could become an amazing wand.

What would luxury look like in a space-poor society? Earlier this year, US-based Rent The Runway launched Unlimited, which offers a subscription to luxury fashion, much like Netflix and Spotify subscriptions.

Had Unlimited existed during Christian Dior’s lifetime, he may have been more generous in his views on the American approach to fashion.

Nick Liddell is director of strategy at The Clearing.

This article was originally published in The Drum Network luxury special. You can get your hands on a copy here. To be featured in the next special focused on the charity sector, please contact stephen.young@thedrum.com.

Consumer Behaviour Marketing Shopping

Content by The Drum Network member:

The Clearing

The Clearing helps clients create clear defendable territory around their brands. We've been voted the UK's number 1 brand consultancy for two consecutive years by The Drum Network, and we're proud of our award-winning clients including McLaren, Lidl, HSBC, Ascot, Breast Cancer Now, Eurostar, One Feeds Two, Tom Kerridge and Fitness First.\

We recently created Wild Cards with The School of Life, a box of 100 killer questions to help you understand your brand better, launching it with a series of panels including Google, Ocado, Ascot and McLaren. Now we've turned 25 of the questions into a book, pairing 25 questions with 25 brand leaders from the world's most interesting businesses. One chapter, one question. One point of view to help you solve your biggest business challenges, with anecdotes and anarchic strategies from brands including Google, V&A, Comic Relief, Ascot and Gap. The result is 'Wild Thinking' - a book for people curious about ways to think differently about work. It's being published in May 2019 by Kogan Page.

Find out more

More from Consumer Behaviour

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +