The New Luxury?

Last week I attended a lecture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art given by Hamish Bowles, the European Editor at Large for Vogue. His topic was the work of Cristóbal Balenciaga and Roberto Capucci, whose colorful, exuberant work is now on exhibit.

I found Mr. Bowles exceptionally charming and knowledgeable (as well as impeccably dressed), but like many hothouse flowers I've met, it was clear that the rarefied world from which he hails is as alien to my own as, well, this:



I'd venture to guess that on any given day, I have to filter out a lot more ugliness than Hamish does. I'm an American, after all: gas stations, convenience stores, and sweatpants move everything around me. He's the Karl Lagerfeld to my Harvey Pekar. The Oscar Wilde to my Huck Finn. The rose to my potato.

While I enjoy the fact that such a glittering, floating world still exists--or at least appears to, as I'm sure there's plenty of grit behind the scenes--this jetsetting demimonde may become even more hermetic and incestuous in the coming years, perhaps even lapsing back into a kind of patron-based mercantilism. Obviously there's enough concentrated wealth to sustain it in one form or another.

But to a penniless aesthete like myself, the idea of luxury as merchandise feels like a notion that now belongs to another age. If we are to have any luxury at all in the near future, it will be based on experiences: appreciation rather than acquisition. Since no one but the lucky two percent will have any money to spend, the rest of us will instead have to spend our time. To my mind, this is an improvement: I think we could do with less gilded lilies and velvet ropes and more imagination and picnic blankets. Perhaps this will bring about an American wabi-sabi: a refined poorness. A modest, natural elegance born of necessity. Rumpled grace. Informal formality. One can hope.

A couple events kept this idea in the forefront of my mind over the days that followed. The first was the announcement that the Philadelphia Orchestra is filing for bankruptcy. The second happened this Sunday at a symposium in Coney Island, where I heard my friend Aaron Beebe, curator of the Coney Island Museum, propose that the erosion of America's aspirational middle class might polarize tastes again, possibly resulting in the shedding of the cultural cringe that kept recent generations from publicly indulging in "low" and "exploitive" entertainments like brothels, burlesque, vaudeville, and freak shows (the internet and reality television now offer a more private indulgence of these appetites, and perhaps may have primed us for this re-polarization). If this is true, then it follows that comparatively genteel cultural institutions like ballet companies, operas, and orchestras may vanish from all but the wealthiest cities. In fact, this already seems to be happening.

Like Aaron, I too think that this New Gilded Age that is now underway will create a social landscape of extremes: wretched vulgarity and perverse preciosity, with very little in between. Gone will be the middling but stabilizing middlebrow tastes of postwar America that kept more tame cultural institutions solvent. Some will applaud this, hailing it as an invigorating kind of destruction. I'll agree that it will probably make for interesting reading in a century's time, but I'm not sure it will be an altogether pleasant time to live through. To put it mildly.

Baudelaire famously noted that The Dandy flourished during times when the ancien regime was in decline but democratization and mass culture had not yet taken complete control. I wonder if the same holds true during times like our own, when the opposite is happening. (Can tornadoes have silver linings?)

I am also reminded of Voltaire's quip that history is full of the sounds of wooden shoes climbing stairs, and silk slippers descending them.

Just to hedge my bet, I'm stocking up on hardy jackets, wool ties, and hobnail boots. Thrift, of course.