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WHAT IS LUXURY? Dr Seán Williams on the cultural significance of luxury
What is luxury?
Dr Seán Williams gets to the philosophical heart of luxury’s curious cultural meaning
Acouple of years ago, I was given a tour of one of London’s most salubrious hotels as I recorded the BBC Radio 3 documentary The Deluxe Edition. I’d wanted to understand the allure of the luxurious and was surprised to find Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant, or Being and Nothingness, laid out for guests on a coffee table in one of the finest suites. Among the many existential reflections in that doorstop of a book from 1943 is a critical philosophy of luxury. The material and the abstract, the exquisite and escapist alongside an examination of oneself: the signature of luxury’s cultural history is a curious contradiction.
Modern luxury consumer culture spread across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term ‘de luxe’, like ‘hotel’, made its way from French into other European languages. In the early period around 1800, luxuries were defined as pleasures, conveniences and curiosities. For enthusiasts, they enabled the expression of individual personality and the progress of civilisation. In other words, the self and society were projected on to material things like never before – for the delight of others about town or as invited guests, yet also for one’s own enjoyment behind closed doors. People bought watches, glamorous postiches, pieces of furniture, high-quality
paper (though at this point made from old rags) and especially linen.
These upmarket products took the European middle and upper classes by storm. Urban servants, too, bought into luxury in a limited way. But it’s easy to misinterpret luxury, then as now, as necessarily a top-down trend. Critics have long made this interpretative mistake. In the late 19th century, Norwegian-American theorist Thorstein Veblen was downbeat that the proletarian revolution he hoped for would ever materialise because he thought luxury items and fashion aped aristocratic taste. As ever, the truth was more complex. When luxury went mainstream in the late 18th century, its influence didn’t travel in only one direction. Marie Antoinette no less, perhaps the person most vilified for her supposed profligacy and exclusive mindset, sent her hairdresser into other Parisian boudoirs so that her own style would be trendsetting – but still in line with what the chattering classes were already talking about.
As historians have pointed out, the pre-modern old order and aristocratic power was represented by a vertical wardrobe. The peasant and working classes, on the other hand, once packed everything into indiscriminate chests that held all and sundry. A simplification, to be sure, but it’s a visual example of how society changed around 1800. Just as the modern taste in fashion and furniture towards the end of the 18th century wasn’t entirely top-down or generic, nor was the furniture itself. Increasingly, chests of drawers became luxury items around 1800 across the social spectrum. These pieces of furniture had a new, compartmentalising function with discrete sections, sometimes in parallel, at others above one another. Put another way, luxury was symbolised not primarily by a prince’s palace, but also by a cosmopolitan hotel with a range of rooms and guests over different floors and suites. Objects and buildings stood in for the organisation of society in miniature, which had split into ever-more interconnected sub-groups.
The material world can serve as a metaphor for society and offer the space in which to criticise and imagine culture anew. Indeed, modern luxury has influenced philosophy and cultural theory from the outset. The German philosopher Kant even elevated hung wallpaper with leafy squiggles (the luxury version of plastered wall coverings) to the status of pure, free beauty in his third critique. Deluxe interior designs were theorised together with nature as empty phenomena that created space for aesthetic sensibility and abstract reflection. The German romantic Novalis, meanwhile, wrote that you cannot view aesthetic masterpieces such as sculpture or read poetry without background music and being in a beautifully decorated room. Living the high life was only refined when accompanied by art. Centuries of dandies and aesthetes would agree.
Intellectuals have both embraced luxury, yet also felt uneasy about it. As social criticism of luxury gained ground in the political upheaval of early 19th-century Europe, the German author Jean Paul, who gave himself a French name, sought to redefine the sense of luxe. He extolled a ‘luxury of enjoyment’ over mere ‘furnishing luxury’. Opulence was the sun shining into the soul, not ostentatious decor brightening a room. Material splendour instead could become a state of mind, he thought.
More provocatively, later thinkers have suggested that the comfort of feathered pillows and high-grade cotton softens the critical faculties. Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács derided the German philosopher Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School for having checked in to what he called a ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ – the residence of bourgeois idealism. I’m probably every bit as bad. But I’m in good company. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and their Russian literary peers all found enjoyment in their summer stays at spas abroad – even if the novels and stories they wrote there, about the watering places of Europe’s elite, would suggest otherwise.
Our relationship to luxury, and to hotel life specifically, is often ironic. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov never owned his own home and lived out his final years overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland’s Montreux Palace. His day-to-day existence included two-hour afternoon naps and evening Scrabble, as well as literary scribbling. His ostensible reasons for living in a grand hotel – that it made dealing with his post easier, or that he could spend more time in the mountains catching butterflies – sound humorous. He played up his living arrangements with self-irony and witty exaggeration.
Another character who lived in a hotel, albeit not a grand one, is Antoine Roquentin in Sartre’s first novel La Nausée (Nausea) from 1938. He’s a despondent historian, which feels familiar to me, and he aspires to grandeur through art. Looking out at the world, Antoine sees the past as a ‘landlord’s luxury’. His own life is transient and he yearns not so much for the creature comforts of domesticity as for the luxury to be master of its curation. History and heritage dwells not in the mortal body in which we exist, but is founded on a house we can own, inhabit and preserve if we are wealthy enough. Antoine consoles himself that all he ever wanted in life was to be free. There is a social and an existential argument at stake.
Don’t hotels in historic buildings offer us that experience of heritage, of grandeur – if but for a night? That’s not a Sartre-esque conclusion, admittedly, and it’s an absurd reading of his novel. Maybe that’s the point. Luxury living away from home does take us out of ourselves, away from the familiar. And, at its best, into the minds of others.
