Luxury - A Rich History (PDFDrive)

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/07/16, SPi
LUXURY
praise for luxury: a rich history
‘In this truly “rich history” Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello show us why luxury
matters, why—in other words—it is not just a concern of the super-rich of past and
present. Their acute and timely book explains the economics and politics of lux-
ury and explores what it has meant in terms of privilege, display, and experience
from ancient times to today. No previous work has tackled this complex and ever-
changing phenomenon with such range and erudition or illustrated it with such a
dazzling array of stories and examples. The book will be indispensable reading
for anyone wishing to understand why the wealthy have always wanted to live
differently and what this has signified for the rest of us.’
Stephen Gundle, author of Glamour: A History
‘Peering into the past through this informed, engaging kaleidoscope has been a
great time travel. Exploring the definitions of luxury both conceptual and mate-
rial as they manifest the zeitgeist of their time. The inherent contradictions of
opulence versus understatement, its elusiveness, its pleasure seeking nature,
objects of desire to be coveted; and how power, privacy and comfort always find
their place in the dialogue on luxury.’
Charlotte Moss, author and interior designer
‘Luxury is a hot topic, not least because there is a lot of money to be made from the
new global luxury consumer. Selling luxury brands rests in part on how we define
the concept of luxury—is it a function of rarity, cost, authenticity, distinction,
excess, pleasure? McNeil and Riello take a completely new, materialistic approach
to luxury, beginning with the objects themselves—and what extraordinary objects
they are! This is an absolutely fascinating book, rich in insights and pleasures.’
Valerie Steele, Director of the Museum at the Fashion
Institute of Technology, New York
1
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To our friends, our great luxury in life

Preface and Acknowledgements
The genesis of the idea for this work came several years ago as we were sitting
around talking during two cold winter Augusts in Sydney. While fashion has
a long history and has now amassed a large body of studies, luxury—we
observed—had received little attention. What seemed to be missing was an
analysis of the meaning and importance of luxury across time.
A decade ago, this issue would have been easily dismissed by arguing
that luxury was either a niche topic—the whimsical choices of the elites—or
of little interest to either serious scholars or the majority of readers. Yet, in
the last few years, luxury has become a ‘hot topic’. In an age of rampant
individualism, of rising economic inequality, and of puritanical attitudes
to social mores, luxury has become commonplace in our daily news
papers, lamenting the vulgarity of the super-rich, in billboards advertis-
ing the same commodities that are supposed to be so vulgar, and in the
general desire to aim for something better, something different, and
something exclusive.
Yet our students have been surprised to learn that debates about luxury
had a long history reaching far back in time and place. The topic of luxury
seemed so connected to the fashion studies and material culture that we
often studied and taught, sometimes using alternate words, that we began
to ask where the ‘luxury debate’ had gone in recent years. We worked on
establishing a research network, which was generously funded by the Lever-
hulme Trust. Over the two years of its activity, the International Network
‘Luxury and the Manipulation of Desire’, coordinated by Giorgio Riello and
Rosa Salzberg at the University of Warwick, allowed collaboration with
Glenn Adamson, Marta Ajmar, Christropher Breward, Jonathan Faiers,
vii
preface and acknowledgements
Catherine Kovesi, Peter McNeil, Luca Molà, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli,

Ulinka Rublack, Bill Sherman, John Styles, and Qing Wang. We are grateful
to all of them and the dozens of scholars who joined us at events organized
in London (V&A and The Shard), Coventry (University of Warwick), Bol
ogna (the University of Bologna), and Florence (Villa I Tatti and the Euro-
pean University Institute). A grant from the Australian Academy of the
Humanities International Science Linkages Humanities and Creative Arts
Programme (ISL-HCA) allowed Giorgio to spend time in Australia to
develop this book. This project was further developed in conversation with
colleagues at the EUI in Fiesole and at the University of Padua.
Many people must be thanked. First, we thank our colleagues and
friends who endured us writing another book simultaneously with other
projects and even a new job for Peter at Aalto University, Helsinki, and a
new position at Warwick for Giorgio. We wish to mention in particular
Simon Lee and Richard Butler. Our colleagues Maxine Berg, Anne Gerrit-
sen, and giovanni Luigi Fontana did much to support, inspire, and critique
this project. The next round of thanks must go to our indefatigable and
always cheerful friends and occasional assistants Masafumi Monden in
Sydney and Clare Tang in London, and to the very erudite and worldly
Virginia Wright, who took a strong web-based pencil to our text. To all of
you, we are very grateful. We thank the anonymous readers who com-
mented on our proposal and Matthew Cotton, our editor at Oxford Uni-
versity Press, for his patience, surely a great luxury.
Special thanks must go to Kevin L. Jones, FIDM Museum Curator, and
Christina Johnson, FIDM Museum Associate Curator. They kindly showed
us part of the wonderful FIDM Museum collection and arranged for its
special photography. Our thanks also to Justin Hobson, Country Life Pic-
ture Library; Kristen McDonald, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University;
Matthew Martin and Jenny Moloney, National Gallery of Victoria; Sanda
Miller; Elizabeth Fischer, Director of Jewelry Design, Haute École de
Design, Geneva; Adelheid Rasche and Hildegard Ringena, Lipperheidesche
viii
preface and acknowledgements
Kostümbibliothek Berlin; Martin Kamer, Zug; Maurizio Marinelli; Caro-

lyn Cartier; Ilaria Vanni; Mingming Cheng; Desley Luscombe, and Amy
Evans for their help. Concetta Laciaux of LuxAdvisory, and Lifen Zhang,
Editor-in-Chief, FTChinese.com, provided much needed help with the
understanding of contemporary luxury. Titi Halle, Michelle Majer, and
Billy de Gregorio continue to support our projects through their advice
at Titi Halle/Cora Ginsburg New York. Lillian Williams (Paris and Aix-
en-Provence) was very hospitable in showing Peter a part of her private
collection of eighteenth-century artefacts. Finally, we also thank the staff
of the Abegg-Stiftung, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and our other
museum friends around the world. We thank photographer and fashion
theorist Alexander Su for sharing his photograph of a pawnshop in Sydney,
and our picture researcher, Fo Orbell. Shalen Singh helped greatly in
the final stages of the typescript, and Simon Lee read the sections on the
great brands.
Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello

Christmas 2015
ix
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xiii
Introduction. Luxury: A Rich History and a History of Riches 1

1. Luxury, Antiquity, and the Allure of the Antique11
2. Luxury, the Church, and the Court in the Late Middle Ages
and Renaissance 46
3. Luxury and the Exotic: The Appeal of the Orient 79
4. Housing Luxury: From the Hôtel Particulier to the
Manhattan Cooperatives116
5. Luxury and Decadence at the Turn of the Twentieth Century149
6. Between False Poverty and Old Opulence: Luxury Society in
the Twentieth Century182
7. Everything that Money Can Buy? Understanding
Contemporary Luxury225
8. Luxury Capitalism: The Magic World of the Luxury Brands252
Conclusion. Luxury: Towards a Richer History289
Notes 294
Select Bibliography 324
Picture Credits 332
Index 335
xi
List of Illustrations
1.1. Rock Crystal amphoriskos14

1.2. Thomas Couture (1815–79), The Romans of the
Decadence, 184716
1.3. Earring with pearl and emerald pendant24
1.4. ‘The Gate of Herculaneum’ 31
1.5. ‘A Cognocenti contemplating ye Beauties of ye Antique’ 32
1.6. Plate from the ‘Egyptian Service’ 39
1.7. Drawing by John Buckler of the south-west view of
Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire 42
1.8. Print after John Buckler of the south-west view of Fonthill
Abbey, Wiltshire 43
2.1. Chasuble of St Vitalis 49
2.2. Henry VIII, c.1560–8057
2.3. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, c.1560–559
2.4. Elizabeth I, Armada Portrait, c.1588.60
2.5. Portrait of the Goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer (1507/8–85),
c.1562–362
2.6. Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire65
2.7. Sea-Dog Table, c.160066
2.8. The Galerie des Glaces at the palace of Versailles 72
2.9. Tapestry woven in wool and silk, c.1670–170073
2.10. Silver, parcel-gilt, chased, cast, engraved, embossed nef75
3.1. Portrait of Shah Jahan on the Peacock Throne83
3.2. Portrait of Süleyman the Magnificent86
3.3. Scent fountain in the form of a vase89
xiii
list of illustrations
3.4. The Howzer cup93

3.5. The Mazarin Chest96
3.6. Pieter van Roestraten, Teapot, Ginger Jar and
Slave Candlestick 98
3.7. Trade-card of Thomas Smith, c. 1755104
3.8. ‘Maison Orientale’110
4.1. A British lion devouring a French cockerel, Blenheim Palace117
4.2. Cabinet designed by Jean-Simeon Rousseau de la
Rottière, 1778122
4.3. Blue Velvet Room, Carlton House, London129
4.4. The garden front of Waddesdon Manor134
4.5. The dining room at Waddesdon Manor136
4.6. The Ansonia Hotel, 2109 Broadway144
4.7. Library in the Residence of Mrs E. F. (Edward Francis)
Hutton146
5.1. Notman Studio, ‘Miss Evans and Friends’, 1887152
5.2. A shower at Ardkinglas, Argyll, 1906154
5.3. A modern bathroom at 11a Belgrave Square, London,
c.1944155
5.4. Lucien Lelong, ‘Robin-hood’ silver and mink-covered
lipstick, 1935–42158
5.5. Notman Studio, ‘Miss Fraser, Montreal, QC, 1897’163
5.6. Toque (hat), label ‘Mme Heitz-Boyer’, Paris, 1890s165
5.7. Man’s waistcoat and handwritten label167
5.8. Fan by Felix Alexandre, 1870–75168
5.9. ‘The wedding party standing in the Rosenblatt residence
at 55 East 92nd Street’174
5.10. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, 20 May 1950177
5.11. Salon of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, c.1953179
5.12. Bathroom of the Duke of Windsor, c.1953180
6.1. Frauen in Ballkleidern (Women in Ballgowns)184
xiv
list of illustrations
6.2. Jean-Michel Frank dressing table, c.1931–32191

6.3. Jean-Michel Frank cabinet, c.1935192
6.4. History of Navigation, mural by Jean Theodore Dupas, 1934197
6.5. Evening jacket for Marlene Dietrich, 1938–40198
6.6. ‘Luxurious Canberra: The First-Class Lounge’, 1960199
6.7. ‘The Luxury of Gracious Living is Reflected on the Monarch’202
6.8. Image from the German magazine Sport im Bild, 1933203
6.9. Stairs of the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida206
6.10. ‘Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a
diamond bracelet lasts forever’211
6.11. Weegee (Arthur Fellig), ‘The Critic’, 22 November 1943212
6.12. Jean Schlumberger flower pot, 1960221
7.1. The glass cube for the Apple Store, Fifth Avenue, New York,
2006235
8.1. Pawn Shop, Corner George and Barlow St, Sydney, 2013259
8.2. Fondation Louis Vuitton, architect Frank Gehry, Paris, 2014269
8.3. A Dubai mall imitating a street in Paris or London, 2013274
xv
Introduction
Luxury: A Rich History and
a History of Riches
•
The opposite of luxury is not poverty because in the houses of the poor you can
smell a good ‘pot au feu’. The opposite is not simplicity for there is beauty in the
corn-stall and barn, often great simplicity in luxury, but there is nothing in vul-
garity, its complete opposite.
Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel as told to the photographer Cecil Beaton in 1966.
WHAT IS YOUR LUXURY?
To ask ‘What is your luxury?’ might appear a banal question. Yet, the very
subject of this book remains elusive. If we ask a group of people what is their
luxury, replies include a wide variety of material artefacts ranging from
branded products to jewellery, fast cars to fancy clothing. Others will
mention gourmet meals, exotic vacations, and spa pampering—immate-
rial luxuries that cannot be put in a vault—or a wardrobe. The younger set
definitely includes the latest technologies and ownership of an apartment
in those cities of spiralling prices. Those who actually can afford or already
own all of these are much more philosophical and recount that their ‘true’
luxury is time (‘quality time’ to be precise), to be spent with friends and
family or in the relaxation of switching off one’s bleeping cellphone—all
‘free luxuries’, but ones difficult to achieve in today’s managerial society.
1
luxury
Coco Chanel, the great couturière of the twentieth century, was cannier
in her reply. For her, luxury was not necessarily something material or
something that could be experienced. To her it was a concept, an idea. Yet,
she resisted telling us what this idea might be, and identified instead its
opposite. That—according to Coco—was neither poverty nor simplicity,
but vulgarity. Both our imagined focused group and Chanel would find
the story that we are going to tell rather surprising, even upsetting. One
wonders, for instance, what Coco made of the fact that—myth or real-
ity—Cleopatra dissolved a pearl worth 10 million sesterces (roughly $15
million in 2015 money) in vinegar, one of the greatest acts of whimsical
luxury consumption in human history?1 This book includes luxuries as
varied as coconut shells, cut flowers, household plumbing, porcelain cups,
buildings that fell down under the weights of their domes, relics, crowns
that could not be worn, fake jewellery, and real pieces of jewellery in the
shape of flower pots. These are clearly not among the ‘top-ten’ luxury
items anyone would mention. Yet they all embodied the best of luxury in
their specific time and place. They gave pleasure—and sometimes also a
great deal of pain—to their owners, makers, and financiers. They were
treasured and handed down, melted or collected, discarded or sent into a
museum’s vault.
We start with a very materialistic approach to luxury and its history as a
counterbalance to the many academic studies that have treated luxury as
an analytical category.2 We are certainly not the first to write about luxury
in history, but our approach is somewhat different, as we wish to place
people and objects at the forefront of our story. There are many excellent
books and articles detailing the importance of the concept of luxury, of the
debates that it raised historically, and of how luxury intersected with
morality, religion, the economy, and society in different periods, from
antiquity to the present day.3 We start instead with the objects themselves,
as we think that they reveal a great deal about the ideas, cultural practices,
2
introduction
and aspirations of people of different means and social conditions across

time. Rather than impose a general framework of analysis, we wish to con-
sider the forms that luxury assumed in different periods, encountering on
the way a number of memorable characters: vain princes, rich American
brides, British aristocrats, US presidents who lacked dinner services, skil-
ful decorators, bon viveurs, gigolos, acerbic gossip writers, and rich ‘ladies
who lunched’. Many of these figures are now considered so eccentric as to
require explanation.
All books—as good or as bad as readers might judge them—have a plan
and a plot. Ours is to make the long history of luxury accessible, and to
convince the reader that what we today think of as luxury is not an immu-
table category. Our point of departure—and indeed of arrival—in the his-
torical narrative that we present is the very present. Luxury is all around
us. One of the authors was once surprised to find a bar of soap in a univer-
sity’s student dormitory whose package proclaimed it to be ‘luxury soap’,
when clearly it was not. We are told in the daily press of the growth of a new
‘luxury industry’ and the excesses of the richest in the world, be they Saudi
prices, Russian oligarchs, or Chinese billionaires. Since the early 2000s,
luxury as a theme and a topic has returned with a vengeance, to be used in
monographs and journalistic articles, in discussions regarding decadence
and bad taste, or the financial inequality of present-day societies. Luxury
has become a commonplace point of conversation, both conceptually and
materially. The luxury brands have helped to satisfy a demand for luxury
that came not just from a few high net worth consumers, but first and fore-
most from society at large. Some talk about a ‘democraticization of lux-
ury’, an expression that alludes to the fact that luxury has clearly expanded
its meaning and the forms through which it manifests itself.4 We note also
that the topic still divides us, and appears morally revolting to some, even
though they might themselves find pleasure in art, crafts, libraries, wines,
property, and international travel.
3
luxury
WHAT IS LUXURY?
So far we have skirted around the definition of luxury by asking what is

your luxury or what luxury might have been for a person in the fifteenth
rather than the nineteenth century. Luxury is contingent: it depends on
what a society assumes to be ‘beyond’ the expected. Very often this is the
fruit not of mere cultural relativism but of an interplay between society’s
expectations and the availability and capacity of producing material things
and services. Later in the book, we explain how flowers out of their season
were until the 1960s a great luxury and an item of enormous expense. This
was due to the fact that, before the creation of international systems of
cultivation and the ability to move goods by air freight, flowers complied
to the pattern of the seasons. Roses on St Valentine’s Day were something
as unexpected as expensive. Today they can be purchased at corner super-
markets every day.
Is it possible, however, to generalize and find unchanging characteris-
tics for luxury? The philosopher and sociologist Yves Michaud, in a recent
study of contemporary luxury, tells us that luxuries ‘effectively signify rar-
ity, cost, change, transformation, expenditure, distinction, excess . . . and,
we should not forget, pleasure’.5 The French intellectual Georges Bataille
included luxury among a number of ‘unproductive’ items of expenditure
together with bereavement, wars, religious services, the building of monu-
ments, games, the arts and performing arts, non-reproductive sexual
activities—a rather varied list that includes several forms of luxury, some of
which often come free.6 Clearly the emphasis is put on the fact that lux-
ury—and by extension a history of luxury—is about the extra-ordinary,
that which goes beyond the everyday, the affordable, and the mundane.
On the one hand, luxury is uplifting both spiritually and materially; on the
other, it is seen as ‘unproductive’ and therefore useless in any society that
privileges economic and social rationality. As most commodities work on
the principle of price (the higher the price, the lower the demand), luxury
4
introduction
makes a virtue of the opposite. Price must be high in order to convey value,
sometimes a value that can hardly be reified in terms of money. True lux-
ury is either inestimable or completely free.
There is, therefore, a dimension of luxury that cannot be captured
through the lucid rationality of an accountant, or perhaps—dare we say—
by an earnest sociologist or marketing expert. Luxury—today as in the
past—plays with a mixture of feelings and emotions. We are wearied by
historians’ ability to capture and understand the emotions of those people
who preceded us. Yet we must at least try to give some psychological depth
to our forebears. Our narrative, based on wide changes over time, is punc-
tuated by stories that provide ‘flesh and blood’ to a history that is not just
about economic means, social conventions, and cultural practices, but
also about cautious investment, whimsical acts, sexual ambiguity, and the
mere pleasure to dazzle and charm. As we will see, luxury has been linked
throughout history to a series of concepts, including: authenticity and
truthfulness (to own a Van Gogh and not a copy); depth (though luxury is
often accused of being shallow); acculturation (the fact that luxury thrives
on knowledge, sometimes of arcane facts); self-realization (here we study
a long list of rich people with a need to display how rich they are and were);
and eroticism (the sheer pleasure of texture and material allure).
Luxury’s slipperiness is therefore not just the fruit of the emotional logic
that governs it. It is also a concept and a material practice that is relative,
and has been so throughout history. A banal example might explain the
concept thus: the Queen of England lives in great luxury; yet even the
most daring tabloid journalists would not feel entitled to accuse the Queen
of exercising uncontrolled desires or being a ‘slave to luxury’ by the fact
that she travels in a Bentley, wears custom-made dresses on most occa-
sions, and give parties for a thousand people at a time. This is because the
Queen is the state and the state uses luxury as one of the tools of its façade.
It would be considered unforgivable if the Queen were forced to travel in a
Mini metro or go to Top Shop for her suits. By contrast, a pop star who is
5
luxury
chauffeured in a Bentley, wears custom-made dresses, and gives parties for

a thousand people (and indeed many names might come to your minds) is
considered extravagant by many and also immoral, dissolute, and deca-
dent by the same press that hold the Queen up as an example for the
nation.
The example of the pop star suggests a further characteristic of luxury
that one can observe across time: the fact that luxury has always been divi-
sive. As is the case for fashion, it is based on the principle of exclusion, the
sharp division between those who have and those who have not. Today
luxury is seen as the embodiment of growing income inequality within
states and communities, and also between different nations in the world.
This is not new, although in the past luxury and inequality were seen as
part of how a hierarchical society was structured: something that was
acknowledged, rather than seen as a problem. This book, however, is ada-
mant that luxury is not the cause of inequality, though it might be one of its
effects. When societies aim towards income and social equality (as postwar
societies did), luxury—or at least the public discussion of luxury—seems to
disappear. By contrast, societies in the second decade of the twenty-first
century, in which 1 per cent of the population owns 49 per cent of the
world’s wealth, lead luxury to the fore.
Luxury comes with a mixed reputation. The slippage between luxuria
(lust and dissipation), luxus (softness and opulence), and luxury is indica-
tive of the fact that, in ancient times (and when the concept of luxury re-
emerged strongly in the west European sixteenth century), it was clearly
not perceived as being among the virtues. It was connected instead with
some of the deadliest of sins. It was considered as another form of unregu-
lated desire that went hand in hand with vanitas (vanity), pomp, sumptu-
ous spending, and expensive ornamentation. Its personification was
female, something that connected luxury to the bodily appetites. It is not
surprising that luxury has long been seen as an object of desire that acts as
a temptation or testing of one’s moral strength.7 This has therefore
6
introduction
required, as we will see in this book, the taming of luxury through a variety
of acts, some of which were legislative (called the ‘sumptuary laws’), to
temper luxury’s most negative effects by limiting it and sometimes punish-
ing its devotees. Today, this might appear an unusual position, though
many still agree that it is morally and economically sensible to tax luxuries
and discourage their consumption.
Finally, a great many ideas about what luxury might be and what it
might mean come not from history but from various theories. The nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries saw the birth of the modern social sci-
ences—sociology first in the 1890s and later anthropology and economics.
Luxury has played an important role in all of them, with the key scholars
such as Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Werner Sombart dedicating
a great deal of attention to what might appear at first sight the relatively
niche field of luxury.8 Veblen’s ‘conspicuous consumption’ theory is to
luxury what the theory of gravity is to physics, in the words of the art histo-
rian Glenn Adamson.9 Many theorists, who were generally observing their
own time and place, have speculated about luxury. They include philoso-
phers, sociologists, historians, and writers such as Olivier Assouly, Maxine
Berg, Christopher Berry, Jean Castarède, Richard Goldthwaite, Philippe
Perrot, Jan de Vries, Dana Thomas, and Evelyn Welch.10 Their ideas are the
key in structuring the intellectual framework of this book, which moves
beyond the queues at Louis Vuitton and the stories of the brands.
A HISTORY OF LUXURY
This book shows that history has a great deal to reveal about the complex-
ity and richness of luxury. The book’s subtitle, ‘A Rich History’, does not
imply that this is a history of the rich and their toys, but rather that our
work is an attempt to recover the richness of the term through its own his-
tory. We do so by starting with antiquity, when both the Greeks and the
Romans found that luxury was a slippery concept and a matter of great
7
luxury
concern. Accumulation of wealth, the creation of splendid artefacts, and

the building of sumptuous villas allowed some to ‘live the life’. Luxury
emerged as a divisive issue, an indicator of inequality, and, some argued, a
waste of personal and collective resources. Yet many of the luxuries of the
ancient world retained enduring appeal among collectors and men of let-
ters in the following centuries. The antique—the rare object from the past—
has been since the Middle Ages a prop of cultural luxury among the
intellectual and political elites of Europe and beyond. Collectors in the
Renaissance and grand tourists to Italy and Greece in the eighteenth cen-
tury found their luxury in ruins and the excavated items from sites such as
Herculaneum and Pompeii. Across Europe, the splendour of court life in
many rising nation states was embodied in a variety of luxury items. Splen-
did textiles and dresses, priceless jewellery, and great houses were meant
to express magnificence and splendour, especially that of rulers and their
courtiers. They competed to secure the best that art, woodwork, goldsmith-
ing, and textile-weaving could produce in a game of grandeur such as can
still be seen in Louis XIV’s enormous and unrivalled palace at Versailles.
The eighteenth century was, however, a period of profound change for
luxury. Next to traditional luxury goods for the very rich and the noble, a
new series of more affordable luxuries became available to consumers with
more modest means. Goods coming from Asia fuelled desire across Euro-
pean society for commodities such as tea and coffee, teacups and Indian
cottons. They were soon imitated, which sparked a fashion for things ori-
ental, thus expanding the taste for chinoiserie, japonaiserie, and turqueries,
a passion that continued well into the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. One area of particular importance for luxury consumption was
domestic space. We consider in Chapter 4 the birth of modern living, in
the noble residences of cities such as Paris and London, and their owners’
choices of furniture, furnishing, and comforts. Today we think of luxury as
items that are a part of personal consumption, especially for the adorn-
ment of the body, but a history of luxury cannot fail to notice that perhaps
8
introduction
the area of greatest luxury spending has been interior decoration: inlaid
furniture, chaises longues, marble mantelpieces, and extremely expensive
plumbing systems produced enormous bills and were considered by
many—rich and poor alike—as the great luxuries in life.
In the final three chapters, we move into the twentieth century and onto
more familiar terrain. Chapter 5 shows how the opulence that character-
ized the end of the nineteenth century through a superfluity of forms gave
way in the post-First World War period to a more restrained luxury. Coco
Chanel was among those at this time who argued that luxury was not nec-
essarily physically embodied in artefacts: diamonds could therefore be
replaced by imitation paste, silk or velvet by a wool jersey. One did not
need to flaunt money in materials and craft, but luxury could be expressed
in nearly imperceptible ways. Yet, this was no ‘democratic’ move in any
sense of the word. Luxury was the superior taste for those ‘in the know’
and those ‘who counted’ in society, and it continued to cost a great deal.
Chanel was partisan in a titanic struggle between the protectors of elite
forms of luxury (today referred to as ‘metaluxury’ or ‘über luxury’) and
the fact that the affluent society of the twentieth century made available to
many for the first time the things that had before been considered to be
the great luxuries, from chocolate to central heating. Via cosmetics and
domestic appliances, passing through nylon stockings and Bakelite hand-
bags and radio sets, we eventually reach today’s luxury world of branded
products and new technologies.
The final two chapters focus on the role of consumers and producers of
luxury since the 1980s. Today’s consumers think that luxury is something
that everyone should aspire to. Advertising, the Internet, and the conspic-
uous presence of shops that claim to sell us the latest luxury objects make
luxury as much a topic of debate as a much-loved pursuit such as golf or
travel. We lift the lid on the luxury brands, investigating their financial
structures, their claims to authenticity, their power (in the media, but it
turns out in particular in the courts of law), and their shifting appeal
9
luxury
(which waxes and wanes). We see branded products and their production,
distribution, purchase, and consumption as part of a new form of twenty-
first-century capitalism (‘luxury capitalism’), very different from the
industrial capitalism of the nineteenth and the service-based capitalism of
the twentieth century. Our aim here is not one of accusation (terrific works
such as Naomi Klein’s books serve that function well), but to raise the issue
of how much today’s luxury is contingent on specific sociocultural and
economic contexts, very different not just from that of the Renaissance
courts but also from that of the socially minded post-Second World War
Western economies, now being unravelled, for better or worse.
10
Luxury, Antiquity, and the

Allure of the Antique
•
O ne might be mistaken for thinking that luxury is a recent thing, a
phenomenon that developed slowly over the course of history,
becoming particularly pronounced in our modern wealthy societies. In
reality, luxury dates back to prehistoric times. The world-famous Upper
Palaeolithic cave paintings at Lascaux in France, dated to c.15,300 bce, are
not just among the earliest examples of human art, they are also one of the
earliest forms of luxury: something that was not strictly necessary, and
even more so in a society with very limited resources. The Lascaux paintings
point also to a further aspect of luxury: it might be decorative, but it is
neither superficial nor plain useless. Luxury has a function in society, be it to
embellish oneself, to dream of another life, or simply to show that one can
afford not just that which is strictly necessary, but also something extra.
LUXURY AND TIME
More intriguing, perhaps, is the idea that one’s luxury might not just be
produced in the immediate present. Something can be rare and unusual
precisely because it comes from another time. Today we are used to the
concept that the best and most costly furniture is ‘antique’, that paintings
by the Renaissance masters are expensive, not to mention objects of great
11
luxury
value such as Roman coins and Ming vases. The list could continue and
extends to ‘collectables’ of more recent manufacture, including a great
deal of twentieth-century art, design, and jewellery. It is evident that the
appeal of these objects is at least partially that their supply is limited. They
are rare because they can no longer be produced: there is no Michelangelo
to paint another Sistine chapel for a Russian oligarch, even if many of them
could certainly afford one. But the ‘antique’ is also rare because a great
deal of it has simply disappeared. Millions of canvases were painted in the
Dutch golden age; however seventeenth-century Dutch paintings are now
valuable because the great majority has not survived.
Rarity might explain why we value objects from the past, things that are
not just ‘old’ but ‘antique’. Indeed, there is sufficient demand to deserve an
entire sector, that of the auction houses and antique dealers, although the
latter are currently in decline as tastes in luxuries change. Yet the appeal of
the ‘old-antique’ is not just the result of its rarity. There are many things
in the present day that are equally rare and expensive. However, unlike
objects churned out by today’s factories or artisanal workshops, the
antique has also the added value of time. In the same way in which wine
gets better with age, so a piece of furniture ‘matures’ over time. It bears the
signs of time that no new object can possess. This is called ‘patina’, and it
refers to the tarnish that forms on the surface of metals and stone, or the
sheen on wooden furniture produced by age and wear and tear. Patina
makes things look timeworn and thus differentiates them from modern
equivalents. Patina serves to add rather than to subtract value. While most
things lose value by ageing (indeed this could be extended also to the
appeal of humans), some things become more valuable: grandfather’s
Rolls locked in the garage is not simply old but an ‘antique car’. Patina
becomes a cultural attribute by which we value things that have a history.
Better still if this is one that can be documented over time.
This attitude towards the old, and the cultural propensity to value it, are
linked to the greatest luxury of them all: to be able to play with time. If we
12
luxury, antiquity, and the antique
are rich, we might afford to travel around the world, but no one can travel
in time. We might extend our earthly life by buying the best medical care
available; however, no billionaire can live 150 years or travel back to a pre-
vious century. Yet some of us might be able to surround ourselves and
acquire the best that the past had to offer: splendid textiles, luxurious fur-
nishings, works of art, and expensive leather-bound books. By collecting
‘beautiful things’ from the past we are able, if not to relive the past, at least
to appreciate what is no longer.
This playfulness between present and past is a luxury per se: call it a
dream of immortality, or the extension of one’s life beyond the confines
of one’s time. The reality is that such a phenomenon is not recent at all.
The ancient Mesopotamians, for example, valued Old Babylonian monu-
ments, and in c.1900–1800 bce they spent a great deal of time compiling a
catalogue of monuments that were at least 500 years old.1 The best exam-
ples of ancient luxuries have been preserved precisely because of a dream
of immortality. Royal and wealthy Ancient Egyptians were keen to build
vast tombs that acted as ‘palaces of eternity’ where they surrounded them-
selves with everything they would need. Luxury objects promised a future
life after the terrestrial one had ended. Pyramids were both monuments to
eternity and the most direct statement of exhibitionism. And we owe to
such conspicuous funerary waste some of the most important works of art
ever produced by humankind.
We might think that later civilizations were less obsessed with both
luxury and death, but if we consider this first-century ad rock crystal
amphoriskos, an 8.5-centimetre-high two-handled vessel with two braided
gold chains (Figure 1.1), we realize that luxury, time, and death remained
strongly entwined throughout antiquity. The vessel was probably used to
contain essences and oils. It was an object of extreme luxury that possibly
has reached us because it was buried with its owner. It usurped the inex-
pensive pyxides (vessels) made of wood, or blown glass, that held cos-
metics and perfumes that in themselves were often not expensive.2 The
13
luxury
Fig. 1.1. Rock Crystal amphoriskos. Mediterranean—Roman, first century ce. Rock
crystal and gold. 8.4 x 4.9 cm. A golden chain holds the stopper from falling. In the
post-war period, the Swiss textile industrialist Werner Abegg and his American-born
wife Margaret created the world’s most significant private foundation for historic tex-
tiles, the Abegg Stiftung (established 1961), with a museum and innovative conserva-
tion facilities. In order to contextualize the textile collections, many of which were
extremely luxurious and rare, they purchased objects such as this perfume vase to show
the gesamtkunstwerk (total environment) of luxury that pervaded the upper levels of
societies such as Ancient Rome.
14
material of which it was made, rock crystal, was said by Pliny the Elder
(23–79 ce) to have come from mountains and to have naturally cooling
powers like ice.
Objects like these—the luxuries of antiquity—have been at the centre of
the collecting practices of rich people over the past five or six centuries,
with enormous amounts of time and a great deal of money spent amassing
splendid collections of artefacts. These luxuries have, in turn, come to
form important components of many major museum collections. They
are often thought of as ‘artworks’, but many—if not all—were functional, at
least in some way. Most art was described in ancient languages through
words akin to ‘craft’. Most objects had more than one function, and many
‘exhibit a surplus of order and aesthetic organisation which goes beyond
the narrowly functional’.3 Many of the individual luxuries described in this
book, whether we consider them today as ‘craft’, ‘decorative’, ‘applied arts’,
or ‘art’, fall into this useful categorization. Whether they were designed as
artworks or not (and ‘art’ is largely a Western concept), many of them are
little masterpieces.
THE ROMANS OF THE DECADENCE
The Romans of the Decadence (Musée d’Orsay, 1847) is a monumental

7-metre-wide canvas by the French painter Thomas Couture that fasci-
nated the viewers of the nineteenth century (Figure 1.2). Its subject matter
refers to a text by the Roman poet Juvenal (c.66–140ce): ‘Crueller than
war, vice fell upon Rome and avenged the conquered world.’ The orgiastic
painting also alluded to the glittering decadence of the mid-nineteenth-
century Paris in which it was painted. We should not be led to believe that
the past offers just a series of material things that are today appreciated as
luxuries. Egyptian, Greek, and in particular Roman antiquity—up to the
fall of the Roman Empire in 476 ce—set all the major features of luxury.
The late Republican and the Imperial Roman periods clearly show the
15
luxury
Fig. 1.2. Thomas Couture (1815–79), The Romans of the Decadence, 1847. Oil on canvas.
472 x 772 cm. This sensational canvas was designed to pique the interest of contempo-
rary Parisian and other viewers who could only but compare it with the splendours of
mid-nineteenth-century Paris, the centre of good living, sensuality, and luxuries. Two visi-
tors to the right—properly clad—look on unimpressed.
emergence of many of the ideas that we associate with the topic. Antiquity
also presents us with some surprises that challenge our established assump-
tions about what luxury is and what it might mean.
Just as today luxury is a divisive issue, so it was in antiquity. Because of its
alluring qualities, luxury was seen as the ultimate temptation. To resist lux-
ury meant to show firmness of character; to embrace it was a sign of feeble-
ness and at times degeneracy and effeminacy. To the democratic Greeks,
luxury was simultaneously troubling but also a type of evidence that their
society was ‘doing well’ and expanding its borders. Plato saw luxury as con-
nected to the idea of utopia, the land of the ‘lotus-eaters’. The Comic play-
wright Hermippus, contemporary of Aristophanes (c.446–386 bce), wrote:
Now tell me, Muses, dwellers on Olympus:

Which goods Dionysus brought over here for men on his black ship . . .
16
From Egypt, rigged sails and books. And from Syria, further, frankincense.
And fine Crete provides cypress for the gods,
And Libya ivory in plenty for sale.
Rhodes, raisins and sweet-dream figs.
Moreover, from Euboea—pears and fat apples.
Slaves from Phrygia, and from Arcadia mercenaries . . .
Paphlagonians provide the acorns of Zeus and shining
Almonds. For they are the ornaments of a feast.
Phoenicia, further, palm-fruit and fine wheat-flour.
Carthage, carpets and cushions of many colours.4
As the historian of the ancient world David Braund explains, these utopian
lists are connected to comedy and are not at all positive. That a democracy
such as Athens was in fact making new luxuries available to many—rearing
cock fowls and calling them ‘Persian birds’, raising pheasants and calling
them ‘Phasian birds’, and even breeding peacocks for consumption by the
late fifth century bce—was a cause of anxiety to the old oligarchy, as such
luxuries normally sat at the tables of foreign despots.5
Since Roman times the very definition of luxury has been based on a
semantic slippage between the words luxus (meaning splendour, pomp, but
also sensuality) and its derivative Luxuria (riot, excess, and extravagance).
Neither word had a positive connotation, and luxury was therefore held to
be problematic and negative on many levels. Roman commentators claimed
that luxury was also the source of other vices. Cicero, for instance, concluded
that from luxury ‘avarice inevitably springs, while from avarice audacity
breaks forth, the source of all crimes and misdeeds’.6
Already in Roman times, many believed that luxury produced selfish-
ness and undermined civic spirit and a sense of community of interests, a
trope that is still with us today.7 The Roman writer and intellectual Pliny
the Elder was particularly critical of the spread of luxury across Roman
society, something that he saw as a sign of greed and wastefulness. Luxury
was a vice that threatened to destabilize the nation and that symbolized
17
luxury
decadence in the history of Rome. Even those who were less inclined to
dismiss luxury wholesale or see it as the source of all evil did not fail to
brand it as negative. Another first-century Roman, the rhetorician Quintil-
ian, believed material riches to be the most common but unsuccessful way
to hide moral weakness: ‘A tasteful and magnificent dress . . . lends added
dignity to its wearer; but effeminate and luxurious apparel fails to adorn
the body and merely reveals the foulness of the mind.’8 Luxury was good
when it bestowed honour on its owner but not when it simply covered
faults. It was even worse when luxury became the pretext to better oneself
in a society in which birth rather than money or material possession was
what counted. The observant Horace (65–8 bce) laughed at the affectation
that accompanied luxury: ‘I am sorry’, he joked, ‘for those who like to
know how the Phasian bird differs from the crane of wintry Rhodope, what
sort of goose has the largest liver, why a Tuscan boar is tastier than an
Umbrian, and what seaweed makes the most comfortable bed for slippery
shellfish’.9 Apparently, luxury was also the source of pretentiousness.
Horace hints at another perplexing aspect of luxury in Roman life: the
fact that it entailed sophistication. It broke from the idea of Roman society
as embracing a simple way of living. The simple way is a Greek ideal: the
Athenian philosopher Plato in the fourth century bce had already sus-
pected the ‘many will not be satisfied with the simpler way of life’. He
clearly worried about material accumulation and complained about the
habits of his fellow Athenians:
They will be for adding sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties,
and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one
sort only, but in every variety; we must go beyond the necessaries of which
I was first speaking, such as houses, and clothes, and shoes: the arts of the
painter and the embroiderer will have to be set in motion, and gold and
ivory and all sorts of materials must be produced.10
The simplicity of past times versus the sophistication (and corruption) of

the present was a theme dear to those who lamented the decline and loss
18
of the mos maiorum (the customs of the ancestors). The critique of luxury
played no small part in this.
By claiming that luxury was an illness of the present—rather than an
innate ‘character fault’ in any human society—Roman commentators cre-
ated the need to explain whence luxury had developed. They saw it as
quintessentially ‘foreign’ and therefore alien to the true and olden spirit of
the Roman polis. This is why luxury was often represented as coming from
‘the Orient’, something that came as part and parcel of the success of the
Empire’s conquest of North Africa and Asia. It was said that luxurious hab-
its had been adopted when Sulla, during his campaign in Asia (87–82 bce),
had allowed his men to indulge in both the carnal and venal pleasures of
the East. Livy (64 or 59 bce–17 ce), on the other hand, thought that cor-
rupt Eastern luxury arrived in Rome a century earlier with the triumph of
Manlius Vulso in 186 bce when ‘foreign luxuries were brought to the city
by the army from the east’.11 He said that this licentious army had brought
back ‘bronze couches, costly cloth spreads, tapestries, and . . . magnificent
furniture, table with single pedestals and side-tables’.12 Pliny the Elder
singled out instead spices and perfumes (first used by the Persians accord-
ing to him) from the East.13 Others complained about the abundance of
Oriental gold, gems, and silken fabrics, of slaves, and exotic animals rang-
ing from elephants to rare birds. Roman villas were, according to Juvenal,
stuffed with Greek art-works, ivories, silver and silken fabrics including
cloth of purple.14 But they all agreed that the Orient was to be blamed for
having introduced new and appealing goods, another recurrent theme in
the history of luxury. The range of artefacts criticized—rich furnishings,
spices and foods, textiles, vessels and cloths—remain fairly constant until
our own times as the most desirable luxuries.
Wickedness requires a villain: the anti-hero. For the Romans—and we
might stretch to include also the way in which they are written about in
today’s tabloid newspapers and magazines—this was the figure of the nou-
veau riche. Here is Cicero describing a Greek former slave, Chrysogomus,
19
luxury
in less-than-flattering prose. He not only freed himself but became rich

and lived a luxury lifestyle that clearly greatly troubled Cicero. It is worth-
while citing at length:
He has a nice property outside the city, just for the pleasure of it, and several
other pieces of land, all of them attractive, and not far away. His house is full
of Corinthian and Delian ware, including, of course, his famous cooker . . . But
never mind that: how much sculpted silver, how many tapestries, how many
paintings, how many statues, how much marble do you think he has at
home? What about his staff, the number of them and their varied occu-
pations? I pass by the ordinary professions, cooks, bakers, valets. He has
so many people engaged in amusing his mind and his ears, that the whole
neighbourhood resounds continually with music of voice, string, woodwind
and all night partying. What do you think the daily expense must be of a life
like that? How much wine do you think they get through? What must those
parties be like? Good ones, I should think, in that kind of house, if house is
the word for this factory of impropriety, this warehouse of all the vices.15
For the Romans, to whom the domus was the inner sanctorum of family
life, to see it labelled as the ‘warehouse of all the vices’, the brothel of luxus
and luxuria, must have made it titillating reading. Here might be found
‘Indian gold, Tyrian purple, Arabian cinnamon, and mother-of-pearl’.16
Bacchanals (from Bacchus, god of wine) were a pastime of the Roman rich
but also the source of great anxiety: the luxux mensae (the luxury of the
table), as Tacitus called it, was becoming one of the most common luxuries
of Roman society. The expenditure on food reached such levels that laws
were introduced setting limits in relation to one’s position and wealth.
Sumptuary laws—laws governing the expenditure on luxuries—come
about from a mismatch between economic wealth and political power.17
Newly enriched people attempted to challenge the power of traditional
elites through conspicuous consumption and the magnificence of their
parties. Men vied with each other in the splendour of their entertainments,
and the new ‘equestrian’ class who could engage in overseas rather than
local agricultural trade tried to make a mark where there were limited
20
political places: ‘men displayed their riches in order to impress the elector-
ate and secure the offices that were their due.’18
Sumptuary laws—as we will see in the following chapters—remained
important features of the history of conspicuous consumption until the
eighteenth century. Yet, unlike the medieval and ancien régime sumptuary
laws that regulated mostly expenditure on clothing and adornment, the
Roman ones focused on expenditure on feasts. They regulated what types
of foods could be consumed, how much one could spend for a single meal,
and even the number of guests one could have for dinner in any single day.
The Romans enjoyed a version of haute cuisine in which one food was
made to resemble another; one of their favourite delicacies was sows’
udders, which appear in both texts and funerary sculpture on the head-
stones of butchers.19 They enjoyed delicacies such as fattened fowls, pea-
cock, oysters, ham, wild boar, and fig-peckers, a bird that was eaten whole,
sometimes all combined together in a paté en croûte, even though this was
forbidden by law (only one bird might be eaten at a dinner and fattening
was outlawed).
Laws limiting food and other luxury consumption must have been quite
often disregarded, as by the time of Caesar more drastic measures were
needed and guards were sent from market to market to seize all manner of
forbidden foodstuffs even before they could reach the tables of wealthy
Romans.20 They include dried figs and imported Atlantic oysters.21 Rice,
chickpeas, black pepper, olives, melons, pistachios, almonds, pine kernels,
dates, pomegranates, and to some extent peaches were also imported into
Central Europe, where they are found mainly in Roman officers’ quar-
ters.22 At a Roman villa in Switzerland, in the town of Avenches (Aventi-
cum), hundreds of bones from pigs’ trotters as well as the feet of hare and
chicken have been excavated.23 Dates and olives packaged in long, thin
amphorae were also found at this site; imported dates have also been found
as far afield as Cologne and Tours.24 Small songbirds were consumed in
very large amounts by the Roman rich.
21
luxury
Partying required not just expensive wine and exotic food but also lavish
accoutrements in the form of silverware; the most expensive and sought
after was antique silver. It was not uncommon to mix silverware of differ-
ent manufactures and different periods. This appears to be the case in the
famous finding in a Roman villa at Posanella a Boscoreale in Campania in
1895, where an impressive 109 pieces of silverware (mainly tableware)
were found. These were bought for half a million French Francs (around
$15 million in 2015 money) by Baron Edmond de Rothschild for his col-
lection, but he eventually decided to donate the bulk of it to the Louvre
Museum, where they are to be found today.25 The House of Menander
yielded 118 such dining vessels. The surviving silver tableware shows the
refinement of the Roman elite: it includes spoons and ladles for the wine,
several trays used for serving food, salt cellars, and containers for spices
and sauces. The silver cups are decorative masterpieces showing mytho-
logical scenes and political subjects such as episodes from the lives of
Augustus and Tiberius. These and other decorative cups were functional
objects as well as being objects of conversation for those eating and drink-
ing at the long banquet, and later reclining on the semicircular dining
couches with matching marble tables favoured by the Romans.26
Of particular concern to moralists and satirists such as Juvenal was the
practice of disguising practical furniture such as dining tables with inap-
propriate materials: silver was bad but ivory was even worse. Juvenal also
comments satirically that clearly it was better to have a bevy of pretty
pageboys (exoleti) arranged according to their nationality, size, and hair
colour serving the drinks rather than coarse householders.27 The older
servant boys had painted faces and their long hair was plaited and woven.
Only the young men with developing beards did heavy work.28 It is
believed that the iconography of the beautiful and gracious serving
page passed into the Christian iconography of the Adoration of the
Magi.29 Once again, there is a long continuity in this type of conspicu-
ous consumption; in the nineteenth century there was a premium on
22
tall footmen matching in size, and the wages diminished for good-look-
ing men in the great houses of England and France as they aged, unless
they advanced to become a butler.
The Romans were less interested than modern societies in clothing.
Fashion did exist, but expenditure on clothing was not great compared to
modern societies. An exception was, however, the use of jewellery, mag-
nificent examples of which are still visible today in the most important
museums in Europe and North America. Precious metals held and con-
tinue to exert an important cultural value in society. Gold and silver, but
also gemstones, are both items of decoration and objects of intrinsic
worth: they are beautiful and expensive. While they are often invested
with deep meaning (think about engagement rings), they can also serve as
a visible expression of wealth. A good example would be the small earring
shown in Figure 1.3, measuring just over 3 centimetres and weighing no
more than one gram. This apparently simple piece of jewellery was in fact
a highly sought-after artefact that included both a stone and a pearl all the
way from Asia. It was crafted in the most exquisite and refined taste.
Women would wear bracelets (armillae), rings, earrings, necklaces
(monilia), golden chains to their waists, veils made of silver or gold thread
(retuculae), all made of gold imported from Egypt, Spain, Britannia, and
Dalmatia and further embellished with stones from the Middle East, or
pearls from the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The much desired Chryso-
lithi—peridot or topaz—came from India or Ethiopia and smaragdi or
emeralds from Scythia. Gems were also copied in glass and worn by pros-
titutes and actresses.30
It therefore appears not coincidental that the first sumptuary laws for-
bidding the immoderate display of wealth (the lex Oppia of 215 bce)
focused on jewellery. In particular it forbade ‘women from owning more
than half an ounce of gold’, as well as ‘wearing multi-coloured clothing,
and go[ing] around town in a chariot with the exception of religious fes-
tivities’.31 At the time there was resentment at displays by women, who
23
luxury
Fig. 1.3. Earring with pearl and emerald pendant, Roman, 2–3 century ce. The earring
consists of a simple gold ring; from this is suspended a gold element incorporating a pearl
and a white emerald. Such jewellery, with its air of abstraction rather than naturalism, had
a major impact on the ‘archaeological’ revivals of the mid- to late nineteenth century as
well as on Arts and Crafts and Studio jewellery well into the twentieth century.
were possibly using real gold implements for religious ceremonies. It is

believed that some of the hostility was directed at a way of life imported
from the East by way of Aemilia, wife of Scipio (236–183 bce), the famous
conqueror of the Carthaginians under Hannibal.32 In 184 bce Cato the
Elder, at that time Censor of Rome, taxed luxuries including women’s
clothes, jewellery, and vehicles very heavily.33 Many Roman elegiac poems
featured luxury goods to make a point. Propertius argued that Cynthia
might wear ‘elaborate hairstyles, seductive Coan silks [an almost transparent
24
silk from the Island of Cos], or perfume from the Orient’ so as to provide
inspiration; Tibullus ranked silk with expensive products, including Tyrian
purple and pearls (2.4.28–9), and noted that that the famous transparent
Coan silk was sometimes also striped with gold (2.3.53–4), making it even
more expensive.34
Men too wore gold jewellery. The wearing of the gold ring was initially
limited only to senators and a small group of notables. However, the prac-
tice became so widespread among the populace that a decree of 23 ce
limited the wearing of the gold ring only to those whose fathers and grand-
fathers were free. Freed slaves could wear a silver ring and slaves only iron
rings.35 Moralists also complained about ever wider classes of men wearing
the fine silks and colours to which the elites were entitled.36
The luxury debate in Roman times extended even to the adoption of
children. In an argument that has some parallels with the contemporary
debate as to whether it is unethical to purchase a baby through adoption or
surrogacy, the Roman commentators criticized rich men who adopted oth-
ers’ children, expressly in terms of luxury. Luxury, it was claimed, was tear-
ing apart the very fabric of Roman parenthood. Just as there was a critique
of the desire to imitate nature, with inauthentic painted landscape scenes
on the walls, so there was critique of adoption by the rich: ‘For truly they do
not know how to enjoy anything real, but in their sickness they need unnat-
ural fakes of sea or land out of their proper places to delight them. Do you
still wonder that, in their disdain for the natural, they now don’t even like
children—except those of others?’37 Luxury leads also, in this view, to the
desire to pursue a whole array of anti-social patterns such as sleeping with
other men’s wives and to usurp what was once a free state.38
LUXURY AND THE REDISCOVERY OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
The importance of antiquity rests not just on the fact that most of the
key characteristics of luxury as we know it today were established during
25
luxury
Greek and Roman times but also on the great beauty of antique objects to
be found in private collections and museums around the world since the
Renaissance. They display high levels of design and artisanal sophistica-
tion. Both the world of ideas and the artefacts of ancient societies are
significant as they informed the mentality and material culture of the so-
called rebirths of culture in the West. This started emphatically in the early
fifteenth century when such relics became the passion of the rich and
cultured elite of the period that has since been called the Renaissance
(Rinascimento in Italian, literally ‘rebirth’).
Something not well known outside the world of art history and archae-
ology is the term spolia. Spolia refers to the reuse of pieces of the past,
generally in architectural settings or ecclesiastical artefacts. Spolia often
are superb examples of ‘archaeological luxury’ that connect a ruler or
powerful person to the past for various political or dynastic reasons. They
are generally Greek or Roman artefacts. A fine example is the Ambo of
Henry II (c.1002–14 ce), a pulpit in Aachen Cathedral. Set into the frame-
work of the structure are the most astonishing luxuries: a bronze plaque,
Roman agate vessels, a Roman glass bowl, a Fatimid rock crystal cup and
saucer, even Muslim chess pieces of chalcedon and agate, along with sixth-
century ivories that are contemporary with Henry II.39 Thick gold wire
connected this composition. The aim was to connect Henry with imperial
Christian rulership and Byzantine power. Another famous example is the
Lothair Cross (Aachen, Treasury, c.835–69 ce) in which Emperor Otto III
(980–1002 ce) inserted a Roman cameo and many more early gemstones
on an already made-up jewelled crucifix. Rare stones such as sardonyx
were frequently remounted by the medieval church and state.
Spolia are part of Western society’s long and complex project of redis-
covery of its ancient past, in particular the literary and artistic legacies of
Greece and Rome. It was the humanistic culture of the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries that rediscovered long-lost texts from Greek and Roman
literature (including the many passages quoted earlier about luxury in
26
Roman society). The rich elites of Europe prided themselves on re-estab-

lishing an intellectual lineage and a genealogy of ideas and taste with the
ancient past. In doing so they created new forms of luxuries in the shape
of precious manuscripts and printed editions of ancient texts, and also
through the gathering of impressive collections of magnificent artefacts.
The place where a passion for collecting antiques first emerged was
Italy. By the fourteenth century a large market for antiques was present
in the city of Venice. In the following century, the rich rulers of cities such
as Florence, Mantua, and Milan began amassing enormous—and enor-
mously expensive—collections of ancient artefacts.40 Cosimo de’ Medici
(1389–1464), founder of the princely dynasty that ruled over Renaissance
Florence, collected gems that, together with vases in semi-precious stones,
crystal, ancient medals, coins, and jewellery, were kept in his studiolo (liter-
ally ‘little study-room’), a small display room in his palace in Florence. The
collection became a family passion, and, after Cosimo’s death, it was
expanded by his son Piero and later by his grandson, the famous Lorenzo
Il Magnifico (1449–92).
It is important to note that such collections were more about the sum of
the parts than the individual object. Lorenzo enlarged the family collec-
tion by acquiring part of the collection that had belonged to Pope Paul II,
which included one of the most celebrated objects of antiquity: the Farnese
cup. Produced possibly in Hellenistic Egypt in the second century bce,
the cameo agate cup (really a plate) represents the Egyptian divine triad,
Serapis–Isis–Harpocrates. It was one of the most sought-after objects of
antiquity, not just because of its incredible beauty but also because of its
provenance and royal associations. It was acquired in Egypt in 31 bce for
the Treasury of Rome, following the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra. After
the fall of the Roman Empire, it was moved to Byzantium, and, with the
sack of the city in 1204 during the fourth crusade, it made its way into the
collection of Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250). In the following century
it moved to the Persian court of Herat, but found its way back to Europe.
27
luxury
It was then acquired by King Alfonso V of Aragon, who resided in Naples

in the 1450s and who sold it in turn to Pope Paul II. It was finally purchased
in Rome by Lorenzo in 1471.
What came to be known as the Farnese cup (as it was later in the pos-
session of the noble Italian Farnese family) encapsulates the passion for
unique antique objects in a multi-generational fashion. Collecting both
antiquities and rare things from other continents became a pastime of
the wealthy elites of Europe. Sometimes vast collections indicated status
and connections. The Farnese cup, for instance, materially and symboli-
cally linked Lorenzo de Medici with popes, kings, and emperors. Yet, col-
lecting was not just about belonging to a restricted elite. Such objects also
conferred cultural value to newly acquired wealth. ‘New money’—as in
the case of the Medici family—acquired a lineage in time through the pos-
session of antiquities. They became ‘necessary luxuries’ to endorse one’s
social position. And for those whose nobility and place on the social lad-
der was not questioned, they were a tool of competition. Many of these
collections were a good way to make other powerful and rich people
green with envy.
Giovanni Grimani, a wealthy Venetian patrician of the late sixteenth
century, spent enormous amounts in collecting antiquities and later wor-
ried that he might have offended God, ‘having spent on such vanities as
great amount of money which could have been applied to works of charity’.
Luxury raises moral dilemma, and Grimani finally resolved that, to save
himself from sin (and hell), he had to give up his collection of medals and
cameos. Yet he decided to pass it down to his nephew on the ground that
the collection was essential to the ‘honour of our house of the Grimani’.41
It was not just the classical past that enthused wealthy collectors. Good
Christians like Grimani also had a passion for purported religious relics.
Eleanor, Princess of Portugal, was an avid collector of saintly memorabilia
that included hairs of the Virgin Mary, pieces of Christ’s dress, a drinking
bowl used by St Anthony of Padua, and a variety of other relics from thirty
28
biblical figures and saints, from the Old Testament to Christ’s passion. Her
most treasured relic was a thorn from the crown of Christ that was kept in
an expensive reliquary made in the German fashion.42
Over time the practice of collecting also spread to major noble families.
Status was conveyed by acquiring well-known and beautiful objects that
were often displayed in appositely constructed spaces. Between 1605 and
1607, Carlo Emanuele of Savoy had an entire gallery constructed in his
palace in Turin to house his collection.43 The less wealthy British aristo-
crats started relatively late in collecting antiques. A well-known example is
Thomas, 21st Earl of Arundel (1585–1646), head of the noble house of
Howard. Married to the daughter of the Earl of Shrewbury, in 1613 Arun-
del went on a spending spree to Italy accompanied by the emerging archi-
tect Inigo Jones. During his two-year tour of Venice, Florence, Siena, and
other cities in Italy, he came back ‘infected with an incurable collecting
fever which was to recur in virulent bouts throughout the rest of his life’, as
the historian Jonathan Scott puts it.44 The death of his rich father-in-law
just a year after his return to Britain gave Arundel the funds to refurbish
his London palace on the Strand. He created a gallery for the many statues
that he had acquired in Italy. Later in life he acquired further collections,
including unique pieces, such as the beautiful bronze head of a poet (pos-
sibly Sophocles, now at the British Museum), a prodigious collection of
intaglios and cameos, marbles, busts, and contemporary paintings.45
LUXURY AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GRAND TOUR
Over the following century, this passion for the antique expanded, partly
owing to the fact that an increasing number of people visited Italy and saw
first hand its ancient ruins during travels that could last for years and were
termed ‘the grand tour’. Rich, young, and male, the grand tourists of the
eighteenth century encountered Italian antiquity by visiting not just Roman
ruins but also the Palladian villas of the Veneto in the north-east of Italy
29
luxury
built a couple of centuries earlier in classical style as summer retreats for

rich Italian aristocratic families. Here they learned the classical language of
architecture that they would later repeat in the facades, columns, and tym-
pana of their villas, such as Houghton Hall (rebuilt in the 1730s), con-
structed in the cold and damp English countryside. Once reaching Rome,
they were exposed to the Baroque architecture of the previous century—
that also was ‘antique’ but not regarded as possessing the beauty or cachet
of the gardens at Tivoli and the ruins of Ancient Rome. But if the grand tour
was about discovery, nothing was more inspiring than the view of Hercula-
neum and Pompeii, the archaeological sites not far from Naples, both of
which were excavated and properly rediscovered from the 1730s onwards
(Figure 1.4). Trained to appreciate everything ancient, young English gen-
tlemen found a new way to conceive of antiquity. Years of studying dead
languages and of tedious Greek and Roman literature now came alive in the
newly discovered streets, houses, and public spaces of these two cities that
had been destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 ce.
The rich sons of English aristocrats quickly became ‘Latin lovers’. They
appreciated not just the voluptuous pleasures on offer in the streets of
Naples but also the more refined aesthetic sense of an ancient culture,
famous for its pomp and luxury. The young Horace Walpole (1717–97),
son of the British prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, was one of the priv-
ileged youths sent to admire the ruins at Herculaneum. He was hugely
impressed by what he saw: ‘a subterranean town . . . perhaps one of the
noblest curiosities that ever has been discovered . . . There is nothing of the
kind in the world.’46 Like many others he was interested in ruins of tem-
ples, baths, and palaces, urns, statues, and shattered columns. One of the
most famous British architects of the time, Robert Adam (1728–92), was to
be seen digging at Herculaneum in what looked to him ‘a coal-mine
worked by galley slaves’.47 All this was in the name of ancient culture.
The amazing thing about the eighteenth-century rediscovery of antiquity
is that at the time it was really something very new. It started in 1738
30
Fig. 1.4. ‘The Gate of Herculaneum’ (‘L’Entrée de Pompeii’), watercolour over etched out-
line by Francesco Piranesi after Louis Jean Desprez, second half of the eighteenth century.
Scenes such as this provided inspiration not just to antiquarians and architects, but also to
the set-designers who provided the mise-en-scène for entertainments, fireworks, balls,
and parties at palaces and villas in the eighteenth century, such as the designs by the
famed Philip James de Loutherbourg for Versailles, where a separate department man-
aged such affairs, known as the menus plaisirs.
when Queen Maria Amalia came to be interested in the statues that were
lying about in the palace gardens. They had been found a few years earlier
under the lava deposit of Mount Vesuvius. Maria Amalia wanted more and
convinced her husband King Charles of the Two Sicilies to have the area
dug. Over the following decade, Maria Amalia’s dig came to be one of the
marvels of Europe, a must in any journey to Italy. The appeal of Hercula-
neum and Pompeii gave body to a long-standing interest in classical art
and architecture. It revealed a world of people and not just buildings, fro-
zen in the salacious and colourful frescos and the many everyday and
domestic objects recovered from the excavation.
31
luxury
Fig. 1.5. ‘A Cognocenti contemplating ye Beauties of ye Antique’. Hand-coloured etching

by James Gillray, published in London, 11 February 1801. This caricature indicates the
huge British public interest in taste and modern design, with a heavy hand of cynicism
mixed in.
32
All this also provided a new way to ‘buy’ some culture. It was not just the
occasional rich tourist who was interested in purchasing expensive things.
Sir William Hamilton, British envoy to Naples between 1764 and 1800,
was an avid collector and advertised the new discoveries across Europe
through his publications. Hamilton was one of the best-known Italophiles
of the eighteenth century, famous in old age not just for his wealth and his
collection of antiquity but also for his beautiful second wife, Emma, whom
he married when he was 60 and she was just 26. A caricature by the irrever-
ent cartoonist Gillray shows an old and bent Sir William surrounded by
grotesque ancient artefacts while looking through his spectacles at the
bust of ‘Lais’, aka Lady Hamilton, with a fashionable hairdo but with no
nose, mouth, or chin (Figure 1.5). She reappears among the set of portraits
on the wall this time as ‘Cleopatra’, indecently décolleté and holding a
bottle of gin. Next to her is ‘Mark Antony’, Cleopatra’s lover. In reality, it is
a portrait of Admiral Nelson, Emma’s not-so-secret lover. Vesuvius’ erup-
tion concludes the orgasmic scene. ‘Claudius’, a profile of Hamilton him-
self, turns his back on the other pictures (as he knew and even encouraged
his wife’s liaison with Nelson), confined as he is to be an old ‘mummy’,
properly labelled Midas, the ancient mythological figure who turned
everything he touched into gold.
MAKING GOOD USE OF ANTIQUITY
The appeal of the ancient was not just reserved for the lucky few who could
visit Herculaneum and Pompeii or to equally wealthy collectors. In Britain
and eventually in continental Europe and North America, it sparked a
fashion for the ‘antique’ that came to influence everything from architec-
ture to interior decoration and dress. The architect Robert Adam drew on
his studies of antiquity and from the deep pockets of his clients to refresh
the language of luxury with a coat of ‘ancient’ paint: in the early 1760s no
one could claim to be fashionable without indulging in some classical
33
luxury
redecoration at home. Syon House (1761–2) and Lansdowne House (1765)

were among the most admired Adam mansions in classical style. In France,
too, Marie Antoinette had her apartments at Fontainebleau redone in
classical style with furnishings made to look bleached white in the antique
manner but actually made of luxurious and glittering mother-of-pearl
inlays. Archibald Alison in his Essay on the Nature and Principle of Taste
(1790) concluded that ‘the taste which now reigns is that of the Antique’.48
The pottery produced by the English entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood,
as well as the furniture by Thomas Sheraton and George Hepplewhite,
were much influenced by the Italian archaeological discoveries. New and
old mixed together, with teasets and decorative items of classical inspira-
tion being manufactured in state-of-the-art manufactories such as Wedg-
wood’s own Staffordshire factory (appropriately named ‘Etruria’), where
the new Jasperware and Queen’s-ware techniques invented by Wedg-
wood were deployed. What is distinctive about Wedgwood is that he
used a Classical vocabulary to produce new luxuries made of completely
new materials. He married novelty and the kudos of the antique. He
combined fashion, elegance, and luxury to a level that no one before him
had done. And, finally, he produced goods not just for a selected clientele
of rich patrons but for the rising middle classes. Perhaps more than any
book or scholarly work, Wedgwood was the single most important per-
son in introducing the luxury of antiquity to the homes of eighteenth-
century England.
A great deal of the history of luxury shows that one of the entitlements
of money is to own not just the present but also the past. In fact, the aes-
thetic of the ‘modern’ in the eighteenth century borrowed fulsomely from
that of the ancient. And it did so not for the purpose of venerating the
ancient past of Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but to make the late-eighteenth-
century present just as grandiose, with the added value of conferring sta-
tus and social cachet on the owners. Such social capital was often acquired
not by owning a genuine piece of antiquity, but by owning a fashionable
34
item inspired by the ancient past. And entire industries, from interior
decoration to porcelain and dress, flourished by borrowing from antique
design. The items that they produced were not super-expensive but nei-
ther were they for everyone: what one can define as popular luxuries or
populuxuries.
The idea that the antique could spark improvements across the British
economy was also very much on the mind of another man of culture, the
aristocrat Lord Elgin. He observed that the antique was quintessentially
useful to design production:
The very great variety in our manufactures, in objects either of elegance or

luxury, offers a thousand applications for such details. A chair, a footstool,
designs or shapes for porcelain, ornaments for cornices, nothing is indiffer-
ent, and whether it be in painting or a model, exact representations of such
things would be much to be desired.49
At this time, Greek (‘Grecian’) models were becoming the fashion of the
day in preference to Roman models. A friend of Hamilton, Elgin came to
be interested in Greek antiquity when he was the British ambassador in
Istanbul. Today Elgin is well known for having given his name to the world-
famous ‘Elgin marbles’, now at the British Museum in London. Disman-
tled from the Parthenon in Athens, they were shipped to Britain in 1802
and became the centrepiece of his extensive collection of Greek antiquities
in his large house in London. They were eventually sold to the British gov-
ernment at a fraction of the estimated £70,000 (around £5 million in 2015
money) that he had spent for their excavation and removal. Elgin’s exten-
sive collection of other Greek antiquities was also sold to the British
government, a fate not uncommon for many such valuable objects. Dis-
appointingly, he never managed to get the reward he really wanted: a
United Kingdom peerage, as his own Scottish title did not allow him to
have a seat in the House of Lords. Posed as a condition for the sale of the
Parthenon’s marbles, Elgin’s request was gracefully turned down.
35
luxury
AT WHATEVER COST: REVIVALS
The rediscovery of antiquity created several problems for those who could
afford and appreciate ancient art, as the majority of what was discovered
found its way into vast public collections. By the early nineteenth century
these came to form the outstanding archaeological museum of Naples.
Rarity meant scarcity, pushing those with money and the right connec-
tions to acquire expensive artefacts through legal as well as illegal means.
Unable to acquire the beautiful Roman frescos, many thought it worth-
while acquiring good copies. Yet not even copies were abundant, as the
Italian museums guarded themselves against any copies being made. The
few copies that were produced were sold in great secrecy and were sought
after by collectors possibly on the ground more of their illegal status than
of any artistic quality or closeness to the original. Yet this is also a story in
which original and copy do not just live side by side, but often become one
and the same thing. The Venetian Giuseppe Guerra was one of the many
Italian artists who struggled to make ends meet in the early decades of the
nineteenth century. Though not untalented, he made a fortune more as a
fraudster than as an artist. Based in Rome, he not only copied ancient fres-
cos from Pompeii and Herculaneum but also faked them by using pieces of
ancient plaster and then sold them off claiming to have acquired them
from some Neapolitan petty trader. The directors of the Neapolitan muse-
ums raised the alarm and managed to trace the fakes to Guerra in Rome.
Passing themselves as customers, they commissioned more fakes from
Guerra that they deemed of very good quality. In a reversal of what today
is the market for fake leather bags and wallets, the Neapolitan government
decided that the best deterrent was not to prosecute the skilled artist, but
to display four imitations next to the original frescos accompanied by an
inscription warning wealthy tourists against this type of fraud.50
The problem was that rich grand tourists neither knew nor minded that
they were being defrauded and that copies were frequently passed off as
36
the originals. In fact they generally preferred the ‘improved’ versions of

classical antiques (Elgin himself had been keen to have his Greek marbles
restored, though he was later convinced that prosthetic arms might have
diminished the value of his precious statues). As in the ancient world, the
modern collecting of antiques revealed that the borderline between taste,
exclusivity, and luxury, on the one hand, and tasteless commodification
for the masses, on the other, was a fine one. If Roman and Greek antiquity
prompted a renewal of the grammar of ornament and a reshaping of
refined taste, there was nevertheless the danger of ‘overdoing’ it, something
that occurred all too often in that strange period of historicizing design
between 1810 and 1840.
The potential for exploitation of the antique for the production of new
luxury did not limit itself to the Classical period of Greece and Rome. The
influence of Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt between 1798 and 1801 swept
through Europe in the shape of a new Egyptomania. Many people today
focus on the 1920s mania for Egypt with the exciting opening of Tutankha-
mun’s tomb in 1922. They forget about the rage for things Egyptian more
than 100 years earlier, when ladies carried crocodile-shaped handbags and
even funerary chapels and Christian churches had Egyptian tomblike
door cases. The link with the original was here even more tenuous, and the
new luxuries in Egyptian style produced in Europe often had little to do
with ancient Egypt. The poet Robert Southey in his Letters from England
(1807) remarked upon the fact that ‘everything now must be Egyptian: the
ladies wear crocodile ornaments, and you sit upon a sphinx in a room
hung round with mummies, and with long black lean-armed long-nosed
hieroglyphical men who are enough to make the children afraid to go to
bed’.51 Southey might well have been describing the set of the film Cleo
patra at Cinecittà a century and a half later.
This Egyptian style included everything from headdresses to furniture
and especially architecture. Egypt, with its rich Nile delta, featured as a syn-
onym for luxury in the European consciousness. The eighteenth-century
37
luxury
philosopher and economist Adam Smith had admired Egyptian innova-

tions in agriculture. Egypt represented something that was opulent and
grand, albeit for many too nouveau riche. Size mattered: the contemporary
orientalist Quatremère de Quincy in an 1803 work complained about ‘le
luxe de l’Architecture égyptienne’ that boasted ‘enormous pillars, enor-
mous walls, and enormous ceilings’.52 The mammoth scale of Egyptian style
was clearly not to everyone’s taste, and many considered it quite vulgar.
This was the case with the gigantic Egyptian-style plate service commis-
sioned by Napoleon from the famous luxury porcelain factory at Sèvres
(Figure 1.6). It was produced in two sets with sixty-six plates with Egyptian
scenes, twelve board dishes, twelve dessert dishes, two sugar bowls, and two
ice boxes in Egyptian style and as a final touch a centrepiece 22 feet long
composed of seventeen separate pieces featuring the kiosk at Philae and
another two temples together with an entire small colonnade, two colossal
seated figurines, and a sweep of sphinxes from Karnak. This was top luxury
on a scale suitable for Napoleon, who wove around him all the atmosphere
of an oriental despot. One set was sent to the Russian Tsar Alexander I
(when Napoleon was still a friend). The second set was a divorce gift for
Napoleon’s first wife, the Empress Josephine. Just as today’s billionaires
might give their wives luxury cars and villas as tokens of an amicable marital
separation, so Napoleon thought to impress his soon to be ex-wife. Yet Jose-
phine found it rather tasteless and had it sent back. Eventually, after the fall
of Napoleon, the service—valued at an enormous £1,500—was gifted by the
new Bourbon King Louis XVIII (brother of the unfortunate Louis XVI) to
the Duke of Wellington—by now it was not very fashionable and therefore a
perfect diplomatic present—and installed at Apsley House in London.53
The story of the Egyptian Sèvres set indicates that it is not just the intrin-
sic value of an object that makes it an item of luxury. Many collectors today
emphasize that an object’s provenance adds financial and cultural value.
Large diamonds, for instance, draw their value from rarity but also from
their previous owners. The 31.06-carat Wittelsbach–Graff Diamond, for
38
Fig. 1.6. Plate from the ‘Egyptian Service’, hard-paste porcelain, painted in enamels and
gilt, showing the statues of Amenhotep III at Luxor, designed by Vivant Denon (1747–1825)
and made at the Sèvres porcelain factory, France, 1810–12. One of sixty-six such plates, this
scene, ‘Statues dites de Mennon’, is taken from the illustrations by Denon (1802) in the
description of his journey to Egypt during Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1798 campaign.
instance, sold in 2008 for £16.4 million, was not just one of the most expen-
sive diamonds in the world, but also an object that had once belonged to
King Philip IV of Spain (1605–65) and a variety of other monarchs over the
centuries. This has been surpassed by the record $32.6 million recently
paid for a vivid blue diamond formerly in the collection of the heiress
Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon, which was sold at Sotheby’s New York to a Hong
39
luxury
Kong collector and renamed ‘Zoe’. However, most objects—including

antiques—do not have such well-known provenance. In many cases, prov-
enance is more or less arbitrarily invented. In 1748 Horace Walpole saw
what he thought were Tudor-period chairs at Esher Place in Surrey, and
believed them to have been the property of Cardinal Wolsey, who had lived
there after 1519. A similar suite comprising ebony chairs at Berkeley Castle
was believed to have furnished Francis Drake’s cabin, while an ebony bed
acquired by William Beckford for Fonthill Abbey was reputed to have fur-
nished the chamber of King Henry VIII of England. We now know that this
type of Tudor furniture was in reality made on the Coromandel Coast of
India and imported into Europe by the English and Dutch East India Com-
panies, possibly a century after their famous purported owners had died.
MEN, LUXURY, AND EXTRAVAGANCE
Readers might have noticed that most of the great patrons discussed so far
were men, whereas in the contemporary marketplace it is women who are
very much identified as the luxury consumers par excellence. The eigh-
teenth-century figures Horace Walpole and William Beckford embody a
moment of transition in the gendered notion of luxury. Unlike their noble
predecessors who had collected luxuries and built splendid villas and pal-
aces in the classic idiom, theirs was a more haphazard recovery of the past
characterized by eccentricity and personal passion. They built and fur-
nished some of England’s most extraordinary mansions in a new style that
borrowed not from antiquity but from the Middle Ages: the Gothic style.
Strawberry Hill, built in Twickenham near London between 1748 and 1776
by Horace Walpole, and Fonthill, built by the wealthy William Beckford
near Bath from 1796 onwards, are highly stylized projects directed by
wealthy, eccentric, and privileged men. The dwellings were not follies, a
type of space that is visited but not lived in, but houses and, in the case of
Beckford and Walpole, their main residences.
40
Horace (Horatio) William Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–97), was a

British writer and antiquarian. The third son of the prime minister Robert
Walpole, Horace was a Member of Parliament (1741–68), but his main
interests were copious correspondence, antiquarian researches, and ama-
teur design. A voluminous and pedantic correspondent, he wrote with an
eye to posterity, cataloguing the motives, appearances, and manners of
the personalities of his day in 4,000 surviving letters.54 He also published
The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was the first ‘gothic’ novel. Walpole’s
most significant contribution to the visual arts was his development and
promotion of ‘Strawberry Hill Gothick’, a style that led to a new strand of
English architecture that moved away from Palladian symmetry and
encouraged the recovery of a real or invented medieval gothic style.
From 1748 to 1776 Walpole had his residence, Strawberry Hill, repeat-
edly rebuilt in an asymmetrical pseudo-gothic mode. Additions to the
original building included a gallery, cloister, oratory, and a tower (the
Beauclerk Tower). Walpole pursued what art historian Charles Saumarez
Smith calls an ‘exercise in archaeology, recreating different periods of
architecture from room to room’.55 In old age, Walpole described his ‘small
capricious house’ as ‘a sketch by a beginner’.56 It was conceived not just as
a matter of self-conscious antiquarianism, but rather as a practical resi-
dence with a relationship to contemporary taste and sociability: ‘In truth,
I did not mean to make my house so Gothic as to exclude convenience,
and modern refinements in luxury. The designs of the inside and outside
are strictly ancient, but the decorations are modern,’ wrote Walpole.57
Like Walpole, the son of a powerful and wealthy grandee, Beckford pub-
lished an eccentric novel, Vathek, an orientalist tale of incest and murder.58
In 1796 Beckford began to transform the family estate, ‘Splendens’, into
his own gothic extravagance, Fonthill Abbey. Like Walpole’s Strawberry
Hill, it was outside urban space and scrutiny, Fonthill being on the edge
of a wild landscape, and Beckford having built a 12-foot-high wall to keep
out any onlookers. Even more so than Strawberry Hill, the house was
41
luxury
Fig. 1.7. Drawing by John Buckler of the south-west view of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, the
seat of William Beckford, 1821. Brush drawing in grey wash, 35.1 x 45.7 cm. At this secluded
villa the notorious William Beckford is said to have had gilded pageboys open the front
door. It was one of the tallest residences in England until it collapsed.
about surface, not substance. Designed by architect James Wyatt, Fonthill

included an enormous entrance hall with a corresponding 276-foot tower
made of wood and Wyatt’s mixture of ‘compo-cement’, which collapsed in
1800 and several times subsequently (Figures 1.7 and 1.8). As Beckford
ecstatically wrote in a letter, when you looked up into the tower, it ‘was lost
in vapour . . . all was essence—the slightest approach to sameness was here
untolerated—monotony of every kind was banished’.59
Beckford was infamous at the time, the subject of a public and scan-
dalous affair with a well-born young man and forced to live abroad for a
time with his wife.60 Returning to England following the death of his wife,
42
Fig. 1.8. Print after John Buckler of the south-west view of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, the
seat of William Beckford after the collapse of the central tower, c.1825. Lithograph, printed
on chine collé. A true ‘folly’, this was meant to be lived in, not simply visited for fun. Font-
hill was on the edge of a wild landscape, and Beckford had built a 12-foot-high wall to keep
out any onlookers. Even more so than Strawberry Hill, the house was about surfaces, not
substance. Designed by architect James Wyatt, Fonthill included an enormous entrance
hall with a corresponding 276-foot tower made of wood and Wyatt’s mixture of ‘compo-
cement’, which collapsed in 1800 and several times subsequently.
Beckford put his heart and soul into the construction of Fonthill. The essay-
ist William Hazlitt described Fonthill as ‘a glittering waste of laborious idle-
ness, a cathedral turned into a toy-shop, an immense Museum of all that is
most curious and costly, and, at the same time, most worthless, in the pro-
duction of art and nature’.61 The term ‘toy-shop’ strongly suggests that lux-
ury was here at the service not of magnificence and status, but of fashion
and surfaces. The use of the word ‘toy’ at that time indicated not innocent
children’s games, but jewellery and trifles such as gold snuffboxes or steel
43
luxury
buttons. Hazlitt played the arbiter of ‘good’ luxury, in opposition to pure

embellishment and frills. He found Beckford’s taste as banal as that of a
marchand-mercier (a French luxury dealer): ‘Mr Beckford has undoubtedly
shown himself an industrious bijoutier, a prodigious virtuoso, an accom-
plished patron of unproductive labour, an enthusiastic collector of expen-
sive trifles’, a sentence that would not be out of place as a critique of one of
the many plutocrats of today.62 Beckford created the much-remarked-upon
three-day ‘long weekend’ entertainment of 1781 for himself at Fonthill, for
which Marie-Antoinette’s set and landscape designer, Jacques Philippe de
Loutherbourg, who also worked at Drury Lane Theatre, designed magic
lantern and other light effects inside Fonthill’s Egyptian- style hall.63
Beckford and Walpole aspired not simply to become arbiters of taste, as
many of their peers had done through culture and money. Their pursuit of
culture was also intertwined with passion, anti-conformism, and a good
dose of what Hazlitt and many of his contemporaries thought was the bad
taste of the rich and effeminate. Rather than aspiring to immortal reputa-
tion and the longevity of their creations, they saw luxury as ephemeral and
mainly for the duration of their indulged lives (they had no direct heirs). In
the case of Beckford, his tower had to be rebuilt and repaired several times
until the building was left to decay. Walpole wrote as early as 1761 that ‘My
buildings are paper, like my writings, and both will be blown away in ten
years after I am dead’.64 Yet, Walpole’s legacy remained key to the shaping
of nineteenth-century taste. Strawberry Hill became the destination of a
great many Victorian middle-class tourists, eager to see Walpole’s villa. In
terms of the history of furnishings, the collections at Strawberry Hill also
fuelled an interest in fantastical and incongruous juxtaposition, further
popularized through Walpole’s published Description of his house (1784)
and the famous auction dispersal of 1842.
Luxury is not something of recent invention. The allure and repul-
sion of luxury were already a topic of discussion in ancient times. Roman
authors complained about the decline of ancient mores, yet the splendour
44
of private and civic buildings in Pompeii and Herculaneum did not fail to
astonish contemporaries as well as their discoverers in the mid-eighteenth
century. This fostered a new interest in Roman antiquity already present in
the Middle Ages when precious cameos, busts, and pottery were seen as
essential in the collections of princes and rich intellectuals. The antique
became a sign of cultural lineage and a major item of expenditure. The
grand tour, a long sojourn in the Italian peninsula sometimes lasting
up to several years, was the occasion to acquire a variety of costly (and
often not very authentic) items. This use of the antique as an accessory to
intellectual aspiration continued over the nineteenth and twentieth
century with periodic rediscoveries of Roman, Greek, Gothic, and
opulent Egyptian style.
45
Luxury, the Church, and the

Court in the Late Middle Ages and
Renaissance
•
T he Middle Ages are often portrayed as the ‘dark ages’. Yet, in many
ways they could have not been more splendid. Rich, glossy silks
imported from China and the Middle East were made into liturgical vest-
ments and draped the statues of Madonnas in splendid churches and cathe-
drals decorated with enormously expensive glass windows. The power and
splendour of Church and state were interlinked. The local ruler of one of
the many Italian states would have been no less sumptuous in his choice of
clothing (called ‘livery’) and entertainment for himself than he was for his
family and vast coterie of courtiers. By the fifteenth century, luxury was
also visible in the choice of food and in the degree of formalized manners
used at table and in social interactions. This was evident among the
wealthy urban elites and mercantile classes but assumed unprecedented
forms at court. Princes and kings created perfect settings in which to enter-
tain friends and impress political enemies. Splendid chandeliers, ornate
gilded interiors, mirrors, and precious damasks furnished enormous
rooms used for feasts, balls, and divertissements. By the seventeenth cen-
tury, all these elements had found their apogee at the court of Louis XIV,
King of France, otherwise known as the Roi-Soleil (Sun King) because of
the remarkable splendour of his court, unprecedented in Europe.
46
luxury, the church, and the court
LUXURY AND SPIRITUALITY
The most important figure in the rehabilitation of splendour (and by

default luxurious goods) in the Christian Church is Abbot Suger. Suger
(1081–1151) was in charge of the great abbey of Saint-Denis, which is now
in a rather desultory part of the edge of Paris. In the twelfth century this
was a space of the most splendid experimentation in what is now known as
the French gothic style. Suger rebuilt an older basilica with large areas of
stained glass and thin stone traceries originally painted in polychrome
colours that were ‘intended to inspire reverence in the believer from the
moment he crossed the threshold’.1 Suger worked closely with the court of
the future Louis VI and acquired various rare and precious relics, including
the famous Egyptian or late Imperial Roman porphyry vase that he had
remounted with eagle mounts for the monarch, now in the Louvre, known
as ‘Suger’s Eagle’. The inscription on the vessel makes the point that mar-
ble might be rare, but the deep purple-coloured porphyry is rarer still. It is
one of the hardstones associated with the long afterlife of the Egyptian
Empire.
To Suger, beautiful and precious objects were not just material artefacts,
but conveyed the spiritual power of God. Beauty could therefore be framed
as divine, and splendour for the Church was no longer considered to be an
aberration. This permitted the incorporation into church decoration and
fittings of the most magnificent textiles, gold and silver, gems and semi-
precious stones, enamels (molten glass), marbles, bronze and other met-
als, curious carvings, ivories, and also paintings with precious pigments,
which suggested the transcendental power of religion. The Virgin in art
could wear a habit of the costliest silk, and altar screens radiated a depth of
colour and sensuality. Most important to Suger’s vision was the abstract
play of light from the famous stained-glass windows that came to define
the French gothic era. Anyone who has experienced the beams of these
lights understands the link between matter and spirit that he expounded.
47
luxury
By the fourteenth century it became common to expose the host (the

bread that is the body of Christ). Precious sacred vessels of rock crystal and
metal, known as ‘monstrances’, were fashioned for this purpose. The use
of such crystal to house the relics of the saints also became common among
wealthy congregations from the twelfth century. This trend accelerated
with the arrival of many such relics from Constantinople after it had been
plundered by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Specialist workshops in Paris,
the Meuse, Moselle, and also Venice fashioned rock crystals that had to be
hollowed out very carefully. Crystals sometimes acted like magnifying
glasses for the relics tucked in behind. Rock crystal had magic and alle-
gorical power: ‘according to Saint Augustine, crystal stood for the transfor-
mations of evil into good; for St Gregory the Great, it represented Christ.’2
The ideas are drawn from the discussions of the nature and appearance of
the heavenly Jerusalem in the Old and New Testaments. Goldsmiths fash-
ioned the most charming angels to hold up altarpieces and reliquaries.
Relatively realistic statuary began to take the place of Byzantine vessels
that contained the holy artefacts. Rubies, pearls, and enamel cameos
embellished the famous ‘Well of Moses’, created by the fourteenth-century
Dutch/Burgundian artist Claus Sluter for the Carthusian monastery of
Champmol, near Dijon, about which it has been commented that ‘its radi-
ant physical beauty and the dramatic intensity of the scene depicted attract
attention more beautifully than the presence of relics’.3
The relationship between the clergy and luxury has a long and complex
history in the early Christian Church. Men of the cloth required garments
to wear at the altar as well as in the street, and considerable debate took
place over the centuries as to how they should appear. Pope Innocent II
(1130–43) banned the clergy from displaying ‘gilded bridles, saddles,
breastplates and spurs’ outside the church.4 The Fourth Lateran Council
of 1215 demanded linen tunics, which clearly implied that the more luxuri-
ous silk was not considered reasonable. From the thirteenth century, ‘what
seems to have been sought is a stark visual contrast: dark, plain, and humble
48
outside of the sanctuary, but bright, glistening, and ornamented within

church’.5
Much of the textile culture of this period was paid for and sometimes
also made by noble women. For presiding over the Mass, garments of
great splendour and cost were created and paid for by donors. The cone-
shaped overgarments worn by the priest during the celebration of the
Mass were known as ‘chasubles’. One of the most splendid surviving
chasubles allegedly belonged to St Vitalis. Preserved today in the Abegg-
Stiftung in Switzerland, it was made for the abbey of St Peter in Salzburg,
Austria (Figure 2.1). It was probably produced by ladies of the aristoc-
racy, who from the mid-ninth century began to create luxurious liturgi-
cal attire incorporating rare imported silks, silk and gold thread, woven
Fig. 2.1. Chasuble of St Vitalis. Made of silk produced in the Near East, eleventh century.
Silk and gold, with river pearls and semi-precious stones.
49
luxury
silk bands, pearls, gems, and linen. Some sources suggest that the clergy
themselves directed the work, which was conducted as a form of piety. St
Vitalis died before 730 ce, and he cannot have worn this garment, which
is constructed from eleventh- or twelfth-century silks richly embroidered
with pearls and precious gems.6
LUXURY AND FASHION IN THE LATER MIDDLE AGES
Our image of a courtly society is today very much configured through tele-
visual and movie dramas about the European Middle Ages. Famous come-
dians such as Rowan Atkinson present a rather ‘barbarian’ society in which
the rich and powerful lived in icy-cold castles feasting on large quantities of
game and wildfowl. Historians, however, disagree with such a caricature
and claim that medieval Europe was a more refined place than we imag-
ine.7 The development of fashion, for instance, has been attributed to the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. A dynamic fashion system emerged
within a conjunction of the competing polities of France, England, and
Burgundy in the late Middle Ages, and around 1350 men began to dress
very differently from women.8 There was a new consciousness of the value
of materiality and skills. The historian Georges Duby noted that people of
the Middle Ages wished to celebrate their ‘remarkable technical progress,
the perfecting of tools’, their ability to distinguish the ‘shades among the
colours’, and the ability to unite within art both form and function, ‘endow-
ing it with grace’.9
The idea that the Middle Ages were far from dark comes from Johan
Huizinga’s famous work of history, The Waning of the Middle Ages, first
published in Dutch in 1919. In this study of life in fourteenth- and fifteenth-
century France and the Netherlands, Huizinga focused upon the medieval
characteristics that pervaded the fifteenth-century Low Countries, the
main European artistic and trading centre outside Italy. He presented
the argument that the Middle Ages were not simply the prelude to the
50
Renaissance. Instead of seeing a moment of ‘birth’, he described instead

‘the decay of overripe forms of civilization’, concluding: ‘No epoch ever
witnessed such extravagance of fashion as that extending from 1350 to
1480.’10 Subsequent scholarship has reinforced the notion that something
very particular in the history of Western civilization took place in medieval
Burgundy.
All this is summarized in one of the most popular paintings in the world,
Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Betrothal (1434). Once thought to represent
a wedding, it is now believed to represent a sacramental betrothal between
a wealthy Italian textile merchant of the time, Giovanni Arnolfini, from
the city of Lucca, and his bride-to-be, Giovanna, in a setting in the Flemish
city of Bruges. The nature of his transcontinental trade is indicated not
only in the fine woollen broadcloth, fur, and white linen that adorns both
man and woman, and the small Turkey carpet, but also in the orange fruit,
an exotic luxury that must have come from abroad, sitting on the window-
sill. Even the little dog might represent a type of luxury; the Duke of Berry
had 1,500 dogs, and ‘René of Anjou felt compelled to construct a special
fence to keep dogs off his bed’.11 Lapdogs and hunting dogs were a sign of
prestige.
Textiles were central to this new ‘culture of appearances’ (a term origi-
nally coined for the eighteenth century but that applies to earlier periods
too), with fine woollens and tapestries presented to visiting princes who
voyaged to the rich Franco-Flemish towns.12 One such luxury commodity
that was even more uncommon (and not regularly presented in the north
in this manner to visiting princes) was silk. Silk was more likely to be gifted
to the Church—hence its survival in large quantities in ecclesiastical con-
texts. The lust for silks is well known from the travels of Marco Polo,
who marvelled at the types and qualities of silks made and worn across
China and at the court of Kublai Kahn. His journey with his father and
uncle from Venice to Asia in the late thirteenth century and subsequent
published narratives revealed the trade in luxury goods in countries as
51
luxury
diverse as Japan (which he read about but did not visit), Syria, Lesser Arme-
nia, and as far south as the Hindu kingdoms of Ceylon and Sumatra.13
All this splendour began to filter back to Europe quite quickly, leading
to attempts at producing similar products locally. Silk began to be pro-
duced in Europe in the early fourteenth century in places such as Lucca
and Venice in Italy, where the secret of sericulture had been mastered
from the Levant.14 In a wool-producing country such as England, only silk
braids and trimmings were made in the early Middle Ages. Silk was
imported, however, from the Near East and China and eventually from
Italy and Spain through a network of merchants. Many of these traders
came via Paris and Bruges, the latter being a prosperous centre of luxury
trade. Cloths of gold and figured silks without pile were the most expen-
sive, followed by plain silks. After the 1330s new products like velvets
began to be prominent.15 The weave and lustre of ‘infidel’ textiles indicate
a highly developed awareness of aesthetics. This pleasure was found not
only in the components of dress, but also in trappings such as tents and
equine decorations. Interestingly, this textile culture and interest in fash-
ion are more clearly marked, according to many historians of the period,
as a male interest.
The rise of fashion and the new impetus towards the consumption of
foreign luxuries such as precious silks were not universally welcomed.
Starting in the thirteenth century, local and later national governments
attempted to control and curb conspicuous consumption. They passed
hundreds of laws, called ‘sumptuary laws’, which established what each
rank of society was entitled to consume. The rationale of such legislative
intervention can be understood by looking at the preamble (the opening
lines) of the sumptuary law of the French city of Montpellier in 1277,
which stated that, the town ‘wishing to avoid superfluous expense that was
spent earlier on women’s clothing and ornaments, and the danger for the
soul that is [there] inherent, in honor of the highest Creator and for the
utility of the town . . .’, such a law had become necessary.16
52
The first sumptuary law in England, enacted in 1336, established that all
men and women of whatever rank were forbidden from wearing clothing
imported from outside England, Ireland, Wales, or Scotland. The same
could be said of the wearing of fur, with the exception of the royal family,
high prelates, earls, barons, and knights, as well as members of the clergy
with an income of more than £100 a year.17 Studies of the Roman de la rose
(begun 1225–30, continued 1269–70), one of the most famous verse works
of medieval France, indicate that much of the attention concerning luxury
consumption was directed at men rather than women. Historian Sarah-
Grace Heller notes how sumptuary laws promoted the ambitions of those
who wished to expand their personal visibility.18 Parts of the Roman de la
rose concern ‘deceit’ by clothing, and many luxury fashions are described
in the book, especially hats (furred and ribboned hats, floral garlands, uni-
sex hats, to be worn by both women and men).19
French sumptuary laws, it has been argued, were different from other
European laws in that they were concerned with food, clothing, and horses,
but not funerals or social displays (apart from banqueting), which were a
common object of sumptuary laws elsewhere in Europe.20 French laws are
not concerned with the silhouettes of garments in the thirteenth century;
rather they focus on the nature and cost of the fabric. Philippe III’s laws of
1279 set the number of robes that a man or a woman might possess to five
for a duke and one for a bourgeois.21 Imagine being told today how many
sets of clothes one might own! Quite strict were the prohibitions for the
bourgeoisie: ‘No bourgeois man or women will wear vair [grey fur, gener-
ally squirrel], gris, or ermine fur, and they shall surrender all they have a
year from next Easter. They shall not wear, nor be allowed to wear, gold or
precious stones, nor crowns of gold or silver.’22
As with the French, Italian sumptuary laws attempted—and often
failed—to limit not just the use of luxury cloth and clothing but also jewel-
lery, cushions and coverlets, food and feasting, and expensive forms of
transport such as chariots and palanquins.23 For those who contravened
53
luxury
the law, punishment followed. Fines were not uncommon for those who
were found wearing forbidden items, and these fines were administered by
specially employed officials who went from street to street and sometimes
even entered people’s private residences. Punishment could also extend to
include the makers of forbidden items. In the cities of Forlì and Reggio
Emilia in northern Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, for example, arti-
sans producing forbidden garments, embroideries, or jewellery were fined
25 scudi and received three lashes.24
Within highly regulated Renaissance societies, most sumptuary laws
were directed at women (even if men loved their horses, parties, and furs).
The historian Catherine Kovesi points out that fashion is not an arcane
sign system, but a visible and public indication of important matters. In a
society such as medieval and Renaissance Italy, she argues, women relied
much more than men on dress codes. Men could justify fine clothing by
reference to their public roles; women lacked any such roles and were lim-
ited to the private sphere. Within this system, their clothes functioned as a
type of ‘voice’.25 Young males, on the other hand, were accused of immod-
esty, effeminacy, and sometimes linked to charges of homosexuality via
luxury consumption. The preacher Bernadino of Siena (1380–1444) pub-
lished a sermon in which he claimed that, if parents sent their boys out of
the house wearing fashionable clothes with low doublets, which showed
parts of the legs and see-through shirts, then they were acting as pimps for
their children.26
Sumptuary laws continued in the following centuries, being first
repealed in England in 1603 and in other European countries over the
course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet historians
agree that mere legislation might not have been sufficient to stop the rise
of luxury and fashion. The very fact that these laws were periodically
reissued and updated probably means that they were overall ineffective.
Luxury and fashion became, instead, key phenomena both in the medieval
courts and within the prosperous European cities of the Renaissance. Here
54
one could find not just customers but also a variety of artisans busy provid-
ing luxury dress and trading in its components. The most skilful makers
moved from place to place, sometimes avoiding corporate constraints
and spreading new styles of, for instance, tailored clothes, textiles, embroi-
deries, illuminated books, statuettes, and jewels. In this way, fashion and
luxury became central to technological innovation and to the culture of
hierarchical display that characterized late medieval and Renaissance
Europe, especially in a courtly setting.
THE PURSUIT OF MAGNIFICENCE AT THE COURT OF HENRY VIII
The understanding of luxury within the courtly environment of the later

Middle Ages and early modern period necessitates an appreciation of the
concept of ‘magnificence’. Magnificence, from the Latin magnum facere,
literally means ‘to do something great’ and is closely related to the word
magnificentia, which means both greatness and nobleness, but also gener-
osity and pride. These were all virtues that a ruler had to embody in his
actions, manners, and especially his choices of dress and luxurious spend-
ing. Renaissance rulers thus employed the newly confident artists, archi-
tects, and designers to assert the primacy of their court’s power and
culture. Magnificence was to be contrasted to mere ‘pomp’, the vain and
ostentatious display of wealth through luxurious goods, something that
medieval and early modern governments looked down upon and actively
discouraged through laws and admonitions. The idea of magnificence,
and the associated concept of splendour, had a long pedigree going back
to antiquity, but in the Renaissance the two concepts became guiding con-
cepts for any ruler. The humanist and poet Giovanni Pontano tells us in his
1498 philosophical and ethical treatise De splendore:
It is appropriate to join splendour [splendor] to magnificence [magnificen-
tiae], because they both consist of great expense and have a common mat-
ter that is money. But magnificence [magnificentia] derives its name from
55
luxury
the concept of grandeur and concerns building, spectacle and gifts while
splendour [splendor] is primarily concerned with the ornament of the
household [ornamentis domesticis], the care of the person, and with fur-
nishings [supelectile] and in the display of different things.27
Magnificence and splendour were popular concepts not just in the Ital-
ian Renaissance courts but also at the French and English courts. Since
1485 England had enjoyed a period of relative prosperity and peace under
Henry VII. When Henry VIII (1491–1547) succeeded his father in 1509, he
inherited a full exchequer. He was a boy of 17 who read Latin and spoke
French very well. One of the great events of his tumultuous life was the
Field of the Cloth of Gold (Camp du Drap d’Or). Held near Calais in June
1520, this was a meeting arranged to increase the bond of friendship
between England and France, when Henry came together with the hand-
some François I, King of France. The meeting lasted four weeks, with ban-
quets, jousts, and general showing-off.28 Although Henry VIII changed
clothes constantly and had particularly fine tents and horse trappings, he
realized that his English artists and designers were not as sophisticated as
those working abroad, so he asked the great German artist Hans Holbein
the Younger (1497–1543) to move to London along with other skilled art-
ists and designers. Holbein, whom we associate with portrait painting, in
fact designed everything from jewels to chimneypieces to clocks for Henry,
to samples of embroidery for the ladies, using the then fashionable style of
the grotesque.
Henry was a terror for the Church, and, after confiscating monastic
lands, he lived at Whitehall, then one of the biggest palaces in the world
with buildings covering 24 acres. He also built St James’s Palace and Non-
such in Surrey. Thomas Cromwell made him rich beyond imagination by
dissolving the churches and monasteries. In old age Henry became very
fat, as he could not play the sports he loved because of a leg injury. His
waist increased from an attractive 34 to 54 inches (Figure 2.2). He adopted
padded Germanic styles of dressing and laid on the gems, with some outfits
56
Fig. 2.2. Henry VIII, c.1560–80. Oil on panel after Hans Holbein the Younger.
covered in rubies set in gold and collars of pearls and jewels. It is said that
those who laughed at his appearance suffered later.
Dress historian Maria Hayward, writing on the splendid clothes of
Henry VIII, points out that, despite the rhetoric, ‘visually and finan-
cially there would have been very little difference between magnificent
57
luxury
and luxurious dress. Both would be sumptuous and expensive. The differ-
ence . . . is a moral one.’29 The hats of Henry VIII were of black velvet, which
was not very expensive in itself, but they were so covered in ‘enamelled
and engraved gold buttons, aglettes and jewelled brooches’ that they were
listed in his inventories next to the entry on plate (silver).30 She points out
that most foreign accounts of encountering the King had little to report on
what he said, but much to say about what he wore.
Men liked their jewels very much and wore more than they have ever
done, before or since: a painting of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (attrib-
uted to Steven van der Meulen, active 1543–68), indicates the many hun-
dreds of pearls used as trimming on the sleeves of the doublet and as ties
(Figure 2.3). Pearls also appear as trimmings on detachable sleeves on
Venetian figures of the Virgin. Royal clothes were not locked in tradition,
but had to change, as the English court was influenced by foreign fashions
such as those from the realm of Burgundy.31 The great fashion innovation
of this period was the division of hose (stocking-like nether garments) into
upper and lower. The codpiece or ‘cod’ was separate. A great luxury (and
also, of course, a means of asserting a masculine presence), it was laced to
the hose and doublet—and was, of course, also slang for scrotum.
LUXURY AND SPLENDOUR UNDER ELIZABETH I
Elizabeth I (1533–1603), daughter of Henry VIII, took magnificence to an

ever greater extreme. In her famous Armada portrait, painted when she was
nearly 60, she wears a front-fastening bodice with wings, decorated with
bands of pearls and gem-studded bows and set with separate gems (Figure
2.4). The Ditchley portrait shows a dress of what is probably white silk with
a secondary weft of silver. She has 45 jewelled buttons, 370 pearls, 300
pearls in necklace ropes, and earrings in the form of armillary spheres,
tied with red ribbons. Her wired veil in two parts is edged with more jewels.
The inventory of her wardrobe listed 1,900 items, including her clothes,
58
Fig. 2.3. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, c.1560–5. Oil on oak panel attributed to Steven
van der Meulen (fl. 1543–68).
59
luxury
Fig. 2.4. Elizabeth I, Armada Portrait, c.1588. Oil on panel attributed to George Gower
(1540–96).
her fans, buttons, jewels, and lengths of silk. Dressing the Queen meant
that each lady in waiting had a task, and a book was kept to record any
jewels lost from the Queen. The circulation of jewels was a very important
part of court culture. The miniatures given by Elizabeth I were a prized
sign of great favour, and could be both melancholy and amusing at the
same time: an eye shedding a tear and a heart pierced by an arrow spelled
melancholy.
Luxury needed to be managed and required an army of trusty servants
to receive, record, care, store, and mend garments, jewellery, weapons,
and other royal paraphernalia. This position came to be known in France
as the office of the King’s Wardrobe. Under the French king Henri III
(r. 1574–89), an executive office of the royal household was charged with
60
providing not only the clothing of the King, but the livery (‘issues’) of cloth
and furs of defined type and value for the nobility to gift to the poor, and a
whole range of luxuries from ginger to candles. The King’s tailors, who are
known by name, were often a type of bureaucratic chief, responsible for
everything from complete hangings for a royal bed, to the tens of thou-
sands of furs bought to line livery. They made purchases from the regional
fairs of England as well as from foreign merchants such as the Lucca silk-
dealers and Baltic fur-traders.32
The role of the goldsmith was also central to the burgeoning trade in
European high luxuries: he was an international figure also involved with
the financial affairs of clients and trade generally. He had to move gold and
silver from the Americas via Spain and Portugal and then might work in
Nuremburg or London using diamonds from India, rubies from Burma,
sapphires from Ceylon, emeralds from Colombia, and pearls grown on
the Persian Gulf and off the coast of Ceylon. One of the most celebrated
goldsmiths of the sixteenth century was the German Wenzel Jamnitzer,
who served as court goldsmith to a succession of Holy Roman Emperors,
including Charles V, Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolf II (Figure 2.5).
Extremely skilful in the production of jewellery boxes incorporating cor-
als, shells, and hardstones encased in precious metal, he was also an inven-
tor and a scholar of some reputation. He was probably the inventor of a
machine for embossing metals and the author of Perspectiva corporum
regularium (‘Perspective of Regular Solids’), published in 1568.
Furs were also a very important part of global trade: armions (ermine)
were the winter coat of the stoat, a member of the weasel family; those from
the north were white in winter, except for the tip of the tail, which is black.
You could substitute miniver, the white bellies of squirrels, which by the
mid-sixteenth century was cheaper than ermine. Fashion was also on the
move. Elizabeth knew about French cutting techniques and tried to get a
French tailor to come to her court from Paris. Life-sized fashion dolls were
sent between the French and Italian courts to communicate new trends.33
61
luxury
Fig. 2.5. Portrait of the Goldsmith Wenzel Jamnitzer (1507/8–85), c.1562–3 by Nicolas
Neufchatel (previously attributed to Georg Pencz). 92.5 x 80 cm. Donated to the City
of Geneva in 1805 according to consular decree of 1801 (Decree Chaptal) also called ‘Send-
ing Napoleon’. The goldsmith is depicted with the tools of his trade and the fruits of
his labour. The ferns and leaves in the gilded vessel on the shelf are clearly fashioned
from silver.
62
Medieval and Renaissance mindsets loved colours; to the well educated,

colours had metaphysical as well as sensual qualities.34 Elizabeth I owned
rich gowns of mainly black and white, but also tawny, ash, dove, carna-
tion, orange, peach, russet, crimson, ‘hair colour’, purple, bee colour, clay,
drake’s colour, horseflesh, lady’s blush, partridge, and straw. New dyes
were found all the time to extend the colour range.35 The most vivid red
was called lustie gallant, the palest maiden’s blush. There was goose-turd
green, pease-porridge tawny, and popinjay blue. None of Elizabeth I’s com-
plete garments survives, and barely any components; some are believed to
be in the Danish Royal Collection.
Elizabeth developed the idea of the ‘progress’, in which she and her
court moved across her realm. This was very clever, as she did not have to
pay for her court when she was away. She greatly delighted in elaborate
masques, a form of conspicuous consumption that was completely ephem-
eral and yet took up an enormous amount of time and money. Masques
centred on the monarch, and she was generally invited to play a role in
them. She borrowed the concept from Medici Florence. The idea was that
noble lords and ladies would perform in masques and other theatrical
devices on themes such as ‘Triumph of the King and the Court’—masquers
vanquished base enemies, who might be dressed as witches and hags, bac-
chic figures, grotesques, and carnival fools. They were cast away by mem-
bers of the royal family dressed as Oberon, the Fairy King, the Divine
Beauty, and the like. Nobles did not speak and had their faces hidden with
a mask. Exquisite clothes were worn by the performers: some dancing
before the Queen in 1600 wore ‘a skirt of cloth of silver, a rich waistcoat
wrought with silks and gold and silver, a mantel of carnacion taffeta cast
under the arme, and their hair loose about their shoulders’.36
All of this was not about vanity so much as statecraft, organization, and
economy. Elizabeth I’s wardrobe did not exceed that of the other mon-
archs of Europe, about which she was well informed. She regarded these
cloths and clothes as state treasure. But the pursuit of magnificence was
63
luxury
not confined to dress. Architecture became in the early modern period a

necessary expenditure for any ruler or nobleman. One historian of the
period has written that Elizabethan architecture ‘is not . . . of the mind but
of the senses’.37 Timber, stone, and brick offered colour, pattern, and qual-
ity. Architecture in the English-speaking world became part of the curricu-
lum of magnificence and learning for the first time: ‘Classical architecture
was the built form of classical learning,’ writes the architectural historian
Christy Anderson.38 The rise of the printed book played an important
role in this: ‘through the printed page architecture could now be studied
independently of buildings themselves. Ancient architecture and inscrip-
tions . . . and ideal cities were all topics available to the professional and
amateur.’39
The completion of the great ‘prodigy houses’ of England was enriched
with plunder in this period, especially after the defeat of the Spanish
Armada in 1588: Longleat House, near Warminster (1567–80), with its
facade showing the three classical orders and banqueting houses on the
roof; Burghley House in Lincolnshire (1574–89), with its classical details
deployed on the roofline; Aston Hall, Birmingham (1618–35), with its
Long Gallery of Ionic pillars; Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire (1610s), with
its Venus fountain and cold bath; and Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire
(1580s), with its semi-correct Doric frieze (Figure 2.6). Many of these grand
houses were fitted out in the hopes of the Queen visiting—a scenario that
lasted until the reign of Queen Victoria.
Considerable investment went into the building of large palaces and
houses. However, the real investment was in furnishing their splendid
interiors. The walls might be brick or stone, sometimes rendered and
painted, but the interiors were filled with tapestry, gold and silver plate,
porcelain, and objects designed after Flemish and German woodcuts
and Mannerist forms from France. One of the most famous and sensual
objects surviving from this reign is the Sea-Dog Table, c.1597 (Figure 2.7).40
Designed after the engravings of the French architect and designer Jacques
64
Fig. 2.6. Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire. Front view of the house, with pavilions with
Dutch gables and acroterions, a tower with two cupolas, and arched windows behind the
central building.
Androuet du Cerceau I, it sits on a base of carved tortoises, with four carved

wooden seadogs with tails, pointed bosoms, and ostrich feather ears (which
it is believed people caressed and rubbed as they studied the exotic inlaid
walnut and marble sliding tabletop). It stood in the withdrawing chamber
at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, home of Bess of Hardwick, one of the rich-
est women in late sixteenth-century England. The top floor was built for a
planned visit from the Queen. Sadly, by 1597 she was too old to visit. It is
speculated that Bess used the tabletop to admire her jewels and objets de
vertu when she was in residence. It was originally fitted with a carpet of
needlework and a blue and gold fringe. That it was so erotic and owned by
a woman cannot be coincidental. Seadog refers to the ‘talbot’ or dog that
was a part of the arms of her fourth husband, George Talbot. Seadogs are
65
luxury
Fig. 2.7. Sea-Dog Table, c.1600. Inlaid walnut 875 mm (H); 1,480 mm (L).
chimera who can fly, walk, and swim. The tortoise base is a visual joke—as
occurs also with so many Elizabeth jewels—‘make haste slowly’. It took its
place within a wholly cosmopolitan space where the carpets were from
Constantinople and the porcelain was Chinese.41
Carpets were probably as important as silks in exciting the superrich of
this time. Until the eighteenth century a carpet meant something covering
furniture and only later applied to floors. As late as 1727 the Chambers
Cyclopoaedia called it ‘a sort of covering to be spread on a table, trunk, an
astrade [dais] or even a passage or floor’.42 It was generally the most deco-
rative element in any room from the fifteenth to the seventeenth cen-
turies, on tables and cupboards. Designs were sent from England to be
worked into carpets in Turkey; they were later sent to India and China, as
was also the case with porcelain. The fabrics used varied widely down the
social scale. The rich had Eastern carpets from Turkey and Persia. The
cheaper English equivalent was called Turkey-work. In 1523 Dame Agnes
66
Hungerford had fifty-four cushions, some of velvet and gold; ‘six fine car-
pets for cupboards, three great carpets for tables (tapestry), as well as seven
“bastard carpets” of poorer quality’ or cut-down from old pieces.43
Prodigality and thrift were two sides of a continuum, and neither was
acceptable for a ruler. Magnificence and modesty could also go together.
Elizabeth was famous for spending a great deal on dress but saved money
by visiting noble houses for part of the year, with the results that she bank-
rupted some of the major English noble families. In this sense, expendi-
ture was rarely discussed in terms of exchange or in the context of a market,
but as a form of representation or performance. When Elizabeth I died
in 1603, her Stuart cousin James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of
England and became James I. Even if Elizabeth I had embodied splendour,
at her death in 1603 she left only £40,000 debt. However, just five years
later, James I had accumulated debts worth £600,000. At the end of his
reign in 1625, he owed a staggering £1 million (equivalent to $200 million
in 2015 money).44 Most of this money had been used not in waging war,
but in a public and flamboyant display of conspicuous consumption. The
cost of the garments of a king could be incredible: Charles I, son of James
I, paid £266 for a scarlet silk suit with gold and silver embroidery in 1629,
whereas a portrait by a great artist of the time such as Daniel Mytens cost
only £66.45 The royal family accumulated so much debt at this time that
the funeral of Anne of Denmark (d. 1619) had to be delayed, as no one
would supply the necessary black cloth.
DECORUM, MANNERS, AND COURT LIFE
The pursuit of luxury among early modern rulers and their retinue was
predicated around the acquisition of enormously expensive artefacts,
but experience of the mind and body was also valued: ‘The things which
can make life enjoyable remain the same,’ commented Johan Huizinga.
‘They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment
67
luxury
of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity . . . and the intoxication of the

senses . . . The Renaissance wanted an unencumbered enjoyment of all of
life.’46 Yet the search for luxury was also underpinned by a series of ideas
and concepts that are specific to the Renaissance. Generalization is dif-
ficult, as courts were widely different in their size and composition. The
sixteenth-century Italian courts were different from the more decadent
and wasteful courts of the seventeenth century, for instance. Cosimo I de
Medici (1519–74), ruler of Florence, was even described as modest in his
taste and expenditure. Medieval feasts, often portrayed today in films
as excessive and extravagant, might not have been so wasteful after all.
We should not assume, in fact, that the luxury of the table of the Middle
Ages was about impressing people. The ceremony of the feast was closely
related to Christ’s Last Supper, and a seat next to the Lord was one of
the greatest prizes. Giving a great feast was not just about impressing
people. It was an act of ‘generosity’, a ‘charitable act’, a ‘pious obligation’,
an attempt to ‘secure the peace’ and sustain ‘the social order of the
world’.47 ‘Loyalty is venison’ ran the motto of the Danish Renaissance
king Frederik II.48
Ideas about what was appropriate and how conspicuous consumption
should be utilized as a tool of power circulated widely and were shared
across courts not just in Italy but throughout Europe. From the late fif-
teenth century Italy provided a model for all of Europe, to be emulated or
rejected, reinterpreted, absorbed, reworked, or transformed.49 An impor-
tant concept generated within the courtly environment of Italy was that of
decorum, the idea of an ideal-type of social behaviours based on good man-
ners and etiquette. A series of humanist writers addressed the issue of
decorum and conduct, among them Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529),
the most famous and influential writer on this topic. Castliglione was a
member of the court of the Duke of Urbino and acted as a diplomat in the
service of the princes of Mantua and the Papal Curia. This first-hand expe-
rience allowed him to publish The Courtier (1528), a true guide for the
68
perfect male courtier. The book stresses the role of moderation in regulat-
ing the appearance of noblemen and their consumption. He says that rul-
ers must be ‘generous and splendid in hospitality towards foreigners and
ecclesiastics’ but at the same time attentive ‘to moderate all superfluities,
for through the errours that are committed in these matters, small though
they seem, cities often come to ruin’.50 For the courtier, Castiglione empha-
sized instead the virtue of courage, and the importance of good man-
ners, conversation, and a range of moderate accomplishments that were
imitated all over Europe.
A second important concept to be found in Castiglione and later stud-
ied by historians is that of the manners encouraged within the courts. His-
torian Maria Bogucka considers the figure of the courtier, gesture, ritual,
and social order from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries among the
Polish gentry, who developed an elaborate code of behaviour that extended
from precedent at table to rules about when to wear a hat or not. The walk
of the Renaissance Polish nobleman was slow and full of dignity, and could
be recognized by foreigners.51 Gesture was one central part of the outward
expression of the social hierarchy in Italy, France, and Poland, just as in
Tudor England.
Sumptuous fashions, textiles, jewellery, and a range of more transient
arts set within architectural frameworks reinforced the notion that the
ruler’s grace and power could not be replicated, but only experienced by
his courtiers as a type of radiation. Livery and gifts of fashionable clothes
and jewels were central to this civilizing process.52 Noble bodies were
designed and identities shaped through the disciplines of fencing, riding,
dance, and ultimately dressing, to become collective mentalities that struc-
tured hierarchies of modern European etiquette and behaviour. The histo-
rian Peter Burke has usefully described this act of distinction as a task of
‘impression management’.53 He notes the rise of the concept of Renais-
sance family ‘strategies’, which included fashion purchase and display. The
idea of the ‘uniqueness’ of an individual, Burke argues, goes hand in hand
69
luxury
with a personal style in painting (the artist), the rise of the autobiography,
and the first-person address (the humanist).
Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century Swiss historian who did more
than anyone to popularize the notion of a cultural ‘rebirth’ to describe life
in fifteenth-century Italy, created much of his analysis from a study of the
incredible public display of this period. Much of this display was ephem-
eral and survives mainly in written descriptions, along with some prints,
drawings, and paintings. The famous festivals and processions of a city
such as Venice displayed the fixed dress of the professions, where the rela-
tive stability of the dress of the nobles, lawyers, physicians, and merchants
was viewed as a proof of the stability of the Republic; and also the luxurious
and fashionable clothes of the doge’s wife, the dogaressa, which were
presented as simultaneously ornamental and delightful.54 And the scope
of aesthetics was understood to be much wider than is generally the case
today, so that a metaphysical interest in beauty extended also to the beauty
of objects. Yet it was all transitory. According to the sixth-century philoso-
pher Boethius, whose writings were much in vogue in the early modern
period: ‘The beauty of things is fleet and swift, more fugitive than the pass-
ing of flowers in Spring.’55 There might be a delight in worldly things,
which must always perish, at the same time as there must be a profound
melancholy and focus upon the transcendental nature of death.
The socialization of manners was predicated on a shared understanding
of magnificence and decorum but also a shared visual culture among the
European elite. This is particularly noticeable when we consider collecting
practices. Literary models were drawn from Aristotle to justify the pur-
chase of objects such as gems, vases, and table services. The purpose of
these objects was not to embody the virtue called ‘magnificence’ but rather
to convey artistry, variety, abundance, and decorum.56 Simply being known
as a collector was prestigious, according to this humanist formula. To col-
lect was not simply to accumulate but to generate knowledge and inter-
connection between things.
70
LUXURY AT THE COURT OF LOUIS XIV
All this fine clothing, gesture, and comportment needed a stage on which
it could be set. The society that established the ultimate stage for luxury
consumption was France, even if many of the ideas were originally Italian.
The scene was set with the incredible spaces and gardens of Versailles,
which has been called ‘a hallucinatory statement of power’.57 Many of the
ideas for Versailles came from the mid-seventeenth-century château of
Vaux-le-Vicomte, about 55 kilometres south-east of Paris. Its lofty spaces of
circulation were a huge advance upon French princely Renaissance archi-
tecture, which was richly decorated with gilding and painting but had
smaller windows and few mirrors. In 1667 Louis XIV left the older palace
of the Louvre in central Paris for his rebuilt and much expanded Versailles.
A series of victorious campaigns from 1672 gave both funds and impetus
to extend the palace. Jules Hardouin Mansart began work in 1678, and by
1684 the Hall of Mirrors was complete (Figure 2.8). As well as being a state-
ment of absolute power and luxury, it was also like a street or road, but one
lined with vast mirrors reflecting the light from equally high windows.
Cast mirror glass had generally been made by the Italians (Venice had the
monopoly), but the French now managed to devise a technique of their
own, partly through industrial espionage.
The complexity—both technical and financial—of building and fur-
nishing such an enormous palace should not be forgotten. Seventeenth-
century France created from scratch a new luxury sector through the
patronage of the court. Royal manufactures—owned by local rulers—had
already been present in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but
France established some cutting-edge manufactures royales for the benefit
not just of the court but also of the state. During the reign of Louis XIV it
was an academic artist, Charles Le Brun, who was the principal orchestra-
tor of all these schemes. Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), France’s prime
minister, put Le Brun in charge of the most important royal manufacture,
71
Fig. 2.8. The Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) at the palace of Versailles, with courtiers
admiring the decoration. Frontispiece to the first volume of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Con-
versations nouvelles sur divers sujets (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1684). Fruit trees can be seen
planted in silver urns on either side of enormous consoles held up by putti.
72
the Gobelins workshops on the left bank of the Seine, in 1667. They manu-
factured almost everything for the court at the highest technical and artis-
tic standards (Figure 2.9). Le Brun provided the sketches and approved
Fig. 2.9. Tapestry woven in wool and silk, c.1670–1700, produced at Les Gobelins.
Designed by Charles Le Brun (1619–90). This tapestry is from a series representing twelve
of Louis XIV’s royal residences during different months of the year, with the King shown
hunting with his retinue in the grounds of his châteaux. Such tapestries relate to the strong
medieval interest in marking time. The foreground is dominated by a display of abun-
dance, the bounty of nature, and the luxury of court life. The textiles and other precious
objects laid on the balustrade are known to have been drawn from Louis’s treasury, and
the animals and birds from his menagerie (private zoo).
73
luxury
designs made by his 250 staff. The aim of the Gobelins workshop under Le
Brun was ‘to unify all the arts and to establish an ensemble of formulas in
which the rules of Absolute Beauty would be fixed forever’.58
The Gobelins continued the tradition of royal workshops at the Louvre
founded in the early seventeenth century, and they were accompanied by
other state-of-the-art manufactures such as Saint-Gobain (est. 1665) for the
production of mirrors, and later in the eighteenth century Sèvres (est. 1736)
for the production of porcelain. Here artisans worked directly for the Crown
and for those who could afford them. These workers had prestige and could
engage in innovation and experimentation. Many were foreign and broke all
the guild rules; they were, therefore, hated by the competition. Their work
showed innovation and richness of craft and materials. In many ways their
example set up the pattern of foreign workers coming to a great metropol
itan city like Paris and innovating luxuries for the next two centuries.
This was not just luxury and magnificence for the sake of it. The king
represented himself through style—architecture, furniture, fashion, and
other decorative arts, as much as through his armies and navies: ‘The
king’s objects were the king, the style of these objects belonged to the
king’s body.’59 In the case of Louis XIV, his court had to represent the power
of the court as ‘foreign princes or their ambassadors make inferences
about the strength or weaknesses of the kingdom’.60 Within this model
of rule—Absolutism—the king, nation, state, and people were interlinked.
The king stood in for the nation, and his things stood in for him. Only
certain privileged people had things that resembled his own. The decora-
tive arts had symbolic powers that we barely recall in social life today—for
instance, when courtiers bowed in front of the royal nef—a shiplike vessel
that contained the king’s knife, fork, and napkin; and indeed they bowed,
whether the king was present or not (Figure 2.10).
France, and Versailles in particular, set a standard for furniture and
design of a costly magnificence that few could emulate. Furniture might be
made of solid ebony and pietre dure, inlaid stones. Chinese porcelain and
74
Fig. 2.10. Silver, parcel-gilt, chased, cast, engraved, embossed nef, produced in Nurem-
berg by Esaias zur Linden, c.1609–29. Nefs were small ships that served as table and buffet
decoration. They remained popular until the Edwardian period, when they were some-
times converted into vessels for wine bottles. This was not their original function; they had
previously held the knife and napkin of a high-ranking person.
vases complemented the colour schemes, which were tonal, like sophisti-
cated Baroque oil paintings. Commodes replaced chests and coffers later in
the reign, and Versailles also had 400 guéridons, a French invention that is
an elaborate candlestand. Marquetry, veneers, ivory and dyed horn, gem-
stones, and trompe-l’œil trumped domestic woods. Leather seating was
75
luxury
replaced by fabric and tapestry. The furniture used classical profiles and
new decorative motifs such as chinoiserie and ‘grotesques’ of interlaced
garlands and figures.
The master cabinetmaker André Charles Boulle integrated metal and
sculptural elements including the human figure and marquetry into one
piece, as well as popularizing brass laid in tortoiseshell or vice versa. Boulle
also invented new furniture forms such as the commode (a chest of drawers
with a flat top), the bas d’armoire (what we might call a wardrobe), and the
bureau plat (a writing desk with a large flat surface area for papers). Ebony,
tortoiseshell, pewter, brass, ivory, horn, boxwood, pear, thuya, stained and
natural sycamore, satinwood, beech, amaranth, cedar, walnut, mahogany,
and ash were among the materials deployed. Little survives of this splen-
dour—there are only about three of the seventy-six precious cabinets inlaid
with stones and lacquers made for Louis XIV known to be in collections
today. The incredible woven carpets that were once laid down on the now
bare floor of Versailles survive only in fragments.
Following the influx of silver from the South American mines, Louis
ordered solid silver furniture to be made. Once again, little survives, but cop-
ies with gessoed silver tops can be seen at the great English stately home of
Knole in Kent, including a console table, a pair of free-standing torchères
(stands) for candelabra, and a mirror surround. Paintings by the French artist
Alexandre-François Desportes show the silver buffet that was placed around
diners. This recalls earlier practices dating back to the medieval period,
and it survived as a practice in the dining rooms of the rich until the Aes-
thetic movement began to declutter the house in the late nineteenth century.
Sumptuary legislation prohibited the use of silver and gilding in furni-
ture or fabric for anyone but the Crown. However, this was luxury that
could be easily converted into cash if need arose: in 1689 Louis XIV
decreed that all silver was to be melted to finance the war against the
League of Augsburg. He melted down rather than sell his furniture. It has
been argued that, had he sold his furniture, symbolically he would have
76
sold a measure of his own power. It took six months to melt and yielded
20,000 tons of bullion.
The melting of silver—a practice not at all uncommon for family silver-
ware in the early modern period—allowed the release of resources, but was
also a method sometimes used to refashion objects in the latest style. We
should not, in fact, think that the category of luxury remained stable or that
its material forms went unchanged or were unaffected by fashion. New
luxury beverages, for instance, helped pass the time of day at Versailles. Tea,
coffee, and chocolate were introduced in the late seventeenth century and
then a whole new repertoire of table services came into being, as pewter
and pottery are not good for holding hot drinks and they do no permit the
colour of the drink to sparkle in the way that transparent porcelain does.
Wide-bottomed silver vessels were better at retaining the heat of the tea.
Coffee and chocolate also ideally require specially shaped vessels. Horology
also improved dramatically: the first practical pendulum for clocks and bal-
ance spring for watches were invented in the 1650s–70s and imported from
The Hague. Changes in luxury consumption were also present lower down
the social scale. The social historian Lawrence Stone, writing on seven-
teenth-century England, reminds us that the decline of the great funeral,
the withdrawal at mealtimes from the great chamber to the private dining
room, and the shift from an equestrian cavalcade to the privacy of the coach
and sedan chair ‘are all symptoms of the same thing’, ‘a readjustment of
values by which emphasis was laid less on publicity and display and numer-
ical quantity and more on privacy and luxury and aesthetic quality’.61
THE RENAISSANCE OF LUXURY
The Church and the court were in the later Middle Ages and the early
modern period some of the only places where luxury was to be found. Yet,
their importance was more than simply performative. Especially in the
world of the European courts, luxury was shaped through a series of
77
luxury
concepts that ranged from magnificence to splendour, giving a new and

important conceptual basis for luxury to thrive. Yet luxury remained divi-
sive and elitist. The luxuries considered in this chapter were within the
reach of only a very small fraction of society. Sumptuary laws are symp-
tomatic of the fact that aspiration to luxury spending became widespread,
especially in towns and cities, yet the response was unambiguously nega-
tive, with legislators trying to limit what they considered as conspicuous
expenditure. This axiom was to be challenged in the following centuries
and in particular in the eighteenth century—when luxury came to be inter-
preted not just as a category for the elites but as a motor for the industry
and artistry of entire societies.
78
Luxury and the Exotic:

The Appeal of the Orient
•
I n April 2014 a small Ming cup was sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for an
astonishing $36 million, the highest price ever fetched by a Chinese
work of art. This sale made worldwide news not just for the record price,
but because the cup is only 3.1 inches in diameter and is nicknamed the
‘chicken cup’ as it represents a rooster and hen with their chicks. Owned
by the Philippines-born businessman Stephen Zuellig, the cup was defined
by a Hong Kong antique dealer as ‘the holy grail of ceramics’, one of just
nineteen similar cups that ‘people, emperors and collectors have always
aspired to own’.1 The rooster and hen are supposed to represent the
Emperor and Empress of China and their chicks the Chinese people.
Although it is not known who the current owner is, in all likelihood it is
one of China’s new super-rich. Rather than emperors, today’s big players
in the Chinese art market are businessmen and women who have made
their money from the vertiginous economic success of East Asia since the
late 1990s. Mr Zuellig, who in his late nineties decided to part with his
large porcelain collection, has spent most of his life developing his father’s
small Manila-based trading house into the Zuellig Group, the leader in
healthcare services and pharmaceuticals in Asia, with an annual turn-
over of $12 billion.2
79
luxury
The ‘chicken cup’—and indeed several other prodigiously expensive

Chinese and Asian antiques—have come to challenge the established idea
that Western art, and to be more precise modern art, was the pinnacle of
collecting, with some of the most expensive objects anyone can purchase.
The allure of ‘Asian luxury’ is something that is rapidly replacing long-
established ideas of Asia as the place of cheap mass-produced commodi-
ties. Until the late nineteenth century, when figures as different as artists
with socialist leanings and connoisseurs began to reassess their products
and works of art, China, India, South-East Asia, and to a certain extent
even Japan, were considered poor and rather underdeveloped places,
whose artistic sensibility was little understood and often derided. It was
therefore felt that they could not match or rival the art of the more devel-
oped West with its focus on a certain view of the human figure in per-
spectival space. Yet a history of luxury shows the enduring appeal and
fascination that anything Asian had for Europeans. One just has to men-
tion the beautiful Chinese silks worn by kings and high prelates in the
Middle Ages or the numerous accounts of the ‘riches of Asia’ that circu-
lated in early modern Europe. The appeal of the exotic—of the object that
came from far away, and as such was different and rare—is something that
might be difficult to grasp when everything seems so readily available to
us. Yet, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Asian commodities
such as Chinese porcelain and Indian cottons were the luxuries that many
aspired to own. These created a taste for Asia, with rich interiors being
decorated in Chinese, Indian, or Turkish style. Design and ornament came
to be influenced by Asian idioms, and by the late nineteenth century jap-
onaiserie, chinoiserie, and Moorish style conquered the middle classes,
having first been introduced by advanced artists such as Lord Leighton at
Leighton House, London, an Aladdin’s cave that he had built with old
fragments. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Asia is once again
becoming an important place not just for consuming but also for creating
new notions of luxury for contemporary consumers.
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luxury and the exotic
Luxuries in the Orient
Oriental luxuries, because of their rarity, were items of prestige in medi-

eval Europe. This was the case of the silks coming from the Byzantine
Empire or from China, the porcelains but also the precious stones, pearls,
highly decorated weapons, and carpets from Persia and Turkey, and the
other exotic foodstuffs such as raisins, oranges, sugar, and spices that were
arriving in Europe in quantity by the eleventh and twelfth centuries.3 The
Orient was imagined as a land of riches, a place of adventure and exoti-
cism. Archbishop Isidore of Seville (560–636 ce), for instance, claimed in
his Etymologies that pepper was a rare and expensive commodity because
the trees on which it grew in India were guarded by poisonous serpents.
Historian Paul Friedman observes how ‘linking an exotic product with
danger appealed to the imagination’ and conferred status to commodities
from faraway places. So, following Isidore, it was believed that the only
way to harvest pepper was to burn the pepper tree to scare off the snakes,
thus turning the originally white pepper fruit black.4
Oriental luxuries had already been appreciated in classical times by the
Roman elites, but in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
they found renewed publicity in travelogues such as that by the Venetian
trader Marco Polo. Polo’s journey with his father and uncle from Venice to
Mongolia in the late thirteenth century revealed the trade in luxury goods
in countries as diverse as Syria and Lesser Armenia, and as far south as the
Hindu kingdoms of Ceylon and Sumatra. Without visiting the country, he
believed that in Japan gold was used to replace the lead of roofs and that
floors were laid with sheets of gold several inches thick. Not all was
invented: he reported that, at the port of Layas in Lesser Armenia, the
Venetians and Genoese were busy buying up spices and cloth, and in Tur-
key the Armenians and Greeks lived together to create ‘the choicest and
most beautiful carpets in the world’, adding: ‘They also weave silk fabrics
of crimson and other colours, of great beauty and richness, and many
81
luxury
other kinds of cloth.’5 In Persia, he observed that the growing of that rare
commodity in Europe, cotton, was abundant and that women were ‘adept
with the needle, embroidering silk of all colours with beasts and birds and
many other figures’.6 On reaching Xanadu, Kublai Khan’s summer capital
of his Chinese Empire, Marco Polo discovered the emperor’s palace to
be marble and gilt, wholly ‘marvellously embellished and richly adorned’.7
At one end was a game park where animals were kept to feed falcons. In
Cathay he saw 5,000 elephants covered with ‘fine cloths’, followed by the
same number of camels in trappings, also laden with provisions for the
feast.
What he described had a profound influence on the European elite’s
understanding of Asia and their attempts to obtain some of these oriental
luxuries for themselves. All this splendour began to be brought back to
Europe quite quickly, yet the appeal of the riches of the Orient remained
unabated, continuing to thrill and excite European rulers, courtiers, and
rich prelates alike. By the seventeenth century, when European kings such
as Louis XIV aspired to be as wealthy, cultured, and powerful as their des-
potic oriental emperor ‘cousins’, the relevance of Asian luxury re-emerged
more strongly than ever. A new series of travelogues composed by mer-
chants, adventurers, and humanists visiting Asia in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries provided new information and rekindled imagina-
tions. The French physician and traveller François Bernier (1620–88), for
instance, provides us with a view of what the Mughal court of the mid-
seventeenth century must have looked like. ‘Never did I witness a more
extraordinary scene,’ Bernier recounts.8 The king was sitting in a robe of
flowered satin with silk and gold embroidery ‘of the finest texture’. The
turban of gold cloth had an aigrette of diamonds ‘of an extraordinary size
and value’ and a large topaz. He wore a pearl necklace and sat on a throne
sprinkled with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds.9
One object in particular captured the imagination of European readers
and rulers alike: the throne of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (Figure 3.1).
This was no ordinary throne. It was said to be worth £4.5 million, the
82
Fig. 3.1. Portrait of Shah Jahan on the Peacock Throne (detail), 386 x 270 mm. Painted in
opaque watercolour on paper, c.1800.
equivalent of more than 10 per cent of the GDP of England at the time.
Another French traveller, the gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
(1605–89), who had a more professional eye for jewels, calculated that the
throne might possibly have been worth three times as much, valuing it
at £12 million. But this was no simple extravagance: the throne was the
83
luxury
display case of precious stones that over time had been accumulated in
the treasury from the spoils of war and the annual presents of lesser rulers
to the Mughal Emperors. It was called the ‘peacock throne’ because it
included two peacocks ‘covered with jewels and pearls’.10 Bernier, who was
a gossip, could not restrain himself from telling his readers that the throne
had been made by a Frenchman ‘who, after defrauding several of the
Princes of Europe, by means of false gems, which he fabricated with pecu-
liar skill, sought refuge in the Great Mughal’s court, where he made his
fortune’.11 Clearly he hinted at the fact that even courtly luxury had its ele-
ment of risk and that Aurangzeb might have been similarly defrauded by
such a rake. We do not know if this was the case.
Bernier, Tavernier, and other travellers to the East Indies were observing
the Mughal Empire at the pinnacle of its splendour, especially during the
reigns of Akbar (1556–1605), Jahangir (1605–27), and Shah Jahan (1627–58),
a period of ‘renaissance’ when Indian artists and craftsmen combined
Hindu, Muslim, and European influences to produce masterpieces in gold,
silver and bronze, hardstone, metalwork, ceramics, and textiles.12 Yet all of
this would not endure. The wealth accumulated by the Mughal emperors
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became one of the most memo-
rable war booties of all times. In 1739 the Persian emperor Nadir Shah ran-
sacked Delhi and took prisoner the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah
(r. 1719–48). The Persians looted the Mughal treasury estimated to be valued
at 800 million rupees (£80 million in eighteenth-century currency and sev-
eral hundred billion dollars in 2015 money)—such a high sum that Persian
subjects were excused from all taxes for three years. The booty included
some of the wonders of Asia: the peacock throne (see Figure 3.1), another
sixteen thrones, jewelled objects, and the famous Koh-i-Nur diamond.
Some of these splendid objects were used by Nadir Shah as presents to the
Ottoman and Russian empires and to publicize his exploits. These acts of
calculated generosity allowed part of the Mughal treasury to survive in sev-
eral collections across the world.13
84
Diplomacy and Collecting
Sometimes it was not just oriental luxuries that found their way to Europe,
but European objects of high-quality manufacture that come into the
possession of the rich and powerful rulers of the Orient. One such case
is that of the sumptuous crown produced in Venice for the Ottoman
emperor Süleyman the Magnificent. This four-tiered tiara no longer sur-
vives, but contemporary representations show its elaborate craftsmanship
(Figure 3.2). This rather ‘over-the top’ head ornament—if one is allowed
the pun—was notable for its fine workmanship and extraordinary col-
lection of diamonds, pearls, and other precious gems. It was produced
by Venetian craftsmen and—prefiguring the luxury industry of modern
times—it was a speculation of the goldsmiths of Venice and of several mer-
chants active in Istanbul, who sold it to the Ottoman sultan for the aston-
ishing sum of 116,000 ducats.14 This was a unique object, not just because
of its intrinsic value but also because it was made in the hope of selling it to
Süleyman, an emperor who, like all his predecessors, had never worn a
crown. Its attraction was the fact that it consisted of four crowns, one more
than the Pope’s, thus signalling the higher status of the Ottoman ruler
over the head of the Christian Church. It also included a pseudo-Roman
plume, not dissimilar from those worn by Süleyman’s arch-enemy, the
Holy Roman emperor Charles V. Extravagance was clearly aimed to flatter
the sultan. This was a precious object that was far from functional: Süley-
man used it to impress European dignitaries by displaying it, but ironically
he probably never wore it, as it was incompatible with the use of the classic
Ottoman turban.
Luxuries were the props of ambassadorial relations between different
rulers. Splendid gifts were important in particular as part of the recep-
tion of Asian and African ambassadors at the courts of several European
states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was the case of the
embassy of the King of Kongo to the Papacy in 1608, followed a year later
85
luxury
Fig. 3.2. Portrait of Süleyman the Magnificent, a profile bust wearing an elaborate crown
with four tiers of goldwork and pearls. 1535. The crown was made by a group of Venetian
goldsmiths and sold in 1532 to the Ottoman emperor Süleyman for 115,000 ducats. The
four tiers were intended to represent the four kingdoms over which Süleyman ruled.
86
by that of Shah Abbas of Persia and the parties from Japan that reached
Rome in 1585 and 1615.15 Each of them brought numerous presents,
and they made Asian goods very fashionable among courtiers. The most
extravagant of the seventeenth-century embassies was the one sent in
1686 by the King of Siam to Louis XIV of France. It delivered 300 bales of
presents, which included Chinese and Japanese vases, thousands of pieces
of porcelain, rolls of silk, and hundreds of objects in precious metals. Louis
felt obliged to send back a vast embassy with several hundred men and
presents worth nearly 200,000 louis, which were packed in five ships. They
included French silks and velvets, mirrors, thousands of pieces of glass,
rich garments, and portraits with diamond frames.16
Western luxuries continued to thrill Asian emperors, kings, and princes
over the following centuries. A number of European artists sold their ser-
vices to Middle Eastern, Mughal, and Chinese rulers, churning out works of
art that mixed European and Asian aesthetic and artistic conventions. The
Mughal emperor Akbar was fond of European atlases, maps, and globes; in
fact, his sense of what was valuable in life probably did not differ much from
that of any European Renaissance nobleman of the time. The Chinese
emperor Qianlong was also an admirer of Western art and employed
the Italian Jesuit lay brother Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766) as a court
painter and designer of the Western-style buildings in the imperial gardens
of the Old Summer Palace. Similarly, Shah ‘Abbas II (r. 1642–66) of Persia
employed at least two Dutch artists at his court, who did not only produce
European art but also trained the Emperor in the European techniques of
drawing. The Emperor was such an enthusiastic student that he tried to
convince Tavernier to produce in goldwork with gem stones some of the
drinking vessels and plates that he had designed. As the commission came
in at an estimated cost of 200,000 écus, Tavernier thought it better politely
to turn it down, in fear of never being paid by the whimsical Persian ruler.17
Embassies and frequent purchases brought together a variety of exotic
and strange artefacts that found pride of place in large and small collections
87
luxury
belonging to men of letters, scientists, noblemen, and rulers. For any

Renaissance gentleman with cultural aspirations, the ownership of arte-
facts from Asia and the Americas was a must. They were to furnish his stu-
diolo—literally ‘little study’—a small room where learning and business
were carried out. The humanist Sabba da Castiglione (1480–1554) com-
ments upon the fact that in these rooms one could find ‘all sorts of . . . new,
fantastic, and bizarre but ingenious things from the Levant’, including
colourful and expensive Turkish carpets (to cover tables), as well as rare
things from India and Turkey such as oriental metalwork, knives, and
scimitars.18
Such collections were often extensive and included a variety of items of
different provenance and importance. King Manuel I of Portugal (1469–
1521) had a keen interest in Asian objects that included not just rarities and
precious things but also animals such as rhinos, elephants, and panthers,
while his father kept a camel in his garden at Evora.19 Rare and beautiful
objects from the Orient found pride of place in cabinets of curiosities
(Kunstkammer) under the category of artificialia (manufactured objects),
which complemented natural rarities (called instead naturalia). Here one
would find porcelain and lacquer, but also weapons, utensils, and gar-
ments from various parts of the world, rare both because of their prove-
nance, but also in some cases because of their intrinsic value and beauty.
One of the most celebrated cabinets of curiosities belonged to the
Habsburg archduke Ferdinand II (1529–95), son of Emperor Ferdinand
I and ruler of the region of Tyrol in the Alps from 1564. Famous for secretly
marrying a patrician’s daughter who was beautiful but deemed to be too
low ranking to become the daughter-in-law of the Emperor, Ferdinand
spent most of his time collecting armour, memorabilia (items from mem-
orable deeds and events), natural specimens, portraits, and busts, and a
variety of exotic artefacts (Figure 3.3). On the outskirts of Innsbruck, he
transformed the existing medieval fortress of Ambras into a palace for his
vast collection. Here he housed moor masks, Ottoman leather shields,
88
Fig. 3.3. Scent fountain in the form of a vase, formed of half a Seychelle nut mounted in
silver-gilt. Southern Germany, perhaps Augsburg, last quarter of sixteenth century. There
are only five extant examples of mounted Seychelles nuts from the late Renaissance; this
one belonging to Baron Anselm von Rothschild as a part of his collection formed in Vienna
in the nineteenth century. There is a good probability that this magnificent object might
have been part of the Archduke Ferdinand II’s collection at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck in
the late sixteenth century.
89
luxury
cups in rhinoceros horn, splendid specimens of coral and shells arranged

in tableaux, ivory and mother-of-pearl items from the Indian subconti-
nent, scroll painting from China, Japanese armour, examples of pietra
dura (inlaid hardstone) from Italy, and a variety of other strange items,
including baskets from South-East Asia, a beautiful Ottoman turban, a
portrait of Dracula, and a ‘trap chair’ of iron where friends could be tested
on how much they could drink. Clearly a collection like this shows how the
pursuit of culture was mixed with that of wonder and conviviality.20
Global Luxury Trade
On 15 September 1592 the inhabitants of London talked of nothing else

than the cargo of a Portuguese carrack that had been seized by English
privateers. The vessel carried 900 tons of Asian merchandise worth an
astonishing £150,000 (equivalent to $200 million in 2015 money). The
cartographer and promoter of exploration Richard Hakluyt was over the
moon:
I cannot but enter into the consideration and acknowledgement of Gods

great favor towards our nation, who by putting this purchase into our hands
hath manifestly discovered those secret trades & Indian riches, which hith-
erto lay strangely hidden, and cunningly concealed from us; whereof there
was among some few of us some small and unperfect glimse onely, which
now is turned into the broad light of full and perfect knowledge.21
He had long professed that Asia was the land of riches and unimaginable
luxury and the content of the seized vessel confirmed it. Among the ‘prin-
cipall wares’ Hakluyt listed a variety of spices such as pepper, cloves, mace,
nutmeg, and cinnamon. There were also silks, damasks, taffetas, and cloth
of gold, and, as in Aladdin’s cave, one could find ‘pearle, muske, civet, and
amber-griece’ and other wares ‘many in number, but lesse in value; as ele-
phants teeth, porcellan vessels of China, coco-nuts, hides, ebenwood as
blacke as jet, bedsteds of the same’.22
90
The carrack included also a significant cargo of other textiles such as

richly colourful calicoes. There were also canopies, diaper towels, quilts,
and ‘carpets like those of Turky’.23 Exotic Asian luxuries were already circu-
lating in Europe in the Middle Ages, but were appreciated mostly in cos-
mopolitan cities such as Venice and Genoa in Italy or the trading ports of
Bruges and Anvers in the North.24 By the end of the sixteenth century,
these new exotic goods had entered into the consciousness of consumers
in London and other parts of Europe. A boost to the trade in Asian goods
came from the setting-up of trading companies chartered by European
governments to rival the state-controlled Portuguese company (Carreira
da India) that had traded with both India and the Far East since 1500. By
the early years of the seventeenth century the English and Dutch govern-
ments had supported the establishment of private (one might say the first
joint stock) companies by conferring on them exclusive rights (charters) to
trade with Asia: the English East India Company and the Dutch Vereenigde
Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC) were born. They were soon to be joined
by other companies such as the French East India Company in the 1660s
but also the smaller Swedish, Danish, and Ostend companies.
These companies and private traders operating in the Indian Ocean
were responsible for importing into Europe a variety of Asian goods, in
particular silks, cottons, and porcelain. In the sixteenth century, porcelain
was still within the reach only of princes and the super-rich, who treasured
and collected rare pieces coming from China. The porcelain was appreci-
ated because of its translucency and because no one could produce similar
objects in Europe. Substitutes could be found in richly decorated majol-
ica—a type of beautifully glazed earthenware that was developed in Italy.
But this was no match for the beauty of Chinese porcelain. This is why
the rich and powerful Medici family in Florence invested considerable
resources in the attempt to establish a court manufacture where porce-
lain as beautiful as that of China could be made. They succeeded in 1533
in producing the first European porcelain (technically a disappointing
91
luxury
imitation of the original) and owned an impressive 373 pieces of what has
since been defined as ‘Medici porcelain’.25
Consequently, during the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centu-
ries, Chinese porcelain remained an expensive rarity within the reach of
only a few.26 Today such pieces are to be seen in many museums in Europe
and North America, often mounted in gold or silver. These mounts were
added to increase the value of these rare objects, in the same way in which
large shells and ostrich eggs were mounted for display (Figure 3.4). Yet the
luxurious nature of Chinese porcelain was undermined by the very trade
of the European East India companies. By 1615 the Dutch Company was
importing 24,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain a year, and this figure had
increased to more than 63,000 just five years later. Over the course of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries pieces of porcelain were traded to
Europe in their millions.27 This does not mean that they completely lost
their luxury value, becoming simple commodities, but they certainly
became available to much wider strata of society.
One of the most astonishing stories of a luxury that instead turned
into a commodity is that of tulips. European expeditions to collect flow-
ers for commercial gain commenced in the sixteenth century; the French
explorer and diplomat Pierre Belon travelled to the Levant for this
purpose in 1546–8. In the Ottoman Empire, the taste for the tulip was
ubiquitous in furnishing and dress fabrics. Many of these textiles were
designed for use in palaces, as cushions and as wall hangings and bed-
covers, and the textiles also influenced ceramic design. The tulip, which
grows wild in eastern Anatolia and the Iranian plateau, was carefully
cultivated at the Ottoman court, where an incredible number of bulbs
were forced for flower festivals and the palace gardens. This is probably
where Louis XIV’s chief gardeners got the idea of staging the enor-
mous displays of flowers that changed almost daily at Versailles. Ogier
Ghislain de Busbecq, ambassador to Süleyman’s court from Ferdinand
I of Habsburg, brought bulbs back to Austria, and tulip cultivation
92
Fig. 3.4. The Howzer cup, hard-paste porcelain with silver-gilt mounts and cover. The cup
was produced in China between 1630 and 1650, possibly made as an incense-burner for
ritual offerings to the ancestors. It was later mounted in London in the 1660s by the
renowned Swiss goldsmith Wolfgang Howzer (d. 1688). It was thus transformed into a
luxury cup for display in a private collection and gained a new use.
subsequently spread through the work of Charles de l’Ecluse, professor

of Botany at Leiden.28
In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch became obsessed by tulips,
but also by rare forms of other bulbs and began to speculate on them
rather like shares.29 The cultivation and excitement generated by the tulip,
but also the hyacinth and the Fritillaria Crown Imperial, indicate the
93
luxury
esteem and monetary value of rare flowers; watercolour and printed

images of them functioned as sales catalogues. Collectors and patrons
travelled between notable botanical centres including Prague, London,
Leiden, Brussels, Antwerp, Middleburg, Milan, and Paris to engage with
this new science and form of collecting.30 Paintings of the rare blooms were
then commissioned from mainly Dutch and later Franco-Flemish paint-
ers, who also worked closely with botanical studies and students. The
mimetic transcription of a flower into painting, porcelain, or textile (tapes-
try and brocaded or embroidered silks, printed or painted linen) guaran-
teed that the elite could view blooms not otherwise available to them, and
all the time. The quest for rare garden flowers continued well into the
twentieth century. Examples include the writer and gardener Vita Sack-
ville West and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, who acquired blooms
while on a diplomatic posting to Turkey and posted them back to England
packed in biscuit tins, and adventurers who travelled to Nepal and the
Himalayas to gather rare specimens of the rhodedendra and azaleas that
we today would find rather ordinary.31
Floral appreciation—integral to medieval and early modern European
taste and luxury—extended to Asian textiles.32 Just as in the Middle Ages
richly patterned Asian silks had been an accessory of fashion and splen-
dour, so in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Indian cottons ful-
filled a similar function, though on a much larger scale.33 The European
East India companies imported millions of pieces of Indian cotton textiles
a year. Large palampores (hangings of colourful Indian fabrics) were used
as bedspreads and valances and were decorated with exotic flowers and
birds. These were expensive items, though not as costly as their silk equiva-
lents. By the second half of the seventeenth century, however, Indian cot-
tons were used for cushions and smaller soft furnishings and soon were
donned by both men and women in their apparel.34 Historians now agree
that they were not as cheap as previously thought, but contributed a great
deal to the modern phenomenon of fashion.35 They were richly decorated
94
and could be exposed to light (or washed) without losing much of their
beautiful design and intensity of colour. These were not the luxuries of the
social elites of Europe. They were for the rising middle classes and even for
consumers of more modest means who could now afford to buy a few yards
of Asian cloth—at least before their import was banned by many European
countries in an attempt to support locally produced textiles.36
The European trading companies did not just import porcelain and
textiles. Their cargoes also included items of furniture, precious and semi-
precious materials and stones, and, much appreciated by Europeans, lac-
quer. After the direct contact of Portuguese traders with Japan starting
in 1543, Japanese lacquer pieces produced in Kyoto and Nagasaki were
brought back to Europe as luxurious diplomatic gifts or as liturgical pieces.
They could have mother-of-pearl inlay and maki-e (gold or silver) deco-
rations.37 If the Portuguese had sparked a taste for lacquer, supplies of
lacquer furniture in Europe increased only after 1600, when lacquered
screens, chests, and cabinets made an entrance into elite European houses.
The appeal of lacquer was its lustrous, waterproof surfaces, produced using
the extract of the sumac plant, a subtropical flowering plant to be found in
parts of China but not present in Europe.38 Particularly appreciated were
the large folding screens produced in Japan for the European market.
These screens were specifically customized to represent daily life scenes
and suit European taste and were referred to as Nambans, meaning south-
ern barbarians—as the Portuguese were known to the Japanese. They
started to be produced in 1591 and often depicted the ‘great ships’ and the
Portuguese in scenes of trade and everyday life, surrounded by African
slaves, while Indians and Malay servants paraded their European masters
under large parasols.39 The so-called Coromandel screens were of dark lac-
quer and often mounted with mother-of-pearl and hardstones; they were
the personal favourite decoration luxury of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in the
1930s, who had her apartment in Paris completely covered in them, even
cutting holes in them for the electric light switches.40
95
luxury
Fig. 3.5. The Mazarin Chest. Wood covered in black lacquer with gold and silver hiramakie
and takamakie lacquer; inlaid with gold, silver, and shibuichi alloy, and mother-of-pearl
shell; gilded copper fittings. Created in Japan, c.1640.
One of the most celebrated lacquered artefacts of the seventeenth cen-

tury is the so-called Mazarin Chest (Figure 3.5). It is made of wood and
covered in black lacquer with gold and silver (hiramakie and takamakie)
lacquer. It was produced in Japan in the 1640s and possibly bought by a
servant of the Dutch East India Company. The chest, now at the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London, is a typical object produced for the West-
ern market representing scenes from the Tale of Genji and the Tale of the
Soga Brothers, the former being one of the masterpieces of Japanese litera-
ture from the eleventh century. Its name derives from the fact that the
chest’s key bears the coat of arms of the Mazarin-La-Meilleraye family, a
branch of the family related to Louis XIV’s Chief Minister, Cardinal Maza-
rin. It was thought to be unique, but in 2013 its companion piece was dis-
covered in France and is now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
The Mazarin Chest was given additional lustre by the use of mother-
of-pearl shell and gilded copper fittings. Today, in an era of every possible
96
synthetic, it is difficult to appreciate the importance of colour, dyes, and

tints to the people of the past. Asian pearls, for instance, held a fascination
for Europeans because of their luminousness and tempered opacity. Pearls
were used in strings and earrings by women but also as trimming on the
sleeves of men’s doublets. Sometimes hundreds of them were used on the
one garment. Even the restrained Dutch of the seventeenth century appre-
ciated the subtle appearance of pearls, which were often to be seen as
women’s necklaces or earrings in portraits such as Vermeer’s famous Girl
with a Pearl Earring.41
The Luxury Debate and Populuxuries
Teapot, Ginger Jar and Slave Candlestick by the Dutch painter Pieter van
Roestraten is not a traditional masterpiece or a luxury item (Figure 3.6). It
was one of the thousands such still lifes that decorated Dutch domestic
interiors at the end of the seventeenth century. These types of paintings
were commonly referred to as pronkstilleven, or ‘showy still lives’, as they
conveyed visually the social aspirations of their owners. They are cata-
logues of what well-to-do families aspired to possess: English or Dutch sil-
ver vases and silver teaspoons, but also new Asian luxuries. The picture
includes a lacquer tea caddy, a Chinese blue-and-white teapot and stand, a
porcelain teacup, and a porcelain sugar bowl. The English silver-gilt can-
dlestick has a base in the form of a kneeling slave; the slave trade had
underpinned much of this global trade since the sixteenth century.
This painting clearly points to what the middle classes aspired to own—a
new type of luxury that was no longer restricted to the social elites. Histor
ians see the period between the second half of the seventeenth century and
the end of the eighteenth century as one when luxury as we know it was
born: a phenomenon that not only interested just the few, but that
involved entire societies and that was increasingly connected to taste,
fashion, and social and economic competition. As in today’s world, the
97
luxury
Fig. 3.6. Pieter van Roestraten (1629–1700), Teapot, Ginger Jar and Slave Candlestick, oil
painting, London, c.1695. Still-life paintings by Dutch artists were new decorative luxuries
in Northern Europe in the late seventeenth century. The fact that they were called
pronkstilleven, meaning ‘showy still lives’, signalled that not everyone appreciated them.
98
pervasiveness of luxury (or at least of its pursuit) became a topic of debate

and discussion towards the end of the seventeenth century. If luxury was
no longer just for the magnificence of kings and queens and their courts,
who then was it meant for? And, as Roman authors had asked before,
would luxury corrupt the fabric of society, leading to idleness and indo-
lence, or would it foster trade and commerce instead?
These were not rhetorical questions, as luxuries, whether in entertain-
ments, domestic buildings, dress, or furnishings, functioned as potent
symbols for the types of social and economic change that modern capital-
ism enabled. Luxuries in all things represented very different values, which
ranged from the positive notion of transformation and liberation to the
negative forces of deception and effeminacy, all of which were explored
within a range of texts from heavy Enlightenment philosophical tracts to
popular broadsheets. If negative views emphasized greed and personal
short-term gains from the accumulation of wealth and excess in spending,
positive views instead took an approach that went beyond the individual
and underlined how luxury allowed the economy to grow, the state to raise
taxes, and the power of the nation to triumph.
The Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) in his
1714 Fable of the Bees passionately argued that luxury was not a vice but a
positive force of commerce and prosperity. Without luxury, he claimed,
merchants would stop trading and the economy would come to a halt:
‘mercers, upholsters, tailors and many others’, he said, ‘would be starved
in half a year’s time, if pride and luxury were at once to be banished the
nation’.42 This interpretation of luxury was particularly influential in the
way in which David Hume and Adam Smith, two of the most talented
thinkers of the century, understood luxury as a force of economic good
rather than simply a matter of moral concern.43
These changes in attitudes towards luxury were formulated in response
to new forms of luxury goods that were more affordable than the tradi-
tional luxury of the elites. The economic historian Jan de Vries contrasts
99
luxury
the ‘old luxury’ of royal courts and the European nobility with what
he defines as ‘new luxury’: ‘Where the Old Luxury served primarily as a
marker, a means of discrimination between people, times and places,’ he
explains, ‘the New Luxury served more to communicate cultural meaning,
permitting reciprocal relations—a kind of sociability—among participants
to consumption’.44 What he means is that new forms of luxury goods
appeared that were aimed not at achieving grandeur or magnificence, but
at satisfying the needs for novelty and delectation of a much wider number
of consumers. The eighteenth century brought about a redefinition of
luxury. Luxury ‘became less a matter of obligations in representing rank,
as it had been for the aristocracy, and more a matter of wealth and enjoy-
ment according to the economic means that one had’, in the words of the
philosopher Olivier Assouly.45
Throughout the eighteenth century, luxury goods were copied and recast
as populuxuries (popular luxuries) or demiluxe, which more people could
aspire to possess. Clocks, mirrors, and prints were often present in the
domestic interiors of artisans and even servants. The same could be said
of goods made of more affordable materials such as Sheffield plate rather
than sterling silver. English ‘flint glass’, a type of brilliant crystal produced
by the English glassmaker George Ravenscroft in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury by using lead, replaced the more expensive and finer Venetian glass.
Copies of Asian goods such as Indian cottons, Chinese porcelains, and Japa-
nese lacquer were invented; completely novel goods created by new inven-
tions or the application of new technologies were also introduced in the
eighteenth century. These rarely required enormous financial investment,
which made it easier for the new popular luxuries to be replaced on a regu-
lar basis.46 They became part of the world of fashion, with their shapes,
patterns, and decoration changing regularly and reported in the newly
established fashion periodicals, some of which came out monthly. Luxury
was no longer about possessing something expensive and unique; it was
about owning something à la mode. A gown made with the latest chintz
100
pattern or the newest Parisian-styled parasol was a prop for social play
and competition. Luxuries did not just have a commercial value here, but
through the evolution of fashion came to shape an everyday life crafted by
and within shopping, leisure, the sharing of ideas, and polite conversation.
They also required the learning of a new set of social conventions. Benjamin
Franklin, for instance, sent six coarse diaper breakfast cloths from London
to his wife Deborah in the North American colonies in 1758 and explained
that ‘they are to be spread on the Tea Table, for nobody breakfasts here on
the naked Table, but on the Cloth set a large Tea Board with the Cups’.47
From the late seventeenth century, invention came to be one of the
catalysers of new forms of production and new products.48 Colour and sur-
face decoration, for instance—which in the pre-modern era had served as
the principal markers of status secured by sumptuary laws and the sheer
expense of obtaining purple, red, green, and glossy black dyes and intri-
cate designs—were democratized. Francis Dixon of Drumcodan, near
Dublin, printed on cotton from copper plates from 1752, producing the
first ‘linen’ for interior decoration.49 This was about the same time that
transfer-printing onto ceramics was developed in England, which enabled
the luxurious effects of hand-painting and gilding to be simulated in myr-
iad charming compositions for tableware. More colour and pattern
became available within the dwellings of the middling ranks of Western
Europe than ever before. The development of new techniques of printing
extended from furnishing textiles such as bed and window hangings to
cheaper means of producing interior-design elements such as papier-
mâché, encouraging more experimental and transitory decoration. Wall-
paper and hangings began to match from the mid-century.50 These densely
patterned textiles were used both in women’s fashions and in the home—
another harmonious relationship that we would not expect today, when
dresses generally do not match sofas.
The introduction of Indian chintzes, Chinese wallpaper, and their imi-
tations allowed for new colour combinations and effects. Ancien régime
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luxury
societies had a sense of colour and chromatic nuance far greater than the
vocabulary that exists today. Colours had a range of heraldic, religious,
classical, and regional meanings that continued until at least the eigh-
teenth century. In Western European interior design, red represented the
colour of fire, Mars, and the Sun. Hence the most elevated forms such as
expensive bed hangings and canopies were red, which also happened to be
one of the more expensive dyes. Rooms hung in red or green tended to be
more important than those hung in blue—the colour for everyday rooms.
Black and gold furnishings and forms such as Boulle marquetry suggested
the past. Rooms were rarely yellow before the 1740s, but that colour
becomes very prominent in rococo fashion in that decade. Green, it has
been argued, absorbed less light, was easier to live with, and was also better
for displaying pictures.51 It was the colour of Venus, felicity, and pleasure.
Green, a difficult hue to produce, was also a very popular colour for the
dress of both men and women in the last third of the eighteenth century,
being particularly associated with the foppish dress of macaroni men, who
were also described as wearing pea-green, pink, and ‘barri’ orange. It can-
not be a coincidence that this palette was that favoured by the significant
neoclassical architect Robert Adam in the last third of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Fashion of the time was also designed to be seen under candlelight.
The light-reflecting details of men’s and women’s eighteenth-century
dress, the fly fringe and lace for women’s trimmed gowns, the galloon
braid for men’s jackets, as well as embroidery for both sexes intertwined
with spangles and sequins, make a great deal of sense in the pre-gas and
electric world.
To a richly coloured interior, the well-to-do would add other colours,
textures, and materials. Foremost among them was porcelain. The secret
of hard-paste porcelain was discovered only for Europe in 1709 in Meis-
sen, near Dresden in Germany, although soft-paste imitations had already
been produced in Saint Cloud and Rouen in France somewhat earlier.
Meissen developed as a state-supported factory for the production of
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luxury porcelain in high demand across Europe, which replaced the

expensive porcelain imported from China.52 Lacquer, too, came to be
imitated in Europe by the late sixteenth century. ‘Japanned’ tabletops
were produced in Venice as early as 1596, and by 1612 lacquer was being
imitated in Holland, Augsburg, Nuremburg, and Hamburg.53 By the
1730s the Martin brothers in Paris had perfected a new recipe for lacquer,
the famous Vernis Martin, which was more similar to oriental lacquer
than anything that had been produced previously. Lacquer had a surge
in popularity: from furniture to harpsichords, bedsteads and later but-
tons, everything could be lacquered (or ‘Japanned’, as the process was
known in Europe), not just in red or black, but also in fashionable shades
of green and blue in imitation of Japanese, but also Chinese and Indian,
lacquerware.54
Some of the key concepts of ‘modern luxury’ came to be defined in the
eighteenth century. One of the most important relates to the fact that lux-
ury goods were no longer necessarily made of inherently valuable mate-
rials. Therefore the reputation of the producer—often represented by a
name or label—came to assume paramount importance in assessing the
value and esteem of a product as a luxury.55 A series of ‘journals’ (the
equivalent to today’s magazines) appeared in the 1760s and 1770s such as
Gallerie des modes, The Lady’s Magazine, and the aspirationally entitled Le
Beau Monde; later also Ackermann’s Repository and the Journal für Manu-
faktur, Fabrik, Handlung und Mode (Leipzig), which featured real samples
of cloth and wallpaper. Advertising became an integral part of the new
culture of consumption in the eighteenth century. An example is the trade
card (an advertisement to be handed to customers) for Thomas Smith, a
mercer in mid-eighteenth-century London, whose shop was to be found at
the sign of the ‘Indian Queen’ in West Smithfield (Figure 3.7). Here he
lured his customers through exotic associations, with the Indian queen fol-
lowed by an attendant who holds a parasol over her, while two boys sup-
port her train: marketing was born.
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luxury
Fig. 3.7. Trade-card of Thomas Smith, mercer at the Indian Queen in West Smithfield,
London. c.1755. Etching with engraved lettering. The cartouche, containing an Indian
queen walking, followed by an attendant who holds a parasol over her, while two boys sup-
port her train, conveys the exoticism of the silks and satins sold by this mercer, though he
also sold local products such as Norwich ‘crapes’ and woollens.
104
Oriental Style
The taste for things oriental (and, as we shall see, for things French) was
not just a popular phenomenon. The oriental style (Chinese mostly, but
also Indian and Japanese) remained popular among the European elites
throughout the eighteenth century. Dressing rooms were often the most
fantastical space in a wealthy residence, emphasizing the role of fashion in
projecting new luxury design ideas. In England in the post-Restoration
decades (after 1660), wealthy ladies exhibited a new independence in the
design of their dressing rooms or cabinets, which displayed silver-plate
novelties in the chinoiserie style, porcelain, and Japanese lacquer screens.
Novel drinks such as tea, coffee, and chocolate were served in these spaces,
which were transitional between public and private, and where the half-
dress or déshabillée might be worn.
Boudoirs and bedrooms made extensive use of chintz, the printed and
painted Indian cotton whose first use was for furnishings in the 1670s and
1680s and which later migrated to clothing. The English East India Com-
pany directors called for a new design type as early as 1643 to replace the
traditional dark grounds, in order to suit the English, Dutch, and French
taste. Indian makers were encouraged to copy English patterns ‘in the Chi-
nese mode’ with a white or pale background. A famous and fashionable
use of chintz in an interior was inside the luxurious Thames riverside villa
of David Garrick, the most famous actor of the second half of the eigh-
teenth century. His novel painted furnishings by Thomas Chippendale
can be seen today in the Victoria and Albert Museum, alas partly in repro-
duction.
When visiting one of the many decorative arts museums in Europe or
North America or eighteenth-century country houses across Europe, one
is struck by the profusion of objects and interior décor bearing a strong
Chinese influence. Porcelain helped to create a taste, but Chinese motifs
were applied to everything from chairs to tables, chimneypieces, mirrors,
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luxury
clocks, and simple utensils. One of the finest surviving Chinese rococo
interiors is that at Claydon House, Buckinghamshire. Even the doorframes
as well as an indoor tea pavilion were made to resemble a fantasy Cathay.
Gardens were also reshaped in Chinese fashion following more natural
lines and including Chinese pagodas and bridges. The house of Confucius,
a two-storey octagonal structure built at Kew in c.1745, was one of the first
of its type in England, followed by similar buildings at Shugborough Park
in Staffordshire and at Wotton House in Buckinghamshire.56
Not everyone was pleased: exotic visual ideas on bizarre silks, imported
tapestries, and Soho tapestry-weavers (Western reproductions) became
the target of a backlash against chinoiseries led by Archbishop Fénelon in
France and Lord Shaftesbury in England early in the eighteenth century.
Historian David Porter suggests that both the English and the French the-
orists ‘drew a parallel between the depraved and superficial moral values
of the East and perceived on both counts a Chinese threat to established
forms of cultural authority at home’.57 The theoretician Shaftesbury saw
‘merit and virtue’ in Rome and ‘deformity and blemish’ in the East:
‘Effeminacy pleases me. The Indian figures, the Japan work, the enamel
strikes my eye. The luscious colour and glossy paint gain upon my fancy . . .
But what ensues? . . . Do I for ever forfeit my good relish?’58
Fénelon’s and Shaftesbury’s sense of stylistic purity was ignored by
many of their contemporaries. Development in the art of marquetry—
used extensively in furniture and whole rooms for the very rich—goes hand
in hand with pictorial fantasies of chinoiserie and commercial realities of
East–West trade. We see the same taste for the deliberately bizarre and
perverse in the contemporary textile designs that simultaneously seduced
and repelled the European viewer in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. And yet, as luxury fomented criticism, so oriental luxury enraged
the most discerning. The taste for the exotic was linked to licentiousness
and vice connected with the world of women. For some it posed the threat
of a rejection of a male world of scientific order with a new world of disorder
106
and fantasy.59 Others objected to it simply on artistic grounds. In 1675, for

instance, the art theorist Joachim von Sandrart called lacquer this ‘miser-
able painting’ and complained of eastern art: ‘They present everything as
simple, mere outlines with no silhouette, round off nothing but instead
coat their things in paint.’60 Even the popular media of the time were
divided about the merits of oriental style, with the London Chronicle acidly
observing that
every house of fashion is now crowded with porcelain trees and birds, por-
celain men and beasts, cross-legged mandarins and bramins, perpendicu-
lar lines and stiff right angles. Every gaudy Chinese crudity whether in
colour, form, attitude, or grouping, is adopted into fashionable use, and
becomes the standard of taste and elegance.61
This type of aesthetic haughtiness was not new. The French playwright
Molière could not resist making fun of the ‘Asia-mania’ that was taking
over French society in the 1670s. What had begun as an elite appreciation
for the exotic allure of the Orient fast became a passion for the middle
classes. These were represented in Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme, who
provided the title to one of his most famous plays. We find Monsieur Jour-
dain, the main character, donning a banyan or oriental robe: ‘I had this
oriental robe made specially for me,’ M. Jourdain explains to his music
master. ‘My tailor told me that people of quality wear these in the morn-
ing.’ The ridiculous social aspiration of M. Jourdain leads him to welcome
his daughter’s suitor, thinking that he is a Turkish nobleman rather than a
bourgeois. The play concludes with a Turkish ceremony in which M. Jour-
dain thinks that he is now a member of the Turkish nobility.62
Turkey was both repellent and alluring to European sensibility. It was
the land of the infidel Turk, but also that of a powerful and rich (though
increasingly crumbling) empire. Turkish style was particularly appreciated
in dress. Masquerades were popular forms of elite entertainment, espe-
cially in the eighteenth century. Here the exotic was presented through the
appropriation of Asian costumes. In 1700 the Duke of Chartres gave a
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luxury
Turkish masquerade complete with dancing girls. At Versailles, too, it was

not uncommon during the reign of Louis XIV for the courtiers to dress up
in glittering costumes, especially at masked balls. The passion for every-
thing Turkish also included outlandish portraits: in 1755 Madame de Pom-
padour had herself painted as a sultana by Carl van Loo and, later on,
another of Louis XV’s mistresses, Madame du Barry, had a painting of her-
self made in which she was served by eunuchs.
Turqueries, as everything Turkish came to be known, quickly influenced
the design of leisure buildings and interiors such as Turkish kiosks and
summerhouses. Marie Antoinette was second to none when she decided
to have a Turkish boudoir installed at her Fontainebleau residence in
1777.63 Turkish luxury was associated with sensual pleasure. This was the
case of turquerie-inspired furniture such as the divan à la turque, our pres-
ent-day couch, which started its life as an exotic luxury. In the early 1740s
it was made the protagonist of a salacious oriental novel entitled Le Sopha
(The Sofa) by Crébillon fils, in which the furnishing was witness to libertine
acts.64
Sexual proclivity and stimulation served also to shape a new product in
the late seventeenth century: coffee. A luxury within reach of only the few,
coffee was at the time a beverage strongly associated with Turkey. It was
very expensive and most commonly drunk at home, not in coffee shops.
The print Homme de qualité buvant du café (1674), for instance, makes the
point that
It’s not enough that I fill myself

with my country’s best foods
I also demand the coffee of the Levant
and find excuses for this extravagance.65
The problem of coffee (but the same could be said of chocolate and tea) is
that it was subject to social inflation as its fashionability spread from the
elites to the lower social classes. Coffee, as we have seen, was at the end of
108
the seventeenth century still a luxury, but by the end of the following cen-
tury had become a common beverage. In 1785 nearly half of all working-
class homes in Paris owned a coffee pot.66
The Allure of the Orient in the Nineteenth Century
The taste for things Chinese and things made in the Chinese manner by
Europeans was a leitmotif of luxury design. Orientalism was not just the
result of a European sense of superiority or, as argued by Edward Said in
his famous book Orientalism (1978), the creation of an imaginary Orient,
often stereotyped and formed via cultural appropriation and misunder-
standing (Figure 3.8). Although the power relationships were often uneven,
the appreciation of the Orient was also based on an expanding understand-
ing of Asia and an appreciation of the riches of the continent’s culture,
material mastery, and deep past.
The nineteenth-century European taste for Chinese objects was very
much formed within a French milieu, although there were other great
collectors such as members of the Swedish aristocracy and financial elite.
The modern view of Chinese decorative arts was established substantially
by the collecting and writings of the Goncourt brothers in nineteenth-
century Paris. In the 1870s, the brothers shifted their attention away from
the French eighteenth century (they had previously been champions of
the rococo) to the Far East. In his diary for 1876, Edmond de Goncourt
wrote: ‘Since my eyes acquired the habit of living in the colours of the Far
East, my eighteenth century has become discoloured. I see it in grey.’67 The
Goncourts’ favourite objects were Chinese ceramics. They appreciated the
glaze and colour of porcelain above all other features and established a
‘visual’ system for analysing porcelain vases and other forms that does not
make much sense historically but still influences the way we collect and
consider these objects.68 Collectors after the Goncourts preferred multi-
colour ceramics, enamelled wares as well as crazed glazes, and special
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luxury
Fig. 3.8. ‘Maison Orientale’, poster lithograph from Ernest Maindron’s Les Programmes
illustrés des théâtres et des cafés-concerts, menus, cartes d’invitation, petites estampes, etc.
(Paris, 1897). A chic Western woman and gentleman in a summer suit are contrasted with
the dark face and traditional dress of an Arab man. The Europeans are intrigued by the
goods on sale, but their relationship to them is ambiguous.
110
effects such as flambée and blanc de chine.69 In the words of Edmond de

Goncourt:
Porcelain of China! This porcelain superior to all other porcelain on
earth! . . . This porcelain with an outcome so perfect that the Chinese attrib-
uted it to a Spirit of the furnace protecting the firing of the ceramics of
which he was fond! . . . In a word, this earthy material wrought by the hands
of a man into an object of light, softly tinged with the glow of a precious
stone.70
Books, prints, and scholarly catalogues contributed to an understand-

ing of Asian cultures that began to be more truthful to the reality that was
under investigation. This was the case with the work of Philipp Franz von
Siebold (1796–1866), an eminent japoniste whose work included the
reproduction of Japanese prints.71 The famous Impressionist painter
Pierre-Auguste Renoir admired Japan over all other artistic nations:
The Japanese for the time being, or up until now, are the only people to
have remained within the sound tradition provided by nature . . . What’s
certain is that they’re the only people to take the time to find pleasure from
their eyes . . . They go see how birds fly, how fish swim, and have even cap-
tured the foam that the sea makes atop its waves, in order to fix them in
bronze, on porcelain, and add them even to their unmatched embroidery.72
Asia was accorded a new status as an ‘authentic’ producer of fine and

applied art by many advanced parts of French society and collectors in the
late nineteenth century. The ‘authenticity’ of Asian decorative arts and the
perceived ‘decline’ of European taste were mapped on to the notion of
alienation and the critique of the machine that had been elaborated by
well-known artistic and literary figures such as John Ruskin and William
Morris. The Musée Guimet (dedicated to the art of Asia) opened in 1889 at
the time of the Paris Universal Exposition, followed by the Musée Cer-
nuschi in 1898. The Musée Enery opened in 1908, also showing Chinese
art, although the first large-scale Parisian exhibition of ancient Chinese
bronzes was not held until 1934, at the Musée de l’Orangerie.73
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luxury
The taste for anything Japanese or Japanese style developed after the
opening of Japan to the West from 1852 to 1854. In Britain, Japanese things
became quickly popular with their exposure at the 1862 International
Exhibition in London and across the Channel, in France, with the 1867
Exposition Universelle in Paris and the 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna.74
By 1876, at the time of the International Exhibition in Philadelphia, Japa-
nese style had conquered the taste of the American elites. One of the most
famous British designers of the second half of the nineteenth century,
Christopher Dresser, was also a japoniste.75 On his way to Japan, he deliv-
ered a series of lectures in Philadelphia at the time of the Exhibition pro-
moting Japanese and oriental art as a model for Western decorative arts.76
Part of the appeal of Japanese art and material culture was its exquisite
workmanship as well as its subtle beauty. Sir Rutherford Alcock, in his Art
and Art Industries of Japan, published in 1878, commented upon the fact
that the Japanese artisan ‘can give a priceless value to the commonest and
least costly materials’.77 A couple of years later, in 1880, Le Bon Marché,
one of the most famous department stores of its day, opened a ‘Galerie de
la Faïence Japonaise’ to sell Japanese ceramics and lacquer of the Edo
period (1603–1867).78
The playwright and aesthete Oscar Wilde promoted things oriental on
his famous lecture tour to the United States and Canada in 1882. He
claimed that the simple Chinese cups used by working men in San Fran-
cisco were far more beautiful than any of the expensive luxuries handed to
him by hostesses, or the thick new vitreous china used in American hotels.
A whole array of exotic objects such as Japanese carved netsukes (toggles
for clothing), lacquered haircombs, snuffboxes, and other practical imple-
ments became desirable collectables locked behind glass.79
The appreciation of Asian cultures and material culture came at a price.
As for the antique, supply was limited and prices increased by the day. In
1883 Philippe Sichel commented about Japanese antiques that they had
become ‘almost undiscoverable in the country, and those we receive in
112
Europe are but imitations or new works created for our taste’.80 It is per-
haps because of this combination of scarcity and difference that things
Asian were so potent within the advanced design of the late nineteenth
century. Oriental fine and applied art was a major spur to the lifestyle
movement called Decadence. Decadence was, as the philosopher Roger
Scruton notes in his work on Beauty, a ‘paradox’, as ‘it continued to believe
in beauty, while focusing on all the reasons for doubting that beauty is
obtainable outside the realm of art’.81 The scholar and translator Robert
Baldick provides an excellent summary of Decadence: ‘that movement in
France and England characterized by a delight in the perverse and arti-
ficial, a craving for new and complex sensations, a desire to extend the
boundaries of emotional and spiritual experience’.82 Perhaps the most
famous popularizer of Decadence (sometimes more politely called the
Aesthetic Movement) was Oscar Wilde, along with the artist James Abbot
McNeill Whistler.
Apart from sharing the general taste for Japanese ukiyo-e prints display-
ing the luxury of geisha and Edo merchants, and for decorative fans to be
hung on the wall and Chinese blue and white porcelain, the great art nou-
veau designer-makers such as Emile Gallé (1846–1904) were transfixed by
the small luxuries of China such as glass snuffboxes. These curios, along
with the carved netsuke that were used to tie the sash of kimonos, inspired
many of the strange colours, designs, and effects of Art Nouveau glass and
porcelain. Gallé, for example, was inspired by the themes, technical virtu-
osity, and effects of veining found in Chinese glass. These inspired his vege
table- and animal-like forms, which created an entirely new category of
European glass. The Decadents introduced a contemporary sense of mor-
bidity that had not been present in the Asian originals. Of the glass of
Gallé, the aesthete the Comte de Montesquiou wrote: ‘within the molten
glass, a red vein has occasionally run through, like the rosy thread that
recalls the need to triumph, or the necessity of dying’.83 Gallé and the Parisian
jeweller and glassmaker René Lalique were receptive to both European and
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luxury
Asian examples of the past, and created new hybrid masterpieces of design
that spoke across cultures.
Luxury and the New Orient
Although we live in a society that greatly values experiences, some materi-

als are still as highly valued as they might have been 1,000 years ago. Many
such materials continue to come from Asia. Oud resin, for instance, pro-
duced from a parasitical attack on the agar tree, long known in the East, is
now a highly fashionable ingredient for Western perfume. Oud costs more
than one and half times as much as gold—a kilo is worth around $70,000
in 2015. Tom Ford at Yves Saint Laurent repopularized the musky smell in
the 1990s.
As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the Chinese themselves are
now among the most prominent collectors of rare objects and luxuries.
Since the early 2010s they have been very interested in stamps. The most
valuable Chinese stamp is the 1897 ‘Red Revenue’, which sold for $1.2 mil-
lion in 2013. Newspaper and magazine stories feature many rather out-
landish tales of Chinese luxury: at the moment, for instance, it is apparently
very fashionable to have your dog painted by hand to resemble a tiger.
This recalls the taste of the Edwardians for keeping absurd pets in the city.
Exactly who is buying the hyper-luxuries of the present day is unclear—
whether it be the billionaire Chinese or the residents of the Gulf States—as
the great couture houses do not release detailed accounts of their sales.
In the early twenty-first century the market for Ferrari cars has plateaued
in China, the largest market along with the United States, but is rising in
Australia, where a surge of property speculation has created a new raft of
very rich people.84
As well as motor cars, men like buying wristwatches, ironically once the
preserve of ladies until airplane pilots required them in the 1920s for ease
of access. One of the most important markets in the world for luxury
114
watches is once again China, where they are purchased mainly by men.
The heritage but also the ironies of retailing timepieces from Europe to
Asia is demonstrated by a visit to the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.
The museum is presented very much as a museum of horology and various
technological and artistic developments in watch-making, but it is also a
little jewel box devoted to luxury. The upper floors contain a very extensive
collection of Renaissance European enamelled and other timepieces, fine
table snuffboxes, as well as the extraordinary pieces sold to the Chinese
and Turks in the eighteenth century. Such pieces were generally sold via
London. They include clocks, telescopes, fan guards, and perfume bottles.
Watches for China were created in incredible forms—peonies or peaches
enamelled and inlaid with diamonds to simulate the effect of a Chinese
painting—and were generally produced in pairs—yin and yang.
There is a return in the early twenty-first century to the very ‘over-the-
top’ mannerism of eighteenth-century fantasies, whether it be the floral
gemstone rings currently retailed by Dior or the re-creations of panther
jewels by Cartier. The case of the twenty-seven-storey residence built by
India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, in Mumbai galvanized world atten-
tion. With garaging for 168 cars, 3 helipads, 9 elevators, and a dining room
that resembles a grand hotel, it is not a subtle space. However, it makes
having to visit a hotel redundant for this lucky family, and recalls many of
the gestures cultivated by North American plutocrats when the first high-
rises of Manhattan were constructed. As the over-the-top ‘maximalism’
of such structures suggests, today’s ‘orientalization’ or—better to say—
‘reorientalization’ of luxury by rich non-Western consumers is a refusal of
the pursuit of the modernist aesthetic paradigm so assiduously cultivated
by the likes of Coco Chanel, about which we will read more in the follow-
ing chapters.
115
Housing Luxury:
From the Hôtel Particulier to the
Manhattan Cooperatives
•
L uxury is often associated with fashion and accessories but is also fun-
damental to many of the greatest schemes of architecture, furnish-
ings, and splendid living. In the nineteenth century, earnest social
reformers on the streets of London discovered that the young girls who
had fallen into prostitution desired the fine clothes of the ladies they saw
walking in the streets, but had little idea that these ladies also had bou-
doirs, libraries, hothouses, and rich furnishings.1 There are little luxuries in
all aspects of life—from the time and manner of taking meals, to the way in
which people sit on chairs. Yet luxury is always time and place specific, and
attitudes towards it have changed dramatically across culture and time.
The home, perhaps more than any other space, has long been a site
of luxury and display, not visible to all and sometimes even concealed.
The invention of free-standing furniture and upholstery in the late six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries added the extra premium of com-
fort.2 That came at a cost for the wealthy middle classes: by the
eighteenth century, the outlay for a fashionable interior was significant.
Rich hangings added colour, texture, and decoration. Boulle furniture, pre-
cious marquetry, and marble floors became a must for any rich household.
116
housing luxury
Fig. 4.1. A British lion devouring a French cockerel, carved by Grinling Gibbons above the
kitchen court gateway at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. First published in Country Life, 20
May 1949.
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luxury
The size of habitations increased dramatically over time, with rooms

becoming more specialized.3 Country houses in Britain and châteaux in
France were sometimes as splendid and large as royal palaces. In the early
eighteenth century, the Duke of Marlborough’s Blenheim Palace was far
more magnificent than Kensington Palace, the main British royal resi-
dence (Figure 4.1).4 Size mattered: from the residences of the nineteenth-
century nouveaux riches to the fabulous houses of the nineteenth-century
American tycoons, excess in floorplan meant an equivalent excess in
expenditure, not just in furnishing but also for paintings and antiques, as
well as an army of servants to manage the household.
LUXURY HOUSING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The cities of Western Europe became more densely populated in the sev-
enteenth century. Different approaches were taken in Paris and London to
deal with the resulting shortage of space. In London, the wealthy were pre-
pared to live in grand townhouses that faced directly onto the street.5 If
you were lucky, the exterior and interior might be by a great architect such
as William Chambers or Robert Adam, and the staircase and hall ceilings
were engineered to create astonishing vistas and effects via cantilevers
and landings. Wealthy people enjoyed looking onto squares, which were
locked and private, stopping coaches from crossing diagonally, and which
provided air and also a pleasant outlook. The very wealthy enjoyed large
townhouses set behind walls, and many town-dwellers owned a second
villa on the Thames, upstream, where they could pretend to enjoy the syl-
van delights of a Roman residence despite the winter weather. Not all
dwellings were in the classical style or indeed good taste: the eighteenth-
century Prussian travel-writer Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, noting
‘the immense riches possessed by the English’, remarked that this enabled
‘them to indulge in the most uncommon caprices’.6 That to build in the
gothic mode in the 1790s was almost comical may be gauged from his
following comment: ‘A wealthy individual, some years since, built a house
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not far from Hyde-Park, merely to ridicule the gothic style. All that was
disagreeable and fantastical in that taste was here caricatured.’7
France developed very different building traditions. In the late seven-
teenth century Paris expanded dramatically, and courtiers were not keen
to spend all their time in the marble grandeur and freezing spaces of the
palace of Versailles. Instead they flocked to Paris, with its luxury shopping
street the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a
centre of luxury production outside guild control. The luxury trades and
the ‘appearance industry’ (clothing, wigging, make-up, deportment)
were a central feature of the Parisian economy and streetscape.8 Many
new mansions were erected. Residents were not numbered, as the nobles
had their crests over their entrances and pediments, and the introduction
of street numbering proceeded in an ad hoc manner; this might help to
explain the mystery of street numbering that persists in Paris to this
day.9 Some of their mansions, like the hôtel de Soubise (c.1730), with its
painted monkeys and Chinese-style decoration, are works of art in them-
selves. Like the English, the French also sometimes built directly onto the
street, with barely a pavement between themselves and the road, but the
French tended to use the model of a very high front-facing wall and cen-
tral courtyard, with good acoustic effects. Much later, the very rich of
Manhattan would leave their mansions for skyscrapers to avoid the noise
from the streets.
Exceptions to the French model of building are also notable, and include
the beautiful squares of the Place des Vosges, built in the first years of the
seventeenth century, and the Place Vendôme, now the centre of the French
luxury industry, but in the eighteenth century the place where aristocrats,
merchants, and tax farmers built their sumptuous townhouses. It was at this
time that financiers replaced the court as the vanguard and patrons of taste,
and the city replaced the rural palace as the centre of pleasure. It was this
moneyed class that could afford to build hotels and châteaux and collect art.10
French society remained extremely hierarchical in the eighteenth century,
with its social estates and ranks. For the elites (the nobility, the government
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luxury
officials, and the top rungs of finance), houses were the settings in which hier-
archy was materially presented and visually represented.11 Yet the French
elites saw their houses not just as public spaces. It was at this time that the
court nobility developed the concept of privacy as a great luxury and architec-
tural innovation. A set of rooms called the appartement de compagnie or
de société provided a semi-public realm distinct from the magnificent cere-
monial suite that continued to be built for the very rich.12 These new private
rooms were decorated in what was called at the time either the petite (little or
charming manner) or the goût moderne (modern taste), which later was to be
called the ‘rococo’.13
During the reign of Louis XV, smaller, more private rooms were included
in many Parisian townhouses, and easy seating and improved fireplace
technology encouraged informality and the search for comfort.14 Even the
King liked to meet his friends in small private spaces, making them coffee
after dinner, and his mistress Madame de Pompadour enjoyed an early
type of elevator at Versailles.15 The lucky mistresses and actresses of Paris
lived in specially designed villas or apartments that, in the words of the
contemporary French writer Louis Petit de Bachaumont, possessed ‘inso-
lent luxury’; some even had triumphal arches splayed across their facades.16
A wealthy man such as Radix de Sainte-Foy, a well-known rake and spend-
thrift, owned a house in each of Paris and Neuilly, with thirty quality horses
to transport him for the city and ten for the country.17
From the early years of the eighteenth century the French developed a
mode of living that remained remarkably consistent among the very rich
across the world until the second half of the twentieth century, when it was
finally supplanted by modernism. The private suite was for dining, conver-
sation, reading aloud, musical concerts, and games of various sorts (and new
ways of fitting out these intimate but fashionable spaces were required).
A salon or sitting room, a purpose-built dining room, and a library appeared
as dedicated spaces, each with its own fittings such as marble basins and
running water for the dining room. Bathrooms appeared for the first time,
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housing luxury
although they were quite rare early in the century. The lady of the house had
her own boudoir (Figure 4.2) next to her bedroom and the man a study.
This was a practical format that was easily transplanted into the luxury
‘French flats’ or apartments later erected in wealthy cities such as New York.
The new significance of the eighteenth-century dining room meant that
it was now often magnificently decorated. For example, in the Parisian
house of the famous eighteenth-century Crozat family, the dining room
had two marble fountains. After dining, guests retired to take coffee in
a cabinet a pale yellow octagonal space decorated with painted flowers
from foreign climes that simulated a room outside in a garden.18
Mme du Châtel at the Place Vendôme had her own grand cabinet à la
Chinoise with large panels of black lacquer, each over 6 feet high and set in
rococo panelling. Such cabinets often displayed personal rather than pub-
lic collections of objects. A great variety of built-in libraries and cabinets
were developed to hold these often precious collections. New furniture
forms to carry and display all these new things were developed, often
made by foreign craftsmen in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; they included
the lady’s dressing table with adjustable leaves, bedside tables with marble
shelves to hold hot drinks at night, women’s desks with dainty legs and
places to store ink, the chiffonier or a chest of drawers with shallow drawers,
and the semainier, a much higher chest with narrower drawers for storing
papers, lace, shells, and the like. Much of this new furniture was mobile—
remember that the French for furniture is literally a ‘movable’ (meuble).19
Ébénistes (cabinetmakers) made tables in which, rather than pull out a
drawer in an ungainly manner, one pressed a hidden spring mechanism to
release the locks. Ormolu-mounted mechanical dice-throwing machines
meant that the aristocrats need not exert even their wrists.
For a noble family the gallery was the most prestigious space—this was a
male space in that portraits, generally of the male line, were placed there.
Crozat had his gallery gilded in 1703, circumventing the slackly enforced
sumptuary laws of Louis XIV that stated that only he and the Church could
121
Fig. 4.2. This little cabinet or chamber was designed by Jean-Simeon Rousseau de la
Rottière (1747–1820) in 1778 for a hôtel particulier (private residence) in the Marais district
of Paris where the de Megret de Sérilly family lived. The de Sérilly family soon faced seri-
ous financial difficulties and had to give up the house only six years after the room had
been built. The Marquis was guillotined in 1794, and the Marquise escaped the same fate
only by claiming that she was pregnant. This photograph shows the range of luxuries
enjoyed by an eighteenth-century woman of the upper classes, such as the telescopic
porcelain-top work table in the foreground.
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housing luxury
own gold and gilded goods. The King expressed disapproval, but Crozat
got away with it. The chapel was also a noble prerequisite and was a ‘female’
space in that it was generally placed near the women’s apartments, open-
ing off their rooms. All manner of luxurious silks and sculptures would be
offered there to the Virgin and Child in a display that frequently horrified
English Protestant visitors. Bathing rooms were placed in odd spots such
as near the kitchen, presumably to access the water. It was considered very
bourgeois for the husband and wife to share a bedroom, but people had
choices, and some of these rich financiers did indeed choose to share their
beds with their wives.20
French luxury was also connected with eroticism, which is hardly sur-
prising as this had been one of its connotations since the ancient world. All
is made clear in this delightful passage from a book by Jean-François de
Bastide, La Petite Maison (The Little House), which published in serial form
in 1757 and republished in 1879. Merging two forms, the erotic libertine
novella and the architectural treatise, the book presents a progression
through the rooms of a charming pavilion as the corollary to a seduction
ending in release. Mélite, a virtuous woman, is lured into the ‘maison de
plaisance’ of the Marquis de Trémicour. He takes her on a tour of his ‘asy-
lum of love’, past girandoles of Sèvres porcelain, silken couches, Boucher
paintings, and shimmering and shining surfaces. At the end of the per-
fumed tour she succumbs to the inevitable:
Trémicour took her hand, and they entered into a bedroom on the right. In
the square-shaped room, a jonquil-colored bed of Peking fabric, brocaded
with resplendent hues, lay nestled in a niche, across from one of the windows
that over-looked the garden. This room, with chamfered corners graced by
mirrors, was crowned by a vaulted ceiling. In the ceiling’s center was a cir-
cular painting that brought all of Pierre’s mastery to the image of Hercules
in the arms of Morpheus, awakened by Love. The room’s walls were painted
a soft yellow; the marqueterie parquet combined amaranath and cedar
woods and the marble was a Turkish blue. Lovely bronzes and porcelains
were displayed in a studied and orderly manner on the marble-topped
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luxury
consoles that sat before each of the four mirrors. Elegant furniture of myr-
iad forms resonated the ideas expressed everywhere in the little house, and
coerced even the coldest minds to sense something of the voluptuousness
it proclaimed. Mélite no longer dared praise anything; she had begun to
fear her own emotions.21
Mélite then enters an exquisite water closet and descends to the garden,
where a fireworks display goes off. Fountains shoot into the air. The rake
further leads Mélite into a room solely for the enjoyment of coffee.22 She is
finally seduced in a second boudoir richly furnished with bergères (uphol-
stered armchairs), ottomans, duchesses (day beds), and sultanes, or Turk-
ish-style settees. This reflects the ambience of the supposed hedonism of
the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI: an early nineteenth-century English
travel guide claimed that Queen Marie-Antoinette had slept in a sus-
pended bed-basket of roses before the Revolution.23 Some readers might
have believed this to be true.
FURNISHING LUXURIOUS INTERIORS IN THE

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Furniture is necessarily practical but can also embody aesthetic ideals and
convey public or private messages. This was particularly the case with aris-
tocratic furniture with inlaid or mounted arms, or that was made of materi-
als that only the very rich could afford. One of the most etiolated luxuries
of the period was the taste for creating elaborate pictorial fantasies in and
on the carcass of wooden furniture. Development in the art of marquetry
went hand in hand with new knowledge of the artistic production of the
East (textiles, lacquer, porcelain, arms, and armour) and the development
of the Western taste for chinoiserie. East and West Indian trade routes
brought new exotic woods to Europe, in France known as ‘bois des Îles’—
ebony, purple heart, tulipwood, king wood, and bloodwood—making pre-
viously unobtainable colours possible: natural purples, reds, blacks, and
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yellows.24 The marquetry designs of the highest-style pieces included archi-

tectural scenes, scenes from nature, and exotic pieces of chinoiserie repre-
senting porcelains and flowers.
The French, under the influence once again of refugees and craftsmen
from the German lands, developed their own model of inlaid and ormolu
(gilded-bronze) furniture that has found favour ever since with the very
rich for its luxurious air. French fine furniture of the eighteenth century has
a restraint sometimes lacking in German furniture of the period, although
such an observation perhaps says as much about our own modern tastes as
anything else. The genre pittoresque was translated by German designers
into a sculptural use of curves and counter-curves. Würzburg and Ansbach
were centres of this cabinetmaking, and here the cabinet should be under-
stood as both a piece of furniture and a room. The cabinet was never neu-
tral; it was frequently part of a game, lending itself to flirtation, a site for
love tokens and commemoration. Generally the doors would open to
reveal some other scenes or vistas concealed within. We are sometimes
simultaneously in a jewel box, a cabinet, a garden, or a room.25
It is an uphill battle to convince the design-minded consumer today
that a fake might be good and appealing. But imitation was not a problem
in the eighteenth century. Quite the opposite, in fact: the ancien régime
viewing public often enjoyed the extra degree of artificiality offered by cer-
tain materials and prospects. Marble and wood were of particular interest.
Woods were dyed and stained to produce a variety of colours; there were
speckled, marbled, and jaspered effects. In a setting such as the grottoes
that frequently adorned gardens and villas in the eighteenth century, arti-
ficial coral and rocks were often used, even though both were widely avail-
able in the natural world. It was believed that certain ‘natural’ products
lacked the beauty—‘one might say the desired degree of artificiality—
demanded by society for its artistically subterranean environments’.26 The
famous pietra dura of the early modern period, the inlaid pictorial stone
mosaics, were also prized for their ‘ingenious artifice’ and the luminescence
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luxury
of their stone. In fact, the materials themselves were sometimes thought

to have intrinsic power. This was, for instance, the case with rock crystal,
so popular in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, which was believed
to have cooling powers.
The role of the marchand-mercier was crucial to the luxury economy of
eighteenth-century France. The marchand-mercier was an elite merchant
whose job it was to coordinate the large number of specialist tradesmen
who made things in Paris, to create innovations that drove demand, and to
maintain and repair the luxury goods once they had been delivered.27 The
most famous such figure was Dominique Daguerre. Some of the most
enduring luxury creations of this distinct entrepreneurial group were the
ormolu-mounted porcelains from Asia that are so evocative of the rococo
era. Expensive imported Chinese and Japanese porcelain vessels and their
covers were mounted in gilded bronze or gilded brass, often embellished
with elaborate feet or bases. Clocks were built with, for example, a Chinese
mandarin, rhinoceros, or elephant in bronze surrounded by porcelain flow-
ers on gilded stalks made by local companies at Sèvres and Vincennes. Such
pieces were designed to appeal to the connoisseurs of the time, and the
marchands-merciers worked hard to emphasize their aesthetic qualities and
to match the decorative scheme, including the wall panelling, the carpets,
and the chandeliers.28 This was a potent scheme for a multifaceted, multi-
sensory interior decoration that influenced taste in subsequent centuries. It
was sometimes even claimed that the French perfumed their paint!
The eighteenth century saw porcelain not just as a luxurious novelty,
but as a category of object that signified the connoisseur’s discerning
taste, which had in all cases to avoid bright colours and decoration.29 Such
objects had particular appeal to the royal mistress Madame de Pompa-
dour (mistress to Louis XV), and they were also regularly given as diplomatic
gifts. Pompadour owned decorative articles including artefacts made
of lacquer or marquetry as well as myriad porcelains, including twenty-
eight rich Sèvres pot-pourri vases to scent the rooms, blue and white as
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housing luxury
well as pompadour pink porcelain vessels, Vincennes porcelain flowers,

and 475 pieces of imported Meissen.30 Such objects were always among
the most expensive objects in the houses of the wealthy, apart from the
ormolu-mounted furniture.
Small luxury goods such as candlesticks, lady’s mother-of-pearl sewing
cases, étuis of sharkskin to hold tweezers and scissors for grooming, and
novelty animal-form paperweights were made and sold in the luxury shops
of the Palais Royal, one of the first purpose-built shopping arcades just
inland from the Seine and adjacent to the Tuileries Gardens. Such bijoute-
rie or decorative jewellery is still called ‘Palais Royal’ in the antiques trade,
whether it was made there or not. Until the late eighteenth century, the
‘old’ had little intrinsic value whatsoever to buyers, other than to slightly
eccentric antiquarian collectors like Horace Walpole.31 Second-hand
objects were, however, remounted with new bronze borders and mounts
from time to time, even for royalty—hence the importance of the march-
ands-merciers with taste.
Refinement was a result of specialization of production and the devel-
opment of newly specialized craftspeople in the luxury trades. The menui-
siers were frame-makers, craftspeople and technicians at the forefront of
structural design for furniture. They helped develop a whole new reper-
toire of furniture that has perhaps never been equalled for its variety and
comfort until the experiments of Charles and Ray Eames with modern
materials and forms in the post-war period. Myriad new chair types were
introduced in the eighteenth century, from the bergère (armchair) to the
chaise-longue or duchesse, and the duchesse brisée (comprising a separate
but coordinated armchair and long stool).32 The ébénistes were a specialist
guild who worked on the design and the surfaces of furniture, as well as
coordinating construction. They were not just makers, but finishers, and
this is a distinction that has continued until today in the French luxury
tradition of furniture-making. Another guild provided the gilt mounts,
while yet another built compartments for travelling bureaux and trunks,
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luxury
fitting out the drawers and compartments with often elaborately edged
padded silks (known as passementerie). The finest upholstery was of
tapestry made at Beauvais or Gobelins, followed by furnishing silks such
as brocades, and then by inlaid leathers.33
Many of the masterpieces of French furniture were made in the Fau-
bourg Saint-Antoine, the specific area of Paris where thousands of workers
found employment outside the jurisdiction of the guilds and normal rules
of apprenticeship. Labour was more sharply divided by task than in the
guilds. Here a sideboard could be made by one man, but more often it was
the product of one large diversified workshop. The area was largely peo-
pled by foreigners and migrants from the country. By 1791 there were
8,000 workers in furnishing trades; 4,500 lived in the faubourg, which
must have been like a luxury compound. Comparisons with the official
guild were not favourable to the latter, which had only 895 masters; 200
were cabinetmakers (ebenistes), and 100 were chair-makers.34
LUXURY AND THE LEGACY OF FRENCH TASTE
‘Things French’ fascinated the rest of the world in the eighteenth century
and continued to be seen as the apogee of luxury over the following cen-
turies. French words related to fashionability that were incorporated into
English included: etiquette 1750; fête 1754; rouge 1753; ennui (boredom)
1758; monde (society) 1765; chignon (upwards hair-knot) 1783; and bandeau
(head-band) 1790. The great styles of furniture and furnishing, such as Louis
XV and Louis XVI, were named retrospectively in the nineteenth century.
The revolution meant a temporary end to luxury consumption in France.
The French nobility either fled to England or fell victim to the guillotine.
Their wonderful townhouses, palaces, and castles were ransacked and their
contents destroyed, stolen, or confiscated by the revolutionary government.
Yet this presented an unforeseen opportunity for eighteenth-century French
furniture and artefacts of the highest quality to be bought up relatively
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housing luxury
Fig. 4.3. Blue Velvet Room, Carlton House, London. The room is richly furnished with
English and French neoclassical furniture and a woven fitted carpet, then a new vogue.
The hangings are of rich contrasting silk.
cheaply by foreign nobles and the very rich. For instance, the Prince Regent,
later George IV, bought furniture and decorative arts from a series of auctions
following the French Revolution for the lavish decoration of his now demol-
ished Carlton House (Figure 4.3) and also the Brighton Pavilion.35 The rise of
the taste for things French was not always so appreciated and became more
pronounced only in the last third of the nineteenth century. The social and
cultural historian Peter Mandler, in his work on the English country house,
notes that nineteenth-century visitors did not like the luxury and extrava-
gance of Chatsworth, which was found to be too French and too elaborate.36
From the 1870s taste changed. Wealthy collectors such as the banker
Mayer Amschel de Rothschild began to collect French furniture voraciously
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luxury
for his massive Joseph Paxton-designed ‘Jacobethan’ pile, Mentmore (near

Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire), the contents of which were dispersed at
auction in 1977. Before the sale of Mentmore, Eva, Lady Rosebery, was
asked the locations of the kitchens, to which she replied that she had never
been there.37 Here the luxury was so great that ‘at Mentmore even the wash-
ing facilities in the guest bathrooms were provided by Louis XV or XVI com-
modes whose marble tops had been pierced and fitted with basins and
taps’.38 The taste for things foreign did not just extend to the French, but
included objects made from amber, ivory, rock crystal, and enamels from
the Renaissance, the finest German Baroque cabinetmaking; arms and
armour; and seventeenth-century table-caskets from Augsburg and Ant-
werp. Gold boxes and paintings by the great masters covered all surfaces
and walls. Old things (not antiques but of the previous century) were now
more appreciated than ever before.
The most famous British collection of French luxuries was formed by
the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, Sir Richard Wallace,
who was raised in Paris. In 1870 Richard Wallace inherited from his father
one of the most exquisite small bijou châteaux in France, the Bagatelle
near Paris, and he began to add to the significant collection of French fur-
nishings and paintings by masters such as Greuze, Boucher, and Frago-
nard assembled by his father there from the 1830s. Originally housed in
Paris and then on temporary display in London, the collection was left to
the British nation by Sir Richard’s widow, Lady Wallace, in 1897. It may
now be seen in a large nineteenth-century London townhouse, Hertford
House, known as the Wallace Collection, in London.39 It includes the
famous nineteenth-century copy of Louis XV’s desk for his study at Ver-
sailles by the great cabinetmaker Jean-François Oeben, and finished by the
royal cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener in 1769, featuring a built-in clock
and gods and goddesses of plenty supporting the roll top. The desk cost
Louis nearly 63,000 livres, or about $3 million in 2015 money, making it
the most expensive piece of furniture ever commissioned.40
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housing luxury
The auction of the French crown jewels by the Third Republic in May
1887 included some of the surviving gems that had belonged to Louis
XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette. It also included many of Napoleon’s gifts to
Josephine mounted by the jeweller Bapst, and many of the jewels that had
belonged to Napoleon III’s empress, Eugénie, as well as treasures from the
reign of Charles X (1824–30). The auction was an international sensation,
with Tiffany & Co. of New York purchasing the best diamonds and one-
third of the gems for approximately $12 million in 2015 money.41 Buyers
came from all over Europe, from Turkey, Egypt, Tunis, and Havana, indi-
cating the global spread of wealth at this time.42 The French had cleverly
put them all on display first in the Universal Exhibition of 1878, at which
time they received extensive media attention via line engravings and pho-
tography. Nearly all the gems were reset by the buyers in newly fashion-
able styles. Some of these dazzling crown jewels (including the diadem of
Empress Eugénie) have been reacquired in recent years by the French
state, and they now reside in a special case at the Musée des Art décoratifs
in the Musée du Louvre, a few hundred metres from where the Empress
once wore them in her apartments at the Tuileries.
By this time, French taste had become a ‘must have’ also in the United
States. Francophilia set the tenor for the luxury of the American gilded age
and for much of the subsequent century. The term ‘gilded age’ refers to the
novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner entitled The Gilded Age:
A Tale of Today (1873), a satire of greed and corruption in post-Civil War
America. While the very rich were acquiring genuine French furnishings
for their new villas, even at this date a great many new pastiches in the
French manner were created for them, and their freshness probably was a
part of their appeal; the Vanderbilt mansion in New York contained many
such ormolu-mounted items, including a Louis XV-style inkwell for impor-
tant correspondence.
The American passion for things French continued well into the twenti-
eth century. Millionaire businesswoman, philanthropist, and connoisseur
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luxury
Mrs Marjorie Merriweather Post, for instance, started to acquire her mas-
sive collection in the years following the Russian Revolution of 1917, when
it was possible to obtain great French furniture with royal provenance, as
well as the exquisite neoclassical Russian furniture dispersed by the Soviets
in a series of famous sales from the 1930s. It is somewhat paradoxical to
think that two of the major revolutions of modern times have contributed
so much to shape luxury consumption and taste, with France at the top of
the pile. This inspired generations of Americans to buy into French cul-
ture—quite literally. The prominent New York socialite Caroline Astor
(1830–1908) spent up to five months a year in France, had an apartment
on the Champs Elysées, and collected French paintings by the likes of the
famed ‘Carolus-Duran’, the society portraitist.43 A visit to Paris continues
to be one of the ‘must-do’ things for middle-class tourists today. The city
has retained its allure as a centre of art, luxury, and gastronomy, despite
the growing incursion of the English language, the global food revolution,
and globalized shopping. It is now a favourite destination, along with Italy,
for the new middle class of China.
THE NOUVEAUX RICHES AND THE ‘DOLLAR PRINCESSES’
By the mid-nineteenth century, wealth from new industries created enor-

mous fortunes at a time when taxation and labour costs were low. Large
cities in North America, Australia, and South America still had enough
space to enable very large townhouses to be built, and a country residence
was also de rigueur for the rich. As has been well documented, the claim
that nineteenth-century mansions lacked conveniences is largely a myth.
Indeed, a great deal of technology was commissioned for renovations and
new residences in this period. Arundel Castle in Sussex, rebuilt in the
1850s, had electricity, eight bathrooms, and sixty-five water closets, as well
as hydraulic service lifts. Technology at this date was also much more
expensive than the fittings—a complete inversion of twentieth-century
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housing luxury
economics, notes journalist Michael Hall in his fine work on the Victorian
country house. At Arundel Castle, the chimney piece by the sculptor
Thomas Earp cost £150 and the electric system cost £28,652.44 Service
wings grew much larger in this period and appear to have been a status
symbol. They were also increasingly demanded by the servants, who were
coming to expect better working conditions away from basements, and
who moved around for work more than contemporary television drama
might suggest.45
Much of this luxury was selected and directed by men. The wife of Lord
Coleridge noted ‘my husband tells me he worships the ground I tread on,
but I am never allowed to choose the carpets’.46 High society nonetheless
valued the contribution of witty and urbane women, even sometimes
actresses and opera singers, and was also opening up to foreigners and
those of different cultural and religious backgrounds. In the last third of
the nineteenth century, England was notable for greater social mixing
even at the level of the court than in many other parts of Europe. This was
an important era for Jewish integration in England, and King Edward VII
has been praised as one of the first monarchs who would not countenance
anti-Semitic behaviour. He embraced the invitations of his wealthy Jewish
advisers such as Sir Ernst Cassell, accepting them as ‘leaders of society’ for
the first time.47 He was also regularly entertained by some of the richest
Jewish banking and industrial families such as the Rothschilds. This was
widely reported in the press.
One of the most extraordinary of all nineteenth-century houses is Wad-
desdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, one of the Rothschild family’s resi-
dences, built in a hybrid French Renaissance château style in the 1870s and
1880s. Designed by the famed French architect Gabriel-Hippolyte Destail-
leur, it incorporated every conceivable luxury and novelty, including aviar-
ies of delicate gilded metal, and the finest collections of French, Islamic,
and oriental antiques. In Figure 4.4, we see Waddesdon and its encrusted
stone ornament readied for the summer season with canvas awnings and
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luxury
Fig. 4.4. The garden front of Waddesdon Manor, which overlooks a formal parterre. The
house was designed by Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild
and built in 1874–83. Photographed but not published by Country Life in 1902.
newly established flower beddings in the extravagant Victorian taste. The

first design proved too small for the needs of entertaining, and it was
extended soon after completion.
Waddesdon Manor was built, in a place where there had been no house
at all, by Ferdinand de Rothschild, one of the first generation in his family
who did not work at the family bank. His life was one of luxury and plea-
sure, and his residence was one of the favourite visiting spots of the gour-
mand and sybarite Edward VII. Guests could take a private steam launch
to Ferdinand’s sister’s house at Eythrope; transportation for the very rich,
from private boats to Pullman cars, was always an essential ingredient of
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housing luxury
superior living. (Surveys around 1900 in England debated whether ‘public

transport’ was a ‘luxury’ for the working classes; the conclusion was that it
was a luxury, not a necessity—and that the quarter of the population living
in poverty had the means only to walk to work, not to be transported
there.48) Guests at Waddesdon were accommodated in great comfort, as if
they were guests in one of London’s or New York’s luxury hotels.49 The
luxury at Waddesdon was so great that the hearth rugs to protect the car-
pets from cinders were cut out of the original savonnerie (royal French tap-
estry works) stool covers from the chapel at Versailles.50 Its dining room,
which appears to be painted in trompe l’œil, is actually made out of solid
veneers of marble interspersed with large wall mirrors surmounted by
paintings all designed by Nicolas Pineal (1732–33) (which were taken from
a Paris hôtel particulier), and the room was also furnished with Beauvais tap-
estries from eighteenth-century France, and Louis XV-style chairs softly cov-
ered in modern buttoned upholstery (Figure 4.5). The enormous marble
putti who carry the candelabra beside the chimneypiece find their echo in
the so-called beach houses of the Vanderbilts in North America. As in many
nineteenth-century mansions, the decoration and fittings at Waddesdon
harked back to the royal courts of the previous centuries (particularly those
of pre-revolutionary France). For example, the billiard room contained an
enormous sixteenth-century French stone mantle with classical motifs that
was flanked by a pair of caryatids with large projecting breasts. It referred
directly to the court of François I, King of France from 1515 to 1547.
The French château style was the sign of the wealthiest and most luxuri-
ous approach to domestic architecture. But mansions of extreme detail
and luxury such as this were nevertheless often written off by snobs as nou-
veau riche. In the words of the impressionist artist Auguste Renoir, writing
in his journal:
A gentleman who only recently has come into money wishes to have a cas-
tle. He inquires what style is the most in vogue. It turns out to be Louis XIII.
Fine, let’s go for it. Naturally, he can easily find an architect to make him fake
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luxury
Fig. 4.5. The dining room at Waddesdon Manor, which is lined with marble and hung
with a series of Beauvais tapestries after Boucher. The mirror frames, designed by Nicholas
Pineau in 1732–3, are from the Paris home of the duc de Villas. First published Country
Life, 20 December 1902.
Louis XIII. Who’s to blame? It’s society, then, that must be addressed, and
must elevate his taste . . . To have a beautiful palace you must be worthy of it,
otherwise you can address yourself to anyone at all and you’ll have nothing.
The artists, knowing how empty you are, won’t dare to be personal.51
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housing luxury
Despite Renoir’s melancholy regarding the state of contemporary taste,

many such palaces were constructed around the world. This model was
used extensively in cities such as New York and even by the sea—at the
Vanderbilts’ ‘Marble House’ (1888–92) and ‘The Breakers’ (completed 1895)
in Newport, where the bronze chairs in the ‘red marble dining-room . . .
required a footman’s help to get them near the table’.52 As with Waddes-
don, many of these urban dwellings incorporated references to the great
luxury courts of the past. For example, the Vanderbilt townhouse in New
York was described by Consuelo Vanderbilt, the unhappily married 9th
Duchess of Marlborough, as having held a dining room that was
enormous and had at one end twin Renaissance mantlepieces and on one
side a huge stained-glass window, depicting the Field of the Cloth of Gold
on which the Kings of England and France were surrounded with their
knights, all not more magnificently arrayed than the ladies a-glitter with
jewels seated on high-backed tapestry chairs behind which stood footmen
in knee-breeches.53
The surrounding rooms were in the ‘Louis’ style and held furniture with a
royal provenance to Marie Antoinette. Among the great New York society
hostesses there was considerable waspishness attached to this agenda con-
cerning purported accuracy. Mrs Stuyvesant Fish, famous for her harsh
words, once remarked to a hostess who was proudly showing her a ‘Louis
Quinze salon’ in her residence: ‘And what makes you think so?’.
A part of the Arts and Crafts reaction to French cosmopolitanism was its
hostility to continental luxury—when Eaton Place in London was rebuilt in
the nineteenth century it was described in Badecker as a place to please
even those who ‘have little taste for the triumphs of modern luxury’.54
Philip Webb’s exquisite design for the country villa Standen was reported,
according to Michael Hall, as a ‘reaction against the luxury and conspicu-
ous expenditure so evident in English society at the end of the century’.55
Standen, in West Sussex, was built in 1892–94 as his family’s country resi-
dence by a London solicitor, James Beale. It was designed in its entirety by
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luxury
Philip Webb, one of William Morris’s close friends.56 Not a modest house,
it has twenty-one bedrooms, two porcelain and nickel bathrooms, and
seven modern lavatories. Fine wooden details, asymmetry, and a shift
away from densely hung walls characterized this style. The wardrobes
were fitted rather than free-standing (which was unusual for the time);
radiator shelves kept food warm outside the dining room and the electric
lights were repoussé metal sunflower-shaped sconces. Like many wealthy
families of the time, the Beales purchased a motor car at the turn of the
century; the head coachman was sent to be retrained at the Rolls Royce
Chauffeur School. His other job was to wind the clocks once a week.57
All this building, rebuilding, and refitting did not come cheaply. Indeed,
they required resources held only by wealthy Americans—the richest peo-
ple in the world at the time. Clare Booth Luce, a wealthy ambassadress and
society figure, formerly married to Henry R. C. Luce, chairman of Time-
Life publishing house, once said: ‘In America money is a thing less valued
in the spending than in the earning. It is less a symbol of luxury than of
“success”, less of corruption than of virtue.’58 The famed inventor of beauty
creams, Helena Rubinstein (Russian born, living in outback Australia for a
short time before making her fortune in New York), had this to say about
collecting: ‘Quality’s nice, but quantity makes a show.’59 While Americans
were good at making money, they seemed to need Europeans to spend it
quickly. The raft of rich American women who began to marry into the
European aristocracy in the late nineteenth century were known as ‘dollar
princesses’.60 The term came from a popular song ‘we are the dollar prin-
cesses’. The British aristocracy were, of course, in turn marrying into this
American wealth. The fictional Lady Grantham from the TV series Down-
ton Abbey is now one of the world’s most famous ‘dollar princesses’. Gener-
ally their fathers had become immensely rich through business after the
American Civil War and still felt shunned by the first families of Manhat-
tan, the many Dutch-origin dynasties such as the Astors, the Stuyvesants,
and the like. They included such famous figures as Consuelo Vanderbilt
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housing luxury
(who married the Duke of Marlborough, becoming the Duchess, and lived
at Blenheim Palace until her divorce); Mary Leiter, daughter of the found-
ers of Marshall Fields Stores (who became first Lady Curzon and later Vice-
reine of India); and Anna Gould (who married—and later divorced—the
French aristocrat Boniface de Castellane). May Goelet, daughter of a real-
estate tycoon, had a mother who famously gave out silver Tiffany party
favours to the hundreds of guests who attended her balls. May married the
8th Duke of Roxburghe in 1903 and brought a dowry of $20 million to
Floors Castle, her husband’s hereditary seat, which she decorated in a com-
fortable, understated French style that one could easily still live in today.61
The arrival of a number of wealthy American heiresses coincided with a
series of challenges to the British aristocracy: between 1890 and 1910 a
series of legislative and social changes occurred, including reform of local
government, the access of industrialists to the peerage, the Liberal attack
on the House of Lords, the introduction of death duties, and the threat of
land tax.62 The Asquith Budget of 1912 proposed to increase income tax
and estate duties, much to the fury of the House of Lords; it was at first
defeated but later passed after tumult.63 ‘The Great Unrest’ or the Great
Strike of 1912 further unsettled those with means, and the sinking of the
‘unsinkable’ luxury liner Titanic that year, with so many English and
American plutocrats losing their lives, has often been seen as a metaphor
for the end of a whole world before the catastrophe of world war in 1914.64
The American fortunes enabled the ancient piles of noblemen to be
restored and elaborate new residences to be erected, and the newly arrived
women injected a certain American vigour into social life. Many of them,
including Lady Randolph Churchill (née ‘Jennie’ Jerome and mother of
Winston Churchill), were more actively interested in up-to-date interior deco-
ration than their British sisters.65 So many wealthy women arrived that a maga-
zine Titled American was published. Not all the lavish spending undertaken by
some of their husbands was welcomed. Sometimes the male partners spent
so much of the family’s money that the newly acquired American relatives felt
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luxury
they had to intervene. For instance, Boni de Castellane, the French Belle
Époque taste-maker and trend-setter, held legendary fabulous parties, fea-
turing nine miles of specially commissioned red carpets, gardens in which
Nubian men in turbans walked jaguars and panthers, and precious antiques
and art works in abundance. Boni’s father-in-law once innocently enquired
why Boni was purchasing so many ‘second-hand’ objects from the eigh-
teenth century. Boni explained in his memoir: ‘I preferred to exist in a
dream world of past splendour, pretty women and interesting people.’66
AMERICAN OPULENCE
During the nineteenth century, wealth was predominantly generated in

new occupations, professions, and industries, and in the financial sector of
the economy. Even if they were rejected by older members of a snobbish
society such as that of Manhattan (with its ‘400’ list of people ‘worthy’ of
being received), the so-called plutocrats—a word coined in the seventeenth
century but only used widely in the late nineteenth—could easily find a
place in high society. Yet even new money was aware that power (or at least
prestige) was based on the ownership of vast estates.67 One might even say
that the greatest luxury in late nineteenth-century England was, in fact,
land. Land is often considered an investment, rather than a luxury, but, at
the turn of the century, the acquisition of vast estates was more the para-
phernalia of status than anything else. This is because the return on land
was between 2 and 2½ per cent per annum, while bank interest was 3–4
per cent.68 If land itself was a luxury, then we should consider the incredi-
ble houses built in the second half of the nineteenth century an ‘exuberant
pleasure’.69 Whether they patronized an architect, an artist, or an electrical
engineer, male patrons delighted in commissioning the latest and the
greatest. Novelty was embraced. The variety, size, and ingenuity of the
late nineteenth-century dwellings in Britain and the Empire have never
been equalled and, despite the enormous number of demolitions in the
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housing luxury
twentieth century, most cities in Britain and many of the dominions retain
some evidence of this building mania. For example, the first house in the
world to be lit by incandescent light in the world was the English country
house Cragside in Northumberland, in 1880.
Craftsmen from many countries were hired to build and furnish great
houses across Britain, which along with France was a centre of finance,
learning, and art and considered a most desirable destination from which
to conduct business. Men who relocated from other countries to live in
Britain included the German-born Sir Julius Wernher (1850–1912), one of
the so-called Randlords from South Africa who had made a fortune in dia-
mond and other mineral exploration. In the 1890s he refurnished his Lon-
don residence, Bath House in Piccadilly (previously owned by Mr Baring
of Baring’s Bank), and in 1903 he bought and furnished the eighteenth-
century Robert Adam-designed Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire (since 2007 a
Luxury Hotel and Spa), with an enormous collection of medieval ivory and
parcel-gilt treasures, old masters, and French eighteenth-century furni-
ture. The taste was le gôut Ritz (Ritz Hotel taste), and in fact Wernher was
part of the syndicate that had backed the Swiss hotelier César Ritz in creat-
ing that London landmark of luxury accommodation.70 The interior of
Luton Hoo was redesigned by Mewès, the very architect of the London
Ritz, and it was later described by the architectural expert Ernst Pevsner as
‘Beaux Arts at its most convincing and indeed most splendid’.71 Wernher’s
wealth was so great that at his death in 1912 his estate of £11.5 million was
the largest ever recorded in England.72
Despite the glamour of nineteenth-century London and Paris, the
money was and still is in North America. The word millionaire was coined
in 1843 upon the death of the New York tobacco magnate Pierre Lorillard.
Later on, one had to be a billionaire in order to aspire to the pantheon of
genuine riches: in 1982 there were twelve billionaires in the United States
alone.73 The figures have risen dramatically since then. By 2014 Russia had
111 billionaires, China had 152, and the United States had 492.74
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luxury
Wealth is not just concentrated in the hands of the few; wealthy people
like to live close to each other. One of the greatest concentrations of wealth
in the world today is the area of real estate known as the Upper East Side,
New York, specifically Fifth Avenue from 59th Street to 96th Street. Most
of these buildings are known as cooperatives, and they can exclude any
applicant. Cooperatives were invented in 1879 as a new way of dealing
with the looming housing crisis in densely populated Manhattan. They
were the idea of Philip Hubert, and were called either ‘French flats’ or
‘Parisian buildings’. The ideas behind the early ones were partly utopian,
and they were popular with artists and their followers. The first so-called
French flat was built by Rutherford Stuyvesant in 1869 at 142 East 18th
Street. They were all rentals and contained the Otis elevator, invented in
1853. C. K. G. Billings, who hosted the famous ‘horseback’ party at which
men in dinner suits ate their meal astride horses, was one of the first resi-
dents at such a building at 820 Fifth Avenue. By 1885 there were 300 apart-
ment buildings in New York. Five thousand were constructed in the first
ten years of the twentieth century.75
The urban issue in Manhattan was a shortage of land and the rising cost
of that land. The last free-standing great Fifth Avenue residence was built
in 1918 by the banker Otto Kahn (covered in imported French limestone,
no less) and the last extant one was the home of one of the heirs to the
Stuyvesant fortune, until his death in 1949. Gertrude Vanderbilt had said
that ‘it takes three generations to wash off oil and two to exterminate the
smell of hogs’.76 But the walls of a château-style townhouse apparently
helped a great deal. When the great mansions disappeared, an increas-
ingly large number of rich and newly rich moved into the so-called Park
Avenue cooperatives.77 Yet exclusivity has been retained through the
opaque method of selective access. The boards of the cooperatives can and
regularly do summarily exclude applicants, no matter their wealth.78 One
famous heiress once tried unsuccessfully to sue a cooperative that was
apparently not impressed that she was unmarried and felt she was too
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housing luxury
close to the ‘garmentos’ (people in the clothing business). Today, most of

this luxury property is managed by a handful of brokers, who bring ‘pre-
qualified’ buyers in to look. Some applicants even have to provide copies
of their cheque-account statements, which reveal shopping habits and
other private details to the cooperative’s membership committee. One
might well ask why wealthy New Yorkers came to live in these relatively
low-ceiling spaces and why they put up with this ritual abuse.
In the late nineteenth century, an alternative to living in an apartment
was to rent rooms for an extended period of time in one of the extraordi-
narily stylish Manhattan hotels. The famous Chelsea Hotel, for instance,
was built in 1884. Most striking in the New York building scape was the
Ansonia Hotel (Figure 4.6). Popular with the theatre and entertainment
crowd, it cost $6 million to construct and opened in 1904. Here was every
luxury: there were 1,400 rooms and 340 suites in its 17 storeys, 70,000
electric lights, 400 baths, and 600 toilets. More than 125 miles of pipes car-
ried messages in pneumatic tubes. There was hot, cold, and also iced water
on offer. In summer, freezing brine was pumped through the walls to cool
the building. Each suite had mahogany doors, and a selection of furnish-
ings was possible. Most striking was the inventory of linen. Every suite had
eighteen face and bath towels, and a set of eighteen table linens, which
were changed three times a day, along with the soap and stationery. There
was a fully working farm on the rooftop to supply fresh eggs and milk for
the residents. The Ansonia had the world’s largest indoor swimming
pool—which became the famous gay bathhouse the Continental Baths
when the hotel later declined.79 Before the London Ritz opened in 1906,
boasting a bathroom per room, these were incredible levels of luxury.80
Some well-to-do people resorted to much more extreme measures. This
was the case for the apartment built in 1926 as the residence of Mrs E. F.
(Edward Francis) Hutton, at 2 East 92nd Street, Manhattan. Its owner was
Marjorie Merriweather Post Close, the Postum Cereal Company (later
General Foods) heiress. Her company owned such iconic brands as Jell-O,
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luxury
Fig. 4.6. The Ansonia Hotel, 2109 Broadway, between West 73rd and 74th Streets, New
York, opened 1904. This is the view at the intersection of Amsterdam Avenue, photograph
1905. The design of the hotel was lavish but also eccentric. Live seals played in the foyer
in the fountain and there was a farm on the roof to supply fresh milk and eggs. Famous
people like the Ziegfields of the Ziegfeld Follies lived there.
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housing luxury
Birdseye, and Maxwell House, proving that to get rich, you sell to the poor.
Post Close (at that date still Mrs E. F. Hutton) inherited in 1914, when she
was just 27. In 1924 Post decided to demolish her New York mansion,
because of the increasing noise of the New York streets. She asked the
architect Rouse and Goldstone to re-create parts of her mansion in a tri-
plex at the top of a fourteen-storey apartment. It was the largest apartment
in New York and described as the most luxurious in the city when com-
pleted in 1926. The family had their own entrance, separate from the one
used to welcome the hundreds of people who came for balls and dinners.
The dwelling had seventeen bathrooms, cold storage for furs and flowers,
and a room for storage of large ballgowns. The library panelling came
from the demolition, as she had requested (Figure 4.7). The room was
symmetrical and included fine classical detailing. Furniture was mainly
French. Shaded electric lights, gilt-bronze sconces, a large Persian carpet,
and a matching clock and barometer filled out the opulent scheme. The
rooms resembled many others of the period, and without the portraits of
the owners it would be hard to say that the room was very individualistic.
When the lease expired on this building in 1941, it remained empty, as no
one else could afford to take it. Notwithstanding such extravagance, Mrs
Post was a generous woman with strong philanthropic tendencies and fed
thousands of people in New York during the Great Depression.
This might appear a distant world, but it is not as far distant as we might
think. In 2014, Christie’s New York held a most curious auction, the estate
of the late Huguette M. Clark, who had died in 2011 at the age of 104.
Huguette, with her charming French name, was the much-loved daughter
of the man considered the richest man in the Unites States in the late nine-
teenth century, William Andrews Clark. Having made his fortune from
prospecting, cattle, and railroads, he removed himself from Montana to
New York, where he commissioned one of the finest mansions in the city at
the time, a château-style 121-room house on Fifth Avenue with 41 baths
and 4 art galleries. Like the Post mansion, it was later demolished, as it was
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luxury
Fig. 4.7. Library in the Residence of Mrs E. F. (Edward Francis) Hutton, 2 East 92nd
Street, New York. Gelatin silver print, unbound photograph album created c.1915–30,
photograph c.1926. This was the penthouse apartment of the famous American business-
woman and philanthropist later known as Marjorie Merriweather Post.
thought too excessive for anyone else to reside in. Much of Clark’s signifi-
cant art collection and even parts of its French wall panelling are now in the
Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC. After the death of her father in 1919,
the unmarried Huguette and her mother moved to three separate apart-
ments and 42 rooms over several floors at 907 Fifth Avenue. Later she
checked herself into private hospitals that she endowed, and lived there in
complete seclusion from 1991, having not been seen by the general public
since the 1940s. Perhaps privacy is sometimes the greatest luxury.81
Huguette’s mother, Anna, who might have afforded anything in the
world, selected for her Manhattan residence an interior and contents that
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housing luxury
were mainly French but with some English materials, the latter including
Jacobean and eighteenth-century furniture that evoked a sense of the Eng-
lish country house. She also owned one of the finest sets of lacquered chinoi-
serie ‘magot’ figurative clocks known to have survived from the 1740s, the
definitive product of the marchands-merciers of eighteenth-century Paris.
Her bedroom and boudoir furnishings were completely French, with silk
satin upholstery, of the mid-eighteenth-century rococo style, covered in
gilded mounts and brimming with pictorial inlay. But, rather than original
antiques, she ordered contemporary copies of these items, produced by
the greatest furniture-makers of the late nineteenth century such as Mai-
son Krieger, and incorporating new innovations such as pivoting mirrors.82
Huguette had all this bedroom furniture later copied by the best French
craftsmen in the 1990s, in order to live among it once again, possibly after
the ‘originals’ had been sold. Huguette was musical, well read, and edu-
cated. Copies of first editions by writers such as Charles Dickens and
Charles Baudelaire were in the library. What were Huguette and her
mother trying to evoke in the decoration of their houses? They were pic-
turing the urbanity of eighteenth-century Paris, the delicacy of the Enlight-
enment mondaine, the sociability of a society that lived for appearances
but that also expected erudition. Paris of the mid-eighteenth century sup-
plied one of the most elegant templates for sophisticated living, dining,
and sleeping that there has ever been, and the super-wealthy of the New
World always understood that fact. It is sad to think that Huguette enjoyed
all her luxury in private, along with her very large collection of dolls.
From the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century,
French taste was key in shaping luxury living. The sumptuous urban space
of the hôtel particulier was replicated in the different cities of Western
Europe and in the Americas; it was scaled up to shape château-style country
houses in England and scaled down to suit more modest flats. Architecture
and interior decoration are often forgotten in the long history of luxury. It is
erroneously assumed that they belong to the history of the applied and
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luxury
decorative arts, and it is sometimes overlooked that interiors—their com-

forts, their furnishings, textiles, technologies, and curious objects—were
and remain some of the major items of expenditure for poor and rich alike.
A great deal of money was required to cultivate taste, to purchase expen-
sive objects, and to outdo the neighbours. In the late nineteenth century,
such levels of spending were showing strains at the bank, most obviously for
the English nobility. Rich Americans, by contrast, seemed to have endless
resources, although over time few wanted to maintain enormous houses in
places like Manhattan where land was extremely expensive. They moved
instead into more comfortable apartments, though we should not think
that these were in any sense similar to what today we call an apartment or
flat. They were really little mansions in the sky. Americans also went to the
rescue of the penniless but titled British and European continental aristoc-
racy, bankrolling the extensive building projects and furnishing endeavours
of their daughters’ new husbands. American money certainly gave a new
lease of life to Old World luxury in this period. And, as we will see in the next
chapter, it was American money that was partly responsible for the apo-
theosis of a new and rather whimsical form of luxury in the years to come,
between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War.
148
Luxury and Decadence at the Turn

of the Twentieth Century
•
W e live in a very anodyne world. Eccentricity is not well regarded.
Women no longer walk black pigs with gilded trotters in Hyde Park
nor do men dye their doves rainbow colours for house parties. We no lon-
ger recline in circular beds covered in pink ostrich feather fronds. Why was
such luxury created and who was it for? This chapter charts the rise of
forms of luxuries that emphasized the importance of the senses. We go
back to the people here, as a history of a changing concept can be tracked
only by examining what people at the time considered to be ‘luxurious’,
and why. Architecture, furniture and interior decoration, clothing and
accessories, gems and jewels, fur and precious silks are all props in what we
might define as ‘the social life’ of a concept, to paraphrase a well-known
cultural anthropologist.1 But next to a list of objects is also a list of people
engaged in conspicuous consumption, in collecting or simply ‘living
the life’ of luxury. They range from Renaissance courtiers to eighteenth-
century salonniers. For the years of the Belle Époque, the ‘beautiful era’
that was swept away with the devastation of the Great War, the key figures
would include American heiresses and decayed noblemen, the emerging
glamorous Hollywood stars, and the rich plutocrats who prefigured the
‘jet set’ of a later period.
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luxury
LUXURIOUS LIVING
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War,
luxury was widely reported and commented upon in diaries and memoirs.
It often concerned the senses and was therefore partly ephemeral. For
example, the rooms in which the Prince of Wales, ‘Bertie’, later King
Edward VII, made love were sprayed with perfumes before the arrival of
the amorous royal.2 The house parties about which so much was written
were characterized by excessive meals of great refinement, elaborate deco-
rations, and characteristics that we still associate with the finest luxury
hotels today—for an Edwardian visitor, the height of luxury was the Asprey
pen for ladies on every desk, the posies and flowers that they might choose
to match their evening toilette, the soft lighting, and the hangings around
the bed. For an American such as the actress, interior decorator, and
socialite Elsie de Wolfe, a private telephone beside the bed was already a
requirement in 1913.3
Notable social climbers such as ‘Mrs Ronnie’ (Dame Margaret Greville)
made the pursuit of luxury their raison d’être. She remodelled her Regency-
period residence near London, Polesden Lacey, from 1906 with the explicit
aim of dazzling royalty and to rival the riches of the maharajas from India
who were taking London society by storm. The design duo Mewès and
Davis, who had just finished the interior decoration of the London Ritz
Hotel in the fashionable white-and-gilt Louis XVI style, worked on her
house. In addition, she employed a great many servants, including the
best French chef, M. Delachaume, who would cook eight courses for a
shooting party. In the words of her biographer, ‘afternoon tea consisted of
delicious home-made cakes, exquisite sandwiches, and for King Edward,
his favourite snack, lobster salad’ (other hostesses knew that he expected a
whole cold chicken in his bedroom in case he became hungry at night).4 At
houses such as this, footmen were considered vastly superior to parlour
maids, who were considered distinctly ‘middle class’. When the First World
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luxury and decadence
War broke out, Lady Sackville, of the great medieval house Knole, wrote to
Lord Kitchener asking if her footmen, carpenters, and other male estate
workers could be excused from war service: ‘I must say that I never thought
that I would see parlour-maids at Knole . . . instead of liveries and . . . pow-
dered hair.’5
Mrs Greville’s taste could be said to epitomize Edwardian luxury. Her
writing desk was covered with Chinese vases; Fabergé decorations in the
fashionable form of pets and animals from Queen Alexandra’s zoo at San-
dringham (which had first been commissioned by the King); inlaid silver
and tortoiseshell writing accoutrements; seals and bell pushes. It was one
of the few places that the austere Queen Mary would attend informally for
afternoon tea with barely any notice, where she was served in the dedicated
tea room that was fitted out like a boudoir with eighteenth-century French
painted panels, tapestry-covered Louis XVI chairs and Sheraton caned fur-
nishings, flowers, and palms. The society figure Beverly Nicols recalled
‘Maggie’s (another of Mrs Greville’s nicknames) terrific teas with great
Georgian teapots, and Indian and China, and muffins and cream cakes and
silver kettles sending up their steam’.6 The taking of tea was one of the great
social rituals of the period, and crossed all classes from poor to rich (Figure
5.1). Mrs Greville also enjoyed the eccentricities of her superior male ser-
vants; she retained an infamous butler who was often drunk; the famous
story goes that once, at dinner, Mrs Greville wrote him a note stating ‘You
are drunk, Leave the room at once’, which he proceeded to pass to one of
the principal male guests on a silver salver. Mrs Greville spent her last
days in a lavish suite at the Dorchester, a concrete new build of 1931 with
seaweed- and cork-lined rooms to dull all sound, seeing out the bombs and
the war. She retained a butler and footmen at the hotel and wore her
famous emeralds and a swathe of other jewels daily, despite the crashing
and the chaos outside.7 Edwardian luxury died with her generation.
In the Edwardian period, only married women were permitted to take
their breakfast in bed; for everyone else it was bad form and also slightly
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luxury
Fig. 5.1. Notman Studio, ‘Miss Evans and Friends’, 1887. These ladies were from wealthy
Montreal families, and they are posing for tea with delicate china vessels in the studio of
the Scottish–Canadian photographer William Notman. The photographer evoked the
mood of contemporary paintings by artists such as Tissot and Alfred Stevens, and the
women wear rich dresses with cuirasse bodices in the manner of the couturier Worth.
Ostrich feather fans and artificial flowers are pinned to their dresses, in an exuberant dis-
play of rather smug luxury.
effeminate. These days the habit is associated with a good time in a luxury
hotel. Luxury for well-to-do women in the past was often about the fitting-
out of the personal bedroom—Marjorie Merriweather Post’s bedroom in
the 1920s featured a Chinese embroidered satin hanging, cut and trimmed
with fur, as a bedcover; Edwina Mountbatten had a pink satin and ostrich
feather bedspread in the inter war years; and Diana Mitford wrote lovingly
of her white satin bedroom—at a time when coal dust remained a major
hazard when keeping things clean. Elsie de Wolfe provided much of the
taste and repertoire of these luxurious bedrooms, which were generally
152
furnished either in a reproduction style such as English Sheraton or Louis

XVI, or in art deco. They included soft lampshades for the new electric
lighting, often converted from Chinese and Delft vases. De Wolfe had
gleaned many of her ideas from the aesthete American architect–decorator
Ogden Codman and the writer Edith Wharton, who co-published The
Decoration of Houses in 1897. Elsie did not approve of the taste for silver-
plated beds, which she described in 1913 as ‘this newest object of bad taste.
It is a little too much.’8
Bathrooms can also be turned into works of art, and enormous amounts
of money are currently expended upon them. There is a stereotype that
the British always had poor or inadequate bathrooms compared to the
Americans, but this is not really fair. The British created components of
plumbing that were considered the wonder of Europe and were described
not simply as proof of an advanced civilization but as tantamount to ‘racial
superiority’ by the German commentator Hermann Muthesisus in his
widely read three-volume report and subsequent book Das Englische Haus
(1904–5). Men enjoyed taking showers, rather than baths. The shower at
Ardkinglas featured wave and spray controls (Figure 5.2). The house was
built in 1906–7 for wealthy arms-dealer Sir Andrew Noble to designs by Sir
Robert Lorimer.
Well-to-do ladies frequently had bathrooms of great luxury in the
Edwardian period, when a purpose-built plumbed room came to be the
expected thing, even for the working classes, if they were lucky enough to
live in a contemporary housing scheme. With the influence of art deco,
bathrooms became little things of beauty, such as the 1930s bathroom
shown in Figure 5.3, which was in Belgrave Square, one of the most fashion-
able squares in London. The design is very ‘Hollywood’ in matched and
veined marble with etched mirrors and recessed lighting, and appears to
include a steam or Turkish bath to the left of the tub. Such baths were a
great favourite of the Prince of Wales, briefly Edward VIII and then Duke of
Windsor. Men could take such baths in the luxury Turkish-style hamaans
153
Fig. 5.2. A shower at Ardkinglas, Argyll, United Kingdom; fitted in 1906, it features wave
and spray controls. The house was completed in 1907 for the armaments dealer Sir Andrew
Noble to designs by Sir Robert Lorimer. The house remains in the family. Published in
Country Life, 29 September 2010.
154
Fig. 5.3. A modern bathroom at 11a Belgrave Square, London, c.1944. To the left there
appears to be a Turkish bath for the man of the house. The carpets are modern Chinese.
155
luxury
of the nineteenth century that were adjacent to the gentleman’s shopping

area of Jermyn Street. Here they might also gain a Japanese-style tattoo on
their back or shoulder—something that was popular with European male
royals (though very discreet, of course).9 The Prince was not permitted one.
The King’s sister Princess Mary, who married Harry Lascelles, 6th Earl of
Harewood, in 1922 and lived at the beautiful eighteenth-century house
Harewood, had an exquisite boudoir designed for her by Sir Herbert Baker,
Edwin Lutyens’s chief assistant, and a recessed bath fitted with silver taps.
But even the princess’s bathroom was perhaps no match for that of the
plutocrat Mrs Horace E. (Anna Thomson) Dodge (1871–1970), whose car
fortune enabled her to commission in the early 1930s a complete version of
the eighteenth-century French pavilion ‘Le Petit Trianon’, called ‘Rose Ter-
race’, at Grosse Pointe outside Detroit, designed by the architect Horace
Trumbauer. Alas, it has now been demolished. Mrs Dodge sold her late
husband’s car operations in 1925 for what was at the time the largest trans-
action in American corporate history, an astonishing $146 million. This
enabled her to build what is considered the finest and also the last great
French-inspired private residence, before the Second World War rendered
such residences (and the staff that they required) impossible. The famous
dealer Joseph Duveen was actively involved in the creation of this luxurious
residence, supplying her with paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and
Joshua Reynolds, as he did also for the Fricks, Huntingtons, and other
American multimillionaires. Rose Terrace, lived in for only three months of
the year, included a truly exquisite gilt-bronze appointed bathroom by the
French–American decorators L. Alavoine and Company. Rather like the
marchands-merciers of eighteenth-century Paris, this high-society firm both
fitted out rooms in exquisite taste but also maintained the furnishings, and
closed and opened the residences for their owners, including Mrs Dodge.
There are other luxuries of this period that might surprise us today,
which were commented upon in private both by members of the British
royal family, particularly Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
156
(1900–2002), and also by the photographer and aesthete Cecil Beaton.

Such figures, from very different social backgrounds but enjoying the same
sense of joie de vivre, nearly always describe in their diaries the experience
of a house party or dinner in terms of the following luxuries: the quality of
the flowers, food and wine, and towels and soaps. There are frequent
descriptions in both their travel notes concerning the enormous amount
and variety of bathroom linen available in the great private homes of the
United States: ‘millions of towels, large, medium, small, tiny, face flannels,
in great profusion’, as the Queen Mother wrote in 1954.10 Linen was quite
a concern to people in the recent past; when the Queen Mother had
become engaged in the 1920s, Mrs Greville offered to gift £1,500 worth of
linen for the trousseau. The then Duchess of York wrote: ‘Whoever is buy-
ing it for us must remember that we are not millionaires (what ho!) and
don’t you think £1,000 ought to do it?’11 In the 1920s £1,000 could buy a
comfortable detached house in the London suburbs.
The private ‘care of the self’ clearly mattered a great deal. Elsie de Wolfe
used the word ‘luxury’ only very sparingly in her book The House in Good
Taste (1913), but when she did use the term it applied to women and to the
‘lots of little dodges’ for
the dressing room of the person who wants comfort and can have luxury.
There is the hot-water-towel rack, which is connected with the hot-water
system of the house . . . Another modern luxury is a wall cabinet fitted with
glass shelves for one’s bottles and sponges and powders. There seems to be
no end to the little luxuries that are devised for the person who makes a
proper toilet. Who can blame them for loving the business of making
themselves attractive, when everyone offers encouragement?12
Such small luxuries continue to structure the way in which traditional lux-
ury hotels operate; the great innovation of the owner of the first Four Sea-
sons Hotel in the 1970s was to give the ladies hair shampoo in small bottles,
which was considered astonishing at the time (it saved them having to
pack them and it rendered ‘dressing cases’ redundant).
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luxury
Fig. 5.4. Lucien Lelong, ‘Robin-hood’ silver and mink-covered lipstick, 1935–42, mink
fur and metal tube with cardboard box, 2013.975.2AB. This was a prototype, along with
several covered in faux jewels, that represents true ‘over-the-top’ luxury between the
wars.
Some luxury was never seen in public. But details from the lifestyle of
the Duke and Duchess of Windsor provide a great many examples from
the late 1930s to the 1960s. Friend Diana Mosley (one of the Mitford
sisters) wrote: ‘Their perfectionism [is] apparent everywhere, their elab-
orate food—melon with a tomato ice in it, eggs with crab sauce.’13 The
Duchess owned mink garters to wear under her skirts, many jewels held
secret inscriptions from the Duke, and jewelled compacts or minaudières
invented in the 1930s by Van Cleef and Arpels held pop-up mirrors and
compartments for powder and rouge. Lucien Lelong designed a mink-
covered lipstick prototype that was not put into production (Figure 5.4).
Its extreme luxury would have been absurd for anyone except, perhaps,
the Duchess.
158
A ROOM IS A MOOD
The complete lifestyle notion of Terence Conran in the 1960s, Laura Ash-
ley in the 1970s, and Ralph Lauren in the 1980s, in which fashion clothing,
furnishings, upholstery, and homewares were selected and coordinated by
a design team, was imagined much earlier. In the 1880s and 1890s new
taste-makers became interested in the ‘associative’ aspects of symbolism.
The famous aesthete, the impeccably dressed Comte Robert de Montes-
quiou-Fézénsac, announced that a room is a ‘mood’.14 Oscar Wilde knew
this notorious figure, a poet and bon vivant who provided the decadent
character ‘Charlus’ for Marcel Proust. At his house, the Pavillon Montes-
quiou, in the town of Versailles, perfumes of different scents were pumped
into the rooms and the famous gilded tortoise wandered across rooms
filled with Japanese artefacts (the author Vita Sackville West’s mother also
had a live tortoise in England at this time with her monogram inlaid in
diamonds on its shell). The dwelling included a sledge on a white bearskin
and glass cases for his silk socks, as well as church furniture.15 The bedroom
of the Comte, illustrated in La Revue illustrée in August 1894, included a
Chinese carved bed and a portière curtain with a motif of a large Japanese
iris, in the manner of the rich Lyons silks popular for well-to-do ladies’
evening dresses in the nineteenth century.16
The English-speaking world was uncomfortable about aesthetic and lit-
erary decadence, and their version of fin-de-siècle taste tended to be more
geometric and restrained. Think, for instance, of the designs of Charles
Rennie Mackintosh, in comparison to the more extreme forms of interior
decoration designed by an artist such as Gustav Klimt. Vienna was a great
centre of design incubation in all areas of design, from furniture and
ceramics to women’s bags and dresses, in a geometric manner with highly
bold colours and strong black outlines that has resonance with the later art
deco. From 1911 the Wiener Werkstätte ran a dress workshop within its
tailor department, and Klimt also designed dresses. More commercial and
159
luxury
long-lasting models of art nouveau taste were created by Liberty’s of Lon-

don, which opened in 1875 to retail an entire lifestyle based on japonisme.
Other decorative innovators of the time such as Henry Van de Velde and
Josef Hoffman proposed completely integrated interiors in which the
works of art were embedded into the very structure of the rooms, and the
women who populated them (often the artists’ wives) in turn looked like
the paintings.
A highly developed and new sensitivity to colour, form, and texture was
apparent in the work of such figures, who were also often involved with
stage and costume design. More avant-garde design was created within the
Bloomsbury circle. Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop produced and sold
designs for clothing and furnishing textiles influenced by Cubist and Futur-
ist art, as well as Primitivism and the colour schemes and athletic eroticism
of the Ballets Russes. This circle also understood that money alone could not
buy taste. A humble kitchen colander, for instance, could be painted and
hung to create an elegant ad hoc chandelier, as in the farmhouse owned by
members of the Bloomsbury group at Charleston, near Brighton.
The first figures to call themselves ‘interior designers’ transferred the
promotional and personalized techniques of mid-nineteenth-century
couturiers such as Charles Frederick Worth to the field of interior decora-
tion. The American Elsie de Wolfe (later Lady Mendl) was first an actress
noted for wearing lavish contemporary fashions on the stage in the 1880s,
but in 1905 announced her services as an interior designer in New York. If
ever a woman embraced luxury it was Elsie. She deployed the home as a
female space in which women might refashion themselves from the restric-
tive spirit of their Victorian mothers; indeed, she was a suffragette sup-
porter and perhaps the first woman who made a million dollars from a
personal business that she had not inherited. Surrounded by mirrors, light
open spaces, and delicate French eighteenth-century furniture, she pro-
moted a new type of modernity that did not reject traditional languages
of design. De Wolfe exhibited a type of hyper-femininity, with the house,
160
clothes by leading designers such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel,

hairstyle and facelift so perfect that it verged on the parodic. Her white
satin and feather dresses found a corollary in the plate-glass and mirrored
interiors that she popularized. Her visit to Bombay (a city described by
Vogue as a cross between ‘Nice and Miami’) and her rapturous account of
Indian elephants’ jewels were reported by the magazine in December
1938.17 Elsie lived her life as a work of art and dressed to suit the changing
moods of fashion and interior decoration. Her parties were notorious,
including her second Circus Ball of 1939, just before the war, held at her
villa ‘Trianon’ (not the real Petit Trianon) near Versailles. A firm worked for
three days to set up the night lighting.18 Rare white horses were imported
specially from Finland and women wore enormous plumed headdresses.19
The ideas were formed in close collaboration with her many designer
friends, creative personalities such as Schiaparelli, and contemporary inte-
rior and furniture designers such as Jean-Michel Frank and Emilio Terry.
Similar balls were also held by plutocrat South Americans such as the
Lopez-Willshaws and the Marquis de Cuevas, in the gilded years before
the Second World War. Many of these entertainments had historical
themes, such as the Racine ball and the Louis-Philippe ball of 1939, and all
required incredible sets and costumes, vast amounts of white lilies, and a
great deal of champagne. The striking effects of the great couturiers of the
day, such as Jeanne Lanvin, who could fashion a dress from ribbons pleated
and stitched on to gauze, turned women into mobile works of art. Just as
today, one can buy the ideas of others to create one’s own personal ‘experi-
ence culture’ if one is sufficiently rich.
Fashion designers had already set the stage as brilliant publicists much
earlier, in the years before the First World War. Paul Poiret flew his models
to North America and Vienna for fashion parades, hosted the most lavish
fancy-dress balls in Paris, and commissioned a series of avant-garde archi-
tects to design his salon and residence. This notion of the celebrity designer,
famed for extravagant living and familiarity with avant-garde circles,
161
luxury
in time became associated with other fields such as interior design,

undoubtedly inspiring people like Elsie de Wolfe in their own ruthless self-
promotion and high living.20
DRESSING UP
The costume ball was in fact one of the most popular pastimes in the Vic-
torian and Edwardian period. It was popular with all classes, as many levels
of improvisation were possible. But for the rich it offered the chance really
to flaunt wealth without limit. A series of grand New York balls in the late
nineteenth century was widely reported in the press because of their
incredible opulence. The first was the 1883 Alva and William K. Vanderbilt
ball, followed by the Bradley Martin Ball of 1897. The latter cost so much
and caused such a scandal that its host was forced to go abroad. Banks of
orchids and roses were arranged for the guests, who arrived in allegorical
gowns designed by the famous couturier Charles Frederick Worth (1826–95).
Some were dressed as goddesses, others as men and women from famous
paintings. One was even dressed as ‘electricity’.
The last such American ball was hosted by James Hazen Hyde in 1905.
He was accused of using funds from his Equitable Life Assurance Com-
pany, and such lavish balls ceased as a result.21 Across the Atlantic, the
greatest costume ball was the Devonshire House Ball held in 1897 to mark
Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. The theme on that occasion was ‘great
courts of the past’. About 200 of the guests were photographed under elec-
tric light by the society photographers Lafayette and Bassano, and the
images demonstrate the astonishing wealth of the period, with women
such as Mrs Paget having her real gems mounted like costume jewels in her
Cleopatra headdress. The Romanovs held similar balls in Russia, and they
were particular favourites in France during the Second Empire. There are
echoes of these great fin-de-siècle balls in the staging of Truman Capote’s
famous Black and White Ball of 1966 at the Plaza Hotel, when it was said
162
Fig. 5.5. Notman Studio, ‘Miss Fraser, Montreal, QC, 1897’, or ‘Woman with Parasol’,
Montreal, 1897. Notman used state-of-the-art camera technology to create crisp effects
such as this; his work won prizes around the world. He captures the strength of the sitter’s
face contrasted with a wide variety of materials from the organdy parasol to the embroi-
dered blouse and artificial flowers on the hat.
that those not invited had to fly to distant points of the United States to
pretend that they had not been available. At this ball women wore beauti-
ful contemporary evening gowns, not costumes, and both men and
women sported amusing masks, many of great whimsy.22 Lee Radziwill
(Jackie Kennedy’s sister) could boast that her ‘spiral silver sequin dress was
made by Mila Schön, who came from Milan to London several times for
fittings, as well as to oversee the mask’.23
The social codes of the nineteenth century demanded different gar-
ments for day and evening for both men and women who wished to be
socially active, and for women the code extended to numerous changes
throughout the day and into the early evening (Figure 5.5). The most pop-
ular couturier of the gilded years of the last third of the nineteenth century
163
luxury
was undoubtedly Charles Frederick Worth. Worth’s couture house opened

in Paris’s rue de la Paix in 1858. Worth is claimed to have said of his
American clients: ‘They have faith, figures, and francs.’24 As well as design-
ing for the dollar princesses, he dressed the imperial circle around Napo-
leon III and his empress, Eugénie, as well as the Parisian demi-monde of
actresses and courtesans. Like Christian Dior in the 1950s, who worked
closely with the major textile manufacturer Boussac, Worth commissioned
special textiles from Lyons silk designers that were impossible for others to
emulate. Women knew who had the originals.
Descriptions of the mid-nineteenth-century clothes of affluent women
are very much about the effects of colours, textures, and the folds of the
fabric. The trimmings and linings of the clothes of the second half of
the nineteenth century have probably never been equalled: rare birds’ feath-
ers that appear to be like fur, crystals and semi-precious jewels, and
extraordinary passementerie (decorative trimming) that links the dresses
to the high style in furnishings. Worth’s archive, now in the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London, includes clothes of an almost modernist geo-
metrical cut for their day, with incredible lace and appliqué.25 Among the
most embellished garments were the visites or paletots, bustled jackets
that ended just below the waist that were worn only outside in the after-
noon, as well as the floor-length evening capes to be worn after dinner or
the opera. Luxurious textiles, elaborate embroideries, and linings of fur
continued to dominate the highest level of haute couture for women, until
the 1960s rendered such effects and materials old fashioned. Although
there was an attempt to revive this luxury at the house of Lacroix in the
early 1990s, the revival never really caught on, and the fashion house
ceased operations.
Many Worth customers bought their Paris millinery at Madame Virot,
his neighbouring business; she was famous for taxidermy and rare mater
ials. Figure 5.6 shows an example from the period by Madame Heitz-Boyer
of Paris, with a small fox head peeping out from among the silk velvet, lace,
164
Fig. 5.6. Toque (hat), label ‘Mme Heitz-Boyer’, Paris, 1890s, taxidermy, fox fur, silk
charmeuse, silk velvet, lace, and glass beads. Milliners were known as the ‘queens of fash-
ion’ in nineteenth-century France. The more successful among them were able to com-
mand very high prices for their novelties, which went in and out of fashion very quickly.
Coco Chanel began her life as a milliner, which required little capital and space to set up.
165
luxury
and glass. Men, too, could enjoy luxurious hand-crafted fashion accesso-
ries, which were often novelties for the hot months of summer. A Paris-
made silk waistcoat by Carette, a business in the fashionable Boulevard
Haussmann, is hand-painted with hydrangeas, a fashionable flower of the
1890s; the waistcoat is signed and dated ‘1904’ in ink, most likely by the
finisher (Figure 5.7).
Such clothes demanded appropriate jewels and accessories, which were
worn by both men and women, although by this date men wore fewer rings
and their jewels were more subtle. Before the commercial cultivation of
pearls started in 1916, pearls were among the most valued type of jewel and
were frequently matched with the flash of diamonds. The New York jewel-
ler Jacob Dreicer is said to have sold a rope of pearls in the 1890s for $1.5
million.26 A panoply of accessories for women—parasols, canes, lorgnettes,
opera glasses, handbags, and binoculars–contributed to the splendour of
dressing. Fans were obligatory for grand ladies, such as the point-de-gauze
lace example by Dumoret of Paris shown in Figure 5.8, with its fine mother-
of-pearl guard carved with artfully sculpted naked ladies, and the owner’s
first name set in diamonds: Phébé (in fact, Phoebe) Apperson Hearst. It
retains its duck-egg blue silk-covered box: the packaging of luxury goods
has and always remains vital to their allure. The Impressionist painter
Pierre-Auguste Renoir had begun his career painting fans; it was a major
part of the French luxury trades. Renoir was born into the working class,
but he derided the materialism of his age. Like the Goncourt brothers, he
advocated a return to the ‘haut luxe’ that had characterized France before
the Revolution. In terms of official culture, the Union Centrale des Beaux-
Arts appliqués à l’industrie was encouraged by the prime minister of the
day, Léon Gambetta, to lobby for a decorative arts museum in Paris (real-
ized in 1894) and to shift the emphasis of French design away from the
industrial and back towards the decorative. This, it was felt, would allow
for a return of the decorative arts to the former aristocratic level, and
the production of those high-quality products that had made France’s
166
Fig. 5.7 (a and b). Man’s vest (summer waistcoat) and handwritten label: ‘Carette, 121
Boulevard Haussmann, Mr. Margeurette, Date, 23 Février 1904, no. 350’, hand-painted
silk depicting blue hydrangeas and stems. Summer fashion for wealthy men in the nine-
teenth century was light, often white with contrasting and playful effects, such as this
painted floral waistcoat. Its boned construction shaped the form of the male body.
167
luxury
Fig. 5.8. Fan by Felix Alexandre, retailed by Dumoret, Paris, 1870–5, initialled ‘Phébé’
[Phoebe Hearst], carved mother-of-pearl, silk point de gauze lace and diamonds with silk-
covered box. Phoebe Hearst (1842–1919) was an American feminist and philanthropist.
The family money came from newspapers. She sponsored expeditions and education.
international reputation.27 Another such effort, this time with anti-Semitic

overtones, was made in the 1920s by Chanel’s friend Iribe, as we shall see.
The American riches of this period were far from secret. Some pluto-
crats published their own collections, such as Mr Vanderbilt’s House and
Collection (1883–4) and Artistic Houses (1883–4). New media and technol-
ogy developed hand in hand; the invention of flashlights that neither
smelt, nor emitted smoke, facilitated the first precise photographs of inte-
riors, which were widely published. Cosmopolitan, Munsey’s Magazine,
Collier’s, and McClure’s were established between 1886 and 1893. The New
York publisher Condé Nast purchased Vogue in 1905 and dramatically
improved the quality of film technology and printing, building his own
printing plant in the 1920s, emphasizing colour, and adding other peri-
odicals to his stable such as Vogue Pattern Book, Vanity Fair, House & Gar-
den, The American Golfer, and Glamour of Hollywood (later Glamour).28
Although the word ‘luxury’ does not appear as frequently as one might
168
imagine in such magazines, all manner of luxuries were laid out there by
advertisers and feature writers.
The search for fine gems was the apogee of a taste that had commenced
in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Wealthy women could wear their
jewels in profusion at any time of day. Favourite items included tiaras (not
to be worn in restaurants, only in private houses), bracelets (known as ‘ser-
vice stripes’ by British women in the 1930s and 1940s), rings, dog collars of
pearls and gems, brooches, corsage ornaments (that covered the breast),
and earrings and earclips (popular in the 1930s and 1940s). It was a period
when women were laden with jewels for dinner: Kenneth Clark, the art
historian, noted in his diary of a New York party in 1930 that the women
‘even brought pieces of jewellery in their hands and laid them down on the
dinner table. This could have happened in the Middle Ages.’29 The million-
aire Mrs Greville, friend of the Duke and Duchess of York, loved her jewels,
owning pieces that could be traced back to Marie Antoinette and Napo-
leon’s first wife, the Empress Josephine. The Queen Mother inherited key
pieces of jewellery from Mrs Greville, a friend from the time she was still
Duchess of York, but, as Elizabeth wrote in her diaries, she did not wear the
lavish Cartier and Boucheron pieces until 1947, so as to not appear ‘out of
sync’ with the austerity movement immediately after the war. She was very
practical about conspicuous luxury, writing in 1934—probably of the Great
Depression—that ‘a few years ago people were embarrassed and unhappy
if they glimpsed a diamond or ate quails in company, which was a shame as
it had no reaction to one’s misery at the poverty and sadness of the people
of this country’.30 This is an important point. Profligate luxury naturally
often risks looking out of step with public morals and public mores.
DEPARTMENT STORES AND OUTFITTERS
The decline of the department store around the world as the principal
point for the purchase of luxuries is remarkable. Until the 1990s, very few
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luxury
luxuries were sold outside the department stores in a typical town or small
city. Yet the department store has reinvented itself as a place of spectacle
and whimsy—consider the Pradasphere held at Harrods in 2013, and in
many smaller cities it continues to occupy an important place in the con-
sumer mentality. For example, both Stockmann in Helsinki and NK (Nor-
diska Kompaniet) in Stockholm have very large subterranean food halls.
Here you will find the very best meat, the pâté de foie, the Duchy of Corn-
wall biscuits, the teabags by Fauchon. In other countries such as Australia
and the United Kingdom, luxury food, wines, flowers, and accessories are
sold in every affluent suburb, in smaller branded boutiques or privately
owned shops. This has spelt the decline of the many department stores that
once existed—for instance, David Jones in Sydney, Australia, which made
luxury its speciality for 100 years but no longer enjoys the same prestige or
exclusive access to many luxury products. The ‘revolution of the domestic
economy’, as the historian Charles Wilson put it in 1965, has been going on
for some time, particularly in the growing market for items such as food,
drugs, books, newspapers, and cosmetics. Wilson described the incredible
transformation of the Britain of the Crystal Palace era (1851) to the Edward-
ian period, and a veritable explosion of shopping; from 1,500 general or
‘specialized multiple grocers’ in England in 1880, to ‘11,645 such stores in
1900. Specialised multiple grocers likes Liptons or Home and Colonial,
shoe shops like Freeman Hardy & Willis, chemists like Boots (with 150
shops by 1900), tailors like Hepworths, newspaper and book stores like
W.H. Smith and scores of others transformed the retail scene.’31
Sports and commercialized leisure also provided new ‘little luxuries’ at
a time when a holiday was still a great rarity for the poorer working classes,
who might instead have a dance once a year, but were beginning to go on
day trips to the beaches. Wilson goes on to make an important point con-
cerning relative living standards for the United Kingdom—a nation where
minor luxuries were now available to the many for the first time: ‘Each
called for capital, labour, enterprise, ingenuity to supply the needs of an
170
urban people living at standards which most believed were higher and all
agreed were different.’32 A good example of such a new luxury is chocolate.
In the nineteenth century, confectionary was sugar, not chocolate, based,
the latter being a luxury, but chocolate began to replace sugar-based sweets
(candies, toffees, drops, boiled sweets, and so on) after about 1900.33
The consumption of foods is obviously always relative, both between
cultures and over time, although it has become more globally homoge-
nous in recent years. British soldiers serving in the Second World War had
been amazed by the food and also the luxurious leisure and bathing facili-
ties on American wartime bases; they were astonished to see ‘unlimited
supplies of steak, chops, chicken and ice cream’, when they had only tinned
food.34 Chicken was a great luxury until the post-war period; in 1950 it
comprised 1 per cent of the total meat consumed in Britain.35 After the
war, British entrepreneurs made study tours of chicken farms in the
United States and began to breed new birds, made use of pharmaceuti-
cals and steroids to hasten growing, moved away from flock to shed farm-
ing, and implemented the complex plant that was required to eliminate
the bacteria that easily attends chicken carcasses; this normally meant the
installation of freezing plants. The frozen chicken subsequently made its
appearance, and no longer appeared just at weddings and Christmas. By
1980 fresh chicken made up one-quarter of total market share of meat
consumption in Britain.36
Health, too, is connected to the debate about luxury. In the late Victorian
period, attending the doctor and displaying the associated medicines in the
front room of a British working-class dwelling was an important aspect of
respectability, indeed a sign of luxury expenditure. Similarly, insurance cer-
tificates against unemployment and illness were also displayed in working-
class parlours and front rooms, in what the historian Paul Johnson calls
‘working-class conspicuous consumption’.37 For these people, basic health-
care was a form of luxury, something to be proudly displayed to the world.
One person’s basic necessity is another person’s luxury.
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luxury
ORCHIDELIRIUM
Flowers grown out of season are clearly superfluous to necessity, but the
pleasure they have given people since the ancient world suggests that the
delight in them might be near universal. The presence of a good florist in a
hotel and flowers in the room is still considered an important indicator of
a hotel’s quality, although the presence of myriad flowers has been dimin-
ishing in recent years in all but five- or six-star hotels. Fresh flowers are
generally included in the tiny lavatory of a business-class airline today
(orchids for Thai International Airways and gerberas for the Scandinavian
Airline System), and sometimes also attached to the seats of First Class.
The association between flowers and luxury goes far back in time and
includes, as we have seen, pastimes such as gardening, the importation of
rare blooms from distant shores, and phenomena such as the seventeenth-
century ‘tulipmania’. In the past, flowers were one of the most important
attributes of magnificent living for royals and good living for others. Flow-
ers are often mentioned in accounts of high society in the late nineteenth
century. Consuelo Vanderbilt wrote: ‘When I think of spring it is Paris,
with its sweet scents of budding chestnut trees and flowering lilac, and of
the lilies the hawkers vend in the streets, those sprigs of muguet one wears
on the first of May.’38 Queen Alexandra had 300–400 flower vases changed
every day at Marlborough House, her large residence adjacent to Bucking-
ham Palace, in addition to ‘the magnificent Kentia palms in every room’.39
In very old age, in 1989, the Queen Mother wrote a letter in which she
recalled her youth: ‘I remember dancing with a nice young American at
Lady Powis’ ball in Berkeley Square (aged 17) and the amazement and
thrill when the next day a huge bunch of red roses arrived! In those days
flowers were very rare!’40 She was clearly very excited to have received a
bunch of roses out of season. Diana Cooper, visiting the Queen Mother’s
private apartments in 1948, mentions great ‘bathtub’ sized vases of flow-
ers, including what she describes as obscene pink ones with male stamens.
172
This taste was founded in the fin-de-siècle pan-European taste for palm-
filled winter gardens, from Nice to Stockholm, and for cut flowers and
even fruits out of season that had to be continually forced. There were 100
florist’s shops in St Petersburg before the Revolution of 1917, run mainly
by foreigners, who satisfied the Russian aristocracy’s love for fresh flowers
by importing them on an express train from Nice. Queen Alexandra elec-
trified her showcases of artificial Fabergé flowers at Sandringham and
turned the lights on as an entertainment for her guests.41
Many great houses offered flowers to both male and female guests sev-
eral times a day from the breakfast trays to posies and corsages: ‘fresh flow-
ers just had to be there . . . There was never a dead flower. It was as if flowers,
for them, lived for ever. It was part of the magic of their lives,’ stated the
head gardener of a large country house.42 Queen Alexandra received gifts
of flower baskets (generally roses, but long carnations arranged in sun
bursts were also very fashionable) 12 feet by 8 feet high, soon to be the stuff
of Hollywood movies. At fashionable London balls in 1915 (the ‘dances of
death’, when young men serving in the forces had some last hours of plea-
sure), banks of orchids and sweet-smelling stephanotis were replaced with
wild flowers at dawn, when the breakfast course was served.43 Flowers were
a must in society wedding celebrations and were often used in abundance
on the stage (Figure 5.9). Apart from fragrant hothouse flowers out of sea-
son, the most sought-after blooms were orchids. Orchids were first propa-
gated commercially in England in 1812, and their propagation increased
from the 1830s. The passion for orchids was known as ‘orchidelirium’:
commercial expeditions were launched to Java to collect them, and a sin-
gle rare, blue vanda orchid was sold by the Veitch nursery in England in the
1830s for the incredible sum of £300.44 They remained one of the most
expensive floral commodities until the 1990s, continuing to be ‘seen as the
badge of wealth and refinement and worldliness’.45 Ziegler tells us: ‘In
1899 a New York florist claimed that floral expenditure (in terms of flower
stems sold) had increased one hundred times over the previous five years.’46
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luxury
Fig. 5.9. ‘The wedding party standing in the Rosenblatt residence at 55 East 92nd Street,
1903’. This image depicts the love of kentia and other palms and trailing florist’s flowers
that were used to decorate the grand balls and weddings at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The bridesmaids all held fans at this wedding, which were probably gifts for the
occasion, and the men have removed their top hats, which they carry in other photo-
graphs of the event.
Flowers remained an important attribute of women’s dress, worn fresh

at the wrist in the nineteenth century and as artificial ornaments on hats
and at the chest until the counter-cultural politics of the 1960s rendered
them old-fashioned. The flower was once the most important motif woven,
embroidered, or printed on women’s garments, although many women
today dislike wearing such patterns because of their over-feminized con-
notations. Contemporary designers have attempted to promote floral pat-
terns of late, but to little avail with their women customers around the
world, at least when it comes to business and everyday attire.47 Receiv-
ing flowers is no longer such a surprising luxury. They are commercial
174
global products, hybridized and farmed in developing countries and

cheaply priced for the high street.48 Nonetheless, to receive a bunch of
roses still commands a respect that plays on older understandings of lux-
ury and sensuality, as they cannot last more than a few days and their
beauty fades as one looks.
LAST DECADENCE: CAFÉ SOCIETY
The great fashion designers such as Elsa Schiaparelli and the interior
designer Jean-Michel Frank worked at the centre of the so-called Café Soci-
ety of the inter-war years. Paris was the natural home of this grouping, which
was based more around money and talent than birth, but which at the same
time included quite large numbers of titled aristocrats. It was a society that
frequented the resort towns of the south of France (going by the overnight
first-class train bleu from Paris), New York, Miami, and South America. Paris
had been an exciting, louche, and daring place since the nineteenth century.
Drug-taking, gourmandize, and eroticism were a part of its appeal. On her
visit there in 1924, the young Duchess of York wrote that she went to the
Casino de Paris, where for the first time in my life I saw ladies with very little
on . . . a dance hall full of doped Russians & Argentines, & then to a tiny
place where we drank off a coffin, surrounded by skeletons & exchanging
very vulgar badinage with a man carrying a huge Bone . . . & then to a tiny
place with several Negroes with delicious voices . . . 49
Needless to say, she did not return to such places when she became Queen
of England.
Café Society included the global members of a deracinated aristocracy:
exiled Russians, cosmopolitan Indian princes with money to burn, British
Lords and Ladies. It also included many of the super-rich South Americans
such as the Patinos, who made Paris their second home, or the incredibly
wealthy dilettante collector the Comte de Beistegui, a Mexican whose
family had returned to France in the nineteenth century after the fall of
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luxury
Emperor Maximilian. Quite a lot of nastiness was directed at the South

Americans within this group, just as there is media interest and discrimina-
tion concerning the wealthy Chinese and Russians today. One anecdote
notes that the South Americans visiting the United States called the St Regis
New York the Sawn Raygee; and that Chilean women squashed their dresses
deliberately to pretend that they had bought and packed them in Paris.50
Café Society was also louche, with its lesbian major-domo (Elsa Maxwell,
the first gossip columnist and party-giver of her type), its pretty ‘joy boys’,
its quirky artists, and its other demi-mondaine inhabitants. It quickly
turned into ‘Nescafé Society’, as Loelia Westminster put it. It was a gay way
of life based on long transatlantic voyages, regular sea holidays, stays in
exclusive resorts from the Greenbier in the United States to the great South
American hotels (some designed by Jean-Michel Frank’s Argentine com-
pany ‘COMTE’), and multiple residences. Although the rich still try to live
in this way, they are no longer such a coherent group, and they no longer
dictate the ne plus ultra of luxury for all in the way they once did.
The Duchess of Windsor was one such well-known member of Café
Society, and much reported in women’s magazines by editors such as
Diana Vreeland at American Vogue.51 It is believed that Vreeland had sold
Wallis Simpson, as she was then called, the luxury negligées that she wore
to meet the Prince of Wales, when in the 1930s Vreeland had a small shop
in London, with nuns making up fine copies of French lingerie. The Duke
and Duchess of Windsor were one of the most famous and photographed
couples in the world from the late 1930s to the 1960s and if anyone embod-
ied twentieth-century luxury, it was they (Figure 5.10).52 The Prince gave
up his throne in 1937 to marry this twice-divorced American who dressed
smartly but was not generally considered attractive by the conventions of
the time. Instead, she was soignée: beautifully dressed and famed as a host-
ess and party-giver. In the early 1950s the couple moved to Paris, where
they lived in a grace-and-favour villa gifted by the French government
for the duration of their lives. The Duchess set out to create a small court
176
Fig. 5.10. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor relaxing, 20 May 1950, White Sulphur
Springs, West Virginia, USA. The Windsors were household names around the world from
the late 1930s to the 1960s. With no formal social role to fulful after the Adbication (1937),
their life consisted of travelling from one luxury home, spa, or resort to another, according
to the seasons. In that sense, they replicated the passage of the nineteenth-century elites
from city to country to beach resort, which was such a part of the mentality of passing
time. The travel was not rushed, but a part of the luxury experience, whether it be by train,
limousine, or ocean-liner. Here they are watching polo near the famous Greenbier Hotel.
177
luxury
to compensate her husband for what he had lost, to divert him and plea-
sure him.
The Villa Windsor, as it was called, stood on the edge of Paris in the Bois
de Boulogne, where the fine ladies of the nineteenth century had once
driven in their carriages. It was but a ten-minute drive to the Place Vendôme
and the Avenue Montaigne, where the Duchess shopped for her haute
couture dresses by Elsa Schiaparelli, Mainbocher, Christian Dior, and later
Marc Bohan for Dior. The Duke had good access to Cartier, where he was
one of the best customers, ordering incredible bespoke modern jewellery
for the Duchess on an annual basis. The Windsor residence was decorated
by Maison Jansen, the interior-design firm, in a style that was redolent of
the 1930s. Walls were stippled to resemble coloured marbles, a silver and
blue carpet was woven with Prince of Wales feathers for the salon, which
featured paintings of the Royal family, and fine French furniture and sil-
vered torchères were installed on custom-made white and silver boiserie
panelling, which was unkindly described by Country Life magazine as
‘grand hotel’ (Figure 5.11).53 Concealed perfume-burners and banks of
fresh flowers created a sensual ambience, and it was said that the Duchess’s
night lighting was the best in Paris. Upstairs was a great deal of private lux-
ury, including one of the great twentieth-century bathrooms, designed
by Jansen for the Prince, in grey-veined marble with stainless-steel mirrored
doors, pivoting mirrors, and appliquéd brick-red curtains (Figure 5.12).
The Duchess’s bathroom had a trompe l’œil candy-striped tôle (metal)
tented canopy over her bathtub and frescoes of great whimsy by the well-
known decorative painter Dimitri Bouchène, who also worked as a fashion
illustrator. The couple spent part of the year in the United States, always
travelling across the Atlantic by ocean liner in the best suite, and staying in
New York in a set of rooms permanently decorated for them at the Waldorf
Astoria Hotel. In Palm Beach they stayed at the local millionaires’ resi-
dences. They were accompanied by servants, dogs, and so much luggage
that numerous carts were required. They often travelled on a private train
178
Fig. 5.11. Salon of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, decoration by the firm of Jansen,
c.1953, 4, route du Champs d’Entraînement, Paris; illustrated John Cornforth, ‘The Duke
and Duchess of Windsor’s House in Paris’, Country Life, 1987. The salon incorporated a
painting of the Duke’s mother, Queen Mary, and a custom-made pale blue and silver low-
weave carpet with Prince of Wales feathers. The sofas are post-war upholstery with cush-
ions depicting seashells. The room had lost its grandest eighteenth-century French
furnishings at the time this photograph was taken (following the death of the Duchess),
and the chandelier is a replacement.
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luxury
Fig. 5.12. Bathroom of the Duke of Windsor, decoration by Jansen, c.1953, 4, route du
Champs d’Entraînement, Paris; illustrated John Cornforth, ‘The Duke and Duchess of
Windsor’s House in Paris’, Country Life, 1987. The Duke’s exquisite bathroom, decorated
with framed prints of regimental dress, in its snappy red and white decoration, has a mili-
tary but also rather melancholy air. The weighing machine is American, and the tubular
steel chairs are British. The couple’s bathrooms were almost as large as their bedrooms and
more elaborately decorated, and were planned to allow them to inspect their appearance
from all angles. The decorator was Stéphane Boudin of the firm called Jansen, who later
worked for Jacqueline Kennedy.
provided by a friend, the rail tycoon Robert R. Young, who also owned the
luxury Greenbier Hotel, West Virginia, where they enjoyed staying.
The Windsor possessions were auctioned after their death, revealing
the great luxury in which they had lived. Their dogs ate from silver-plated
bowls (not silver, as was sometimes claimed). The couple slept in crested
crêpe de chine sheets, their clothing was monogrammed and of the highest
craftsmanship, and there was so much of it that the Duke had his own
180
swatch book and filing system to manage it all.54 As for the Duchess, her
silk velvet and crocodile shoes and dozens of handbags carried her mono-
gram, sometimes overlaid with carved jades and semi-precious stones,
even though it had never been authorized by Buckingham Palace. Her
other possessions were the quintessence of what was soon to appear a
rather old-fashioned kind of luxury: a zebra-skin case for sunglasses, a
pochette made from ocelot fur, a delicate marabou feather evening cape by
Chanel, a range of other rare furs, and a mink evening bag. For better or
for worse, the ‘space age’ of the 1960s would soon replace many of these
perhaps now rather quaint-looking objects of desire with plastics and
other cheaper man-made materials.
181
Between False Poverty and

Old Opulence:
Luxury Society in the Twentieth Century
•
H ow one should spend one’s money is clearly a matter of debate and
personal opinion, and throughout the twentieth century different
extremes were promoted by taste-makers as to how to pursue a beautiful
life. The scale of the issue is not insignificant. By the end of the century
there were more than 250 billionaires worldwide, with an estimated 6.5
million millionaires in the United States alone. Millionaires magazine had
to add the subtitle ‘Opulence’ at this point. All these millionaires and bil-
lionaires have to make decisions as to how to spend their money. And now
as in the past, they have a great many choices to make. From the 1920s
onwards, luxury become more than a practice for a relatively small elite.
This, however, entailed a redefinition of luxury away from mere decadence
and whimsicality to sometimes more obscure and recherché choices.
Throughout the twentieth century, luxury thrived on a set of contradic-
tions—for instance, between revealing versus concealing wealth, between
knowledge and erudition versus vulgarity and crassness, and, most of all,
between opulence and understatement. Privacy became an end in itself, and
was assiduously cultivated by the likes of actress Greta Garbo, former US
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and the philanthropist–gardener
182
between false poverty and old opulence
Mr Paul ‘Bunny’ (Rachel Lowe Lambert) Mellon. Yet, in spite of their reclu-
siveness, theirs was not the entirely understated luxury that the couturier
Coco Chanel and other minimalist architects and designers argued ‘true
luxury’ ought to be. Luxury in the twentieth century also had to concede to
publicity: in the image- and media-saturated world that came to embody the
century, it was virtually impossible to keep one’s home and appearance
completely away from the camera lens or the pen of the gossip columnist.
The luxury of the few came to be the aspiration of the many through
Hollywood films, the pages of fashion and lifestyle magazines, and the
many reports on the lives of the rich and famous that enthralled the gen-
eral public. The cultural historian Stephen Gundle has argued that the
act of ‘being seen’, either framed by the camera lens or witnessed in move-
ment, was a fundamentally necessary component of ‘glamour’ in this
period: ‘The type of personality who was glamorous was generally avail-
able to the public and, for commercial or professional reasons, regarded
this availability as an important part of their being.’1
THE DEATH OF OLD LUXURY: COCO CHANEL
The First World War brought with it the death of millions of young men,
the disruption of succession in the great landed estates, and the destruc-
tion of huge swathes of Europe. A certain cultural pessimism also set in, as
well as modernist aesthetics that rejected the lavishness and historicism of
the Belle Époque. Luxury underwent a redefinition, losing much of its for-
mer opulence. But can luxury be ‘poor’? Modernist ideas minted in the
first part of the twentieth century argued for a notion of luxury that tran-
scended intrinsic value. In the interwar years, a new generation of design-
ers, from Coco Chanel for fashion to Jean-Michel Frank for furnishing,
turned their backs on the ostentatious exoticism and orientalism of fin-
de-siècle and ‘robber-baron’ taste and reinvented the notion of luxury. The
1920s revelled in living for the moment and focused more on ‘experience
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luxury
Fig. 6.1. Frauen in Ballkleidern (Women in Ballgowns), c.1925. Fur-trimmed capes with
velvet linings, ostrich-feather fans, tulle, and lavish embroidery, contrasted with flesh-
coloured short dresses that emphasize the body, are cleverly conveyed by the illustrator.
culture’, in the form of sex, sport, and travel, and fast-changing fashion
(Figure 6.1).
The person who most contributed to redefining luxury in the first half of
the twentieth century was the famous Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. We associ-
ate Chanel with the term chic, although this was not her invention. Théo-
phile Gautier, the French journalist and literary critic, used the term as
184
early as 1864, calling it ‘a dreadful and bizarre word of modern fabrica-

tion’.2 With Chanel, chic came to mean an approach to style that was
not simply dependent upon money, although money always helps. This
explains her use of simple materials, muted colours, and rigid lines. She
claimed that she was not interested in diamonds and pearls—most of hers
were in fact fine fakes crafted by the jeweller Verdura. Although known as
a couturière, Chanel made her fortune from the sale of Chanel Number 5,
a very expensive perfume made with the rarest luxury ingredients from
the south of France but with the novelty of adding synthetic ingredients.
It was first released in 1922 in its medicinal-looking bottle, stripped of
all historical association.3 Chanel was not the sole author of these ideas
regarding a luxurious simplicity. Clearly associated with wider aesthetic
minimalism, they appear also in the popular writings of decorator Elsie
de Wolfe, who wrote in 1913 that ‘the woman who wears paste jewels is
not so conspicuously wrong as the woman who plasters herself with too
many real jewels at the wrong time’.4
Chanel had much to say about the relationship of taste and luxury as
she aged. Paul Morand’s L’Allure de Chanel (1976) was the product of an
important dialogue between the author and Chanel after the Second
World War, which was intended to provide the basis for her memoirs. In
this caustic little book Chanel reveals how she saw the years just before the
First World War, as did many others, as the watershed that extinguished
luxury as people knew it:
When I went to the races, I would never have thought that I was witnessing
the death of luxury, the passing of the nineteenth century, the end of an
era. An age of magnificence, but of decadence, the last reflections of a
baroque style in which the ornate had killed off the figure, in which over-
embellishment had stifled the body’s architecture, just as parasites smother
trees in tropical forests. Woman was no more than a pretext for riches, for
lace, for sable, for chinchilla, for materials that were too precious. Compli-
cated patterns, an excess of lace, of embroidery, of gauze, of flounces and
over-layers had transformed what women were into a monument of belated
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luxury
and flamboyant art . . . There were parasols, aviaries and greenhouses in

gardens. The uncommon had become the normal; wealth was as ordinary
as poverty.5
Chanel was revolted by the approach to luxury connected with the vibrant
Ballets Russes of the early 1910s and the associated fashions, perfumes, and
household products retailed most notably by the fashion designer Paul
Poiret: ‘The Ballets Russes were stage décor, not couture. I remember only
too well saying to someone sitting beside me: “These colours are impos
sible. These women, I’m bloody well going to dress them in black.” ’6 She
pursued an equally novel approach to her residence:
I had the first carpets dyed beige. It reminded me of the soil. All the fur-
nishings immediately became beige. Until the day came when the interior
designers begged for mercy. ‘Try white satin,’ I told them. ‘What a good
idea!’ And their designs were shrouded in snow, just as Mrs Somerset
Maugham’s shop in London became buried in naïve innocence and white
satin. Lacquerware, Chinese blues and whites, expensively designed rice
papers, English silverware, white flowers in vases . . . Eccentricity was dying
out; I hope, what’s more, that I helped kill it off. Paul Poiret, a most inven-
tive couturier, dressed women in costumes . . . the most modest tea party
looked like something from the Baghdad of the Caliphs.7
Chanel was not alone in arguing that luxury was in need of a redefini-
tion. One of her great loves was the French illustrator and entrepreneur
Paul Iribe, who designed the famous art deco style ‘Iribe rose’ that came to
define art deco luxury goods. Iribe was also behind an intriguing publica-
tion, the Défense du luxe (1932). The Défense du luxe was a printed mani-
festo maintaining that France remained the centre of luxury, and it was
also an attack on aesthetic modernism of the type never embraced by Cha-
nel, tubular steel rather than the carved wooden chairs that she favoured,
concrete rather than stone buildings, and also much contemporary art
practice. Iribe criticized everyone from Le Corbusier to Pablo Picasso.
Point two of the Défense went thus:
186
We have given up our French stone in favour of cement.

We have given up our French architecture in favour of Germany.
We have given up our French furniture in favour of a cube.
We have given up our French wood in favour of laminated materials.
We have given up our French bronze in favour of Krupp steel and
aluminium.
We have given up our French furnishing fabric in favour of wicker and
Duco.
We have given up our French rugs in favour of rubber.
We have given up our French fashion in favour of uniforms.
We have given up our French jewellery in favour of gris-gris.
We have given up our French fabrics in favour of uniform colours.
We have given up our French hat in favour of a cask.
We have given up our French embroideries and artificial flowers in
favour of nothing at all.
We have given up our French champagne and great wines in favour of
the cocktail.
We have given up everything that we produce in favour of what we do
not produce at all.
We have—act of terrible treason—forsaken our French workman who
has never forsaken us. We have forgotten that his science both precise
and French was transmitted to him from father to son, in what is a great
tradition, and that this worker, debased to the sordid needs to which our
feebleness pushed him, cannot be replaced with anything else in the
world.
This is an act of treason and the worst commercial sin that one can com-
mit; we have forgotten a basic truth that a French product is sold world-
wide because it is French, but that an ‘international’ product can be sold in
the world only through levels of commercial and industrial competition
that we can neither comprehend nor understand.
We have forsaken exceptional exclusivity to accept price competition!8
There is a lot going on in this passage, with its anti-American, anti-German,

anti-global stance and with its rhetoric of the passing-down of craft skills
from father to son that the great houses continue today to propagate as an
ideal. The Défense also had anti-Semitic and anti-cosmopolitan overtones,
suggesting that an international conspiracy was attempting to drive away
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luxury
the old value system that had created France as the pinnacle of luxury taste
and style.9 Aristocracy and a ‘pure’ French race were required, Iribe argued,
in order for luxury manufacturing to continue. Luxury was also closely
connected in his mind with the world of women consumers. This was all a
little ironic, given that his lover Chanel earned a living from selling licensed
copies of her dresses in North America. Chanel’s designs, nonetheless, in
their focus on craftsmanship, taste, and elite luxury (they were extremely
expensive), were both a reaction to the state of affairs that Iribe posited and
also a confirmation that Paris remained the centre of luxury. Chanel’s own
anti-Semitism, not uncommon for high-society elites of the time, came to
stand as a dark shadow over the subtlety of her designs later in life.
The style of the late 1920s and the 1930s was instead the result of the
staging of one of the greatest twentieth-century design fairs, the so-called
Art Deco Exposition of 1925. Actually entitled the Exposition des Arts déco-
ratifs et industriels modernes—the term ‘art deco’ was coined by dealers
only in the 1960s—the exposition redefined cars, ocean-liners, interior
design, dress, and fashion goods. It had been planned before the First
World War broke out and was designed to ensure that Frenchness remained
synonymous with luxury goods. Particularly notable were the schemes by
ensemblier and furniture-designer Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann. He designed
the furnishings for the mock pavilions such as the ‘Residence of a Collec-
tor’, ‘Residence of an Ambassador’ (French, of course), and a Pavilion of
Sèvres Porcelain. The most costly and recherché material was used to cre-
ate his furnishings, such as galuchat (stingray), with inlays of silver, ivory,
and ebony. The furniture forms themselves owed a great deal to the neo-
classical taste of the late eighteenth century, updated for a new time with
cubist overtones. The forms themselves were not modern but from the
eighteenth century—an array of bergères, secrétaires, sleigh beds, com-
modes, and consoles. They suggested an unchanging world, in which
women reclined on circular beds with matching Aubusson carpets—a new
generation of Madame Récamiers.
188
The art deco manner was truly global. It spread almost immediately via
travelling architects, magazine culture, black-and-white film sets, and
samples sent to department stores around the world. The French govern-
ment was extremely proactive, sending out exhibitions from the exposi-
tion of 1925 to other countries, such as Japan in 1928. Tokyo was being
rebuilt at this time after the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. The country
was very receptive to the new tastes in design, the American architect
Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic and crystalline Imperial Hotel having sur-
vived the earthquake. The Japanese architect Junpei Nakamura created
lavish staterooms for Japanese ocean-liners in the art deco style. The new
style was always likely to find a receptive audience there, as the French ver-
sion had a sparseness and sense of line that suited Japanese aesthetics.
And, by the same token, French reviews of the Japanese pavilion of 1925
were equally favourable, stating that ‘the Japanese, enamoured of fine
materials and refined work, have created a charming work, displaying in
the Cours-de-la-reine a pavilion at once both modern and traditional’.10
In 1933 the Japanese Prince Asaka employed French decorator Henri
Rapin to build a palatial Tokyo interior for him with glass fittings by René
Lalique and bronzes by the sculptor Blanchot; Eaton’s department store in
Toronto, Canada, was also redesigned around this time, with a fashion
floor in high French style. Business records of the time show that the
wealthy of Toronto spent thousands of dollars a week on interior decora-
tion there.11 Resorts and holiday villas from Sydney to Singapore incorpo-
rated art deco flourishes as a sign of leisure, luxury, and modernity. The
French Embassy in Tokyo provided Ruhlmann with one of his last com-
missions in the early 1930s.12 The French-inflected art deco manner relies
on pale colours, linear outlines, and tonal effects (rather than the more
colourful American jazz style of the 1920s). It is still used today for the
design of the luxury hotels of the Peninsula Group, with hotels in Hong
Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo (from 2014), and Paris, where 1930s cars and mod-
ern limousines in green-painted livery are parked outside.
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luxury
MINIMALIST LUXURY
Coco Chanel’s equivalent in the art of interior design was the short-lived
but brilliant Jean-Michel Frank (1895–1941). As his work suggested, mini-
malism is not simply a matter of an editorial eye and an ability to edit. Our
own age does not particularly prize the furniture-maker or the collector,
the ensemblier who builds a home in layered stages. We are meant to hold
our lives on digital devices, and our clothes, dishes, and furniture are
meant to be about fashion and are simply disposable. There is a perception
that the middle-class antiques trade has been largely destroyed around
the world; the prices for so-called brown furniture have collapsed, and a
huge generational shift has taken place in terms of consumption. It is
because the whole ethos that sustained that particular approach to filling a
space has been superseded. The ensemblier approach survives as an older
and often a queer affectation and is fast being extinguished, with the recent
deaths of figures such as the decorator Albert Hadley, and the New York
queens of style Nan Kempner and Brooke Astor.
Minimalism in terms of interior decoration is not the same thing as having
neither ideas nor objects (the sculptor Donald Judd’s 1960s New York studio
is a brilliant example of a truly thoughtful minimalism). Frank was not really
a ‘minimalist’. Frank’s disciplined and elegantly severe design of interiors
and furniture for the transatlantic elites of the 1930s navigated between the
poles of post-Bauhaus austerity and neo-Baroque opulence (Figure 6.2).
Unlike the art deco of the era, Frank’s work redefined ideas of style and
luxury. His use of modest materials—straw, leather (albeit super-fine and by
Hermès), parchment, rope, plaster—made into objects and transformed
into exclusive actions and works of style suggested that the ideas and concepts
of the designer and the choices of the client were more important than older
notions of luxury and exclusivity. Similar experimentation with ‘poor’ mate-
rials was also present in fashion in the 1930s, as in the case of shoe-designer
Salvatore Ferragamo’s use of straw and candy wrappers in response to a lack
190
Fig. 6.2. Jean-Michel Frank, dressing table probably made for the Sans Souci Palace,
Buenos Aires, c.1931–2. Silvered bronze and mirror. This was part of a commission for the
Sans Souci Palace, a mini Versailles conceived by society architect René Sergent in 1912,
and completed in 1916. As Frank had never used mirror glass before, this was probably a
special order, and an allusion to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The firm who made it up
for Frank in Argentina was called ‘COMTE Ltde’.
of precious materials.13 An example of Frank’s great ability to use relatively

worthless materials is a cabinet made of gypsum, which sold at a Paris auc-
tion in 2014 for a record price of €3.67 million (Figure 6.3).
Frank’s design ethic had a global reach. He executed schemes in South and
North America, and supplied many North American interior decorators as
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luxury
Fig. 6.3. Jean-Michel Frank, designer, a gypsum and patinated bronze cabinet, c.1935,
109 x 75.5 x 22 cm, first exhibited in the Galérie d’Art et Industrie, Formes d’aujourd’hui
exhibition, Paris, 1936. Sold at Sotheby’s Paris, Félix Marcilhac. Collection Privée, March
2014, Lot 63, for €3,681,500 (estimate €400,000–600,000), a record price for Frank. The
refinement of this piece lies in the contrast of the fairly worthless material, gypsum, and
the abstracted form set up by the bronze framework.
192
well as designing the famous Rockefeller apartment in New York.14 Frank

worked in collaboration with some of the great artists of his era: Christian
Bérard, Jean Cocteau, Alberto and Diego Giacometti, Elsa Schiaparelli, Serge
Roche, and Emilio Terry. All these figures contributed to the image of French
luxury as playful and modern while also paying homage to the neoclassical
tradition. On one occasion, he designed a set of garden furniture for the villa
La Armonia in the south of France, to be upholstered in a fabric of multi
coloured lozenge shapes, in the same proportion and tones as Picasso’s series
of harlequins, saying to the wealthy patroness: ‘I want my lovely seats, when
seen from far across the lawns of La Armonia, to look like Picasso’s harle-
quins reclining.’15 To the great patrons of the day, the visual arts were a part of
l’art de vivre, and artists tended to retain their predominance.
Although Frank’s work was for an exclusive elite, his aesthetic was much
more widespread and had portability into upper-middle-class taste, par-
ticularly through the styling industries and retailing. Elements of his style
and also that of Elsa Schiaparelli’s extreme fashions appear in the kitsch
and hilarious George Cukor-directed film The Women (1939), which fea-
tured hyperbolic luxuries from a transparent glass bathtub for the scarlet
woman (Joan Crawford) to bathe in, to white satin bedrooms for the good
girls. Frank’s approach to design, with its sparse aesthetic and fresh
approach to furniture design (frequently collaborations with artists such
as Giacometti), was disseminated in aspects of the work of prominent
decorators, including the later years of Elsie de Wolfe, as well as Syrie
Maugham, Eleanor Brown, and Frances Elkins (the latter being his agent
in the USA).16 He did much to popularize a pickled, blonde look for interi-
ors that was the exact opposite of the dense Victorian aesthetic of the past.
Frank was in fact co-opting the ‘chic of poverty’, which had already been
suggested in the deceptively simple clothing designed by Chanel. As the
society photographer and designer Cecil Beaton noted in his 1954 book
The Glass of Fashion, Frank ‘invented new surfaces and fabrics, tables made
of parchment, banquettes upholstered in sackcloth . . . even encouraging
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luxury
people to sit on leather floor cushions’.17 Unlike the work of Cecil Beaton,
or of artists such as Rex Whistler or Oliver Messel, Frank’s theatricality and
sense of luxury never became saccharine, nor was his approach especially
camp. The discipline and restraint in his work avoided that charge. It was
perhaps for this reason that Frank was asked to design major schemes of
luxurious interior decoration for figures such as Nelson Rockefeller: gilded
sofas of an unusual form merged with plaster consoles against walls and
major works of art by Matisse and Picasso. This formula is the type of jux-
taposition that has returned with a vengeance for the super-rich and is
much in evidence in the interior decoration of the Candy Brothers and at
luxury fairs such as Masterpiece London, which operates as a tie-in with
the prominent 100-year-old art and antiques collectors’ magazine Apollo.
The legacy of Frank is important. In the post-war period, luxury was
reconceptualized; it was neither opulent in a traditional sense nor did it
necessarily use overt historical references. The modern masters designed
and taught quite the opposite. This is exemplified by the designs of an
architect like Philip C. Johnson. His Glass House at New Canaan, Con-
necticut (1949), was built primarily for him to entertain in. Of its design,
his biographer has said: ‘The Glass House was so spare in form that it gave
little outward hint of the amount of labor that went into it.’18 Johnson
rarely slept there, and the food came from the local caterer, heated up on
a simple stove that was covered by day with a wooden flap. Luxury was
expressed in the inordinate attention to detail, from the steel-framed
structure itself, to the placement of the circular ashtray—everyone of
course still smoked—to the circular leather-clad bathroom. A number of
little follies—including a writing room and his own subterranean pink silk
sleeping chamber—completed the estate.
Around this time Johnson built for Mrs John D. (Blanchette) Rockefeller
III (with a small part of her oil money) a beautiful little modern guesthouse
at 242 East 52nd Street, designed in 1949–50. Here she served her recep-
tions and teas surrounded by modern sculpture, in rooms almost bereft of
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furnishings. The luxury was in the space and the peace, with the steel-
framed fenestration providing the visual rhythm of the rooms with their
own internal courtyard.19 In a much-copied design, Johnson created a
sleeping chamber across this courtyard reached by ‘three small islands of
stone’ set in a reflecting pond.20 The house was gifted to the Museum of
Modern Art in 1958 and later resold. The property was listed by Christie’s
at an estimated $5 million in 2000.
The Second World War was a watershed for both pockets and tastes, and
no more villas on the scale and magnificence of Mrs Horace E. Dodge’s
Rose Terrace were ever built again. Indeed, many such houses were
demolished. Entertaining in an Edwardian manner was now considered
old-fashioned, and fewer formal rooms were to appear again, with the
exception of separate dining rooms, which persisted into the twenty-first
century when they were vanquished by the taste for open-plan living and
the integration of expensive kitchens. There were always exceptions, such
as John Paul Getty, who built a private museum in the form of a Hercula-
neum villa. But even Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip requested that
the architect Sir Hugh Casson and designer John Wright should provide
the royal yacht Britannia with simple blonde sycamore furniture with
Bakelite handles, anglepoise lamps, plain fitted carpets, and Edouardo
Paolozzi-designed abstract textiles.
Luxury became more subdued and restrained and had to confront the
fact that social conditions had changed. When Mies van der Rohe designed
Farnsworth House in rural Illinois for Dr Edith Farnsworth in the late
1940s, people were shocked that a woman (a professional doctor) would
live in a ‘glass house’ by herself.21
LUXURY LIVES: TRAVEL AND NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Part of the success of minimalism and mid-century design as new forms of

luxury can be explained by social changes and a rebuttal of traditional
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luxury
forms of Edwardian opulence, increasingly seen during the twentieth cen-

tury as both undemocratic (as if luxury is ever anything else) and unpro-
ductive. Social changes in both American and European societies and a
move towards a dream of democratic equality (characterized by progres-
sive policies and social welfare) made pre-war luxury unappealing, unpleas-
ant, and for some plainly wrong. The period from the 1940s to the early
1980s is one in which luxury was definitively out of fashion, and those who
still wished to practise it (as many indeed did) had to do so with great care,
even surreptitiously. The fact that discussions of luxury fell off the radar
did not, of course, necessarily mean that luxury was ‘retreating’ in any
way. Quite the opposite: one can chart the ways in which luxury rejuve-
nated itself, and in fact in the period leading up to the 1980s acquired
many of the features that have allowed the twenty-first-century luxury
industry to emerge. These transformations are particularly evident in the
areas of travel, the diffusion of sartorial fashions, and the application of
new technologies.
Before the Second World War, long-distance travel was still the luxury
of the elite. The 1920s and early 1930s were the heydays of the great lux-
ury ocean-liners. One of the best examples was the SS Normandie,
launched in 1935, whose interiors were the wonder of the world. The
liner was decorated in the art deco manner, with bronze doors and bas-
reliefs, glass ceilings and pillars by Lalique and églomisé (reverse glass-
painted) panels by Jean Dupas, silver by Christofle, blonde pianos by
Louis Süe, and mural paintings and tapestries in a genteel modern style
by the greatest artists working in the art deco style. Its glass dining hall
was hailed as the last Hall of Mirrors. Yet it also incorporated the latest
technology: the large unobstructed public spaces were possible because
of the funnel intakes running up the walls, a great innovation at the time
(Figure 6.4).
Stars of the screen and stage such as Marlene Dietrich and footloose aris-
tocrats such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor mingled with American
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Fig. 6.4. History of Navigation, mural by Jean Theodore Dupas (1882–1964), 1934. Glass,
paint, gold, silver, palladium leaf. Overall: H. 245, W. 348¾ inches (622.3 x 885.8 cm).
Dupas was a French painter trained in the classical manner, later becoming notable for his
work in the French art deco style. In the early 1930s he and the glass master Charles Cham-
pigneulle created four murals for the ocean-liner SS Normandie, launched in 1935. This
panel was for one corner of the first-class salon. It depicts a fanciful scene of the history of
ocean-going mixed in with mythical sea creatures. The reverse painted glass technique is a
particularly luxurious effect that was used in the eighteenth century—for example, at the
restaurant Grand Véfour in Paris—and continues to be used by skilled decorators at the top
of the market.
millionaires such as Jimmie Donohue and his bejewelled mother, the Wool-
worth’s heirs. Dinner aboard ship demanded a full panoply of evening wear
in satin, lace, or velvet, full-length white gloves for women, sets of matching
gemstones, and sometimes even tiaras or at least jewelled headpieces. Mar-
lene Dietrich, for instance, travelled on the liners regularly, ‘with or without
lovers, with male lovers, with female lovers, with male and female lovers’, as
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luxury
Fig. 6.5. Evening jacket, Travis Banton and Howard Greer, for Marlene Dietrich, silk
crêpe, gold metallic thread, glass rhinestone and seed beads and gelatin sequins, 1938–40.
Clothes such as this were designed to look as good in black and white as in colour; the gar-
ment is in a striking red, purple, and blue. This jacket is believed to have been made for
Dietrich’s personal wardrobe.
the complete records of her secretarial correspondence now housed at the

Museum für Film und Fernsehen in Berlin reveal.22 The types of clothes
worn on board are well represented by one of her beautiful jewelled jack-
ets, an evening top that revealed her fine figure but embellished her at the
same time. Such garments were designed for the stars by brilliant costume
designers, such as Adrian and his contemporaries, to look equally good in
black and white photography and film (Figure 6.5). The effect of such
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clothing, jewels, lacquered hairdressing, and painted nails created an allur-

ing type of glamour that has never been equalled.
Yet this was a world that the Second World War killed off once and for
all. In the late 1940s and early 1950s liners remained an important way to
travel in comfort, but their luxury was altogether different and catered for
larger audiences. An example might be an ocean-liner like the SS Canberra
(from 1961), whose interior was directed by architect Sir Hugh Casson, in
which a simple sculptural staircase, modern Danish-style chairs, and dra-
matic lighting established the space of a luxury dining room for its own
time (Figure 6.6). Canberra incorporated large amounts of plastic and
Fig. 6.6. ‘Luxurious Canberra: The First-Class Lounge’, Supplement to the Illustrated
London News, 1960. Known as ‘Tomorrow’s Ship Today’, SS Canberra operated from 1961
for P&O’s service Australia to the United Kingdom. The interior design was overseen by
architect Sir Hugh Casson, who was also the preferred designer for Queen Elizabeth II and
Prince Philip. Thoroughly 1960s, the ship was one of the first to make a virtue out of plas-
tic, which was used as a laminate in the first-class cabins. The copy accompanying this text
notes that ‘the international design of Canberra marks a new era in ocean travel’ and that
the most striking feature of the first-class lounge ‘is the angular ceiling of glittering metal
facets. The curving walls enclose the sit-up bar, which is a new feature for P&O Liners. The
chairs are of glass reinforced plastic.’
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luxury
‘Formica’ for the first time as a luxury material. From Helsinki to Sydney,
modern architects and designers created a new, simpler format for a more
democratic luxury in spaces such as hotels, cinemas, restaurants, coffee
houses, outdoor bars, music halls, and department stores. Modern light-
ing, often concealed, novel rubber materials for flooring, etched glass,
comfortable tubular steel chairs, laminated woods and striking veneers,
fitted carpets, escalators for department stores, and good heating and
cooling systems defined the new approach. These design ideals had been
formulated decades earlier by the great modernists, often working in
harsh European climates and adjusting to new materials such as steel and
power such as electricity. For an architect such as Alvar Aalto in the 1920s
and 1930s, it was just as important to design a sanitarium very carefully as
it was a private residence. Aalto’s designs used the latest technology and
often featured large windows to take maximum advantage of the available
perspectives and views. Space, light, and air were becoming the new luxu-
ries that mark contemporary design today.
The decline of ocean-liner travel in the 1950s and the introduction and
popularity of the safe and quiet Boeing 707 (introduced in 1958) meant a
whole raft of luggage types such as trunks and heavy suitcases were no lon-
ger suitable or even possible. Clothing, luggage, and accessories lightened
up. Even if a chef served a joint of meat on a trolley in first class, no one
could pretend that the interior of a jet liner was like a restaurant. Women
and men alike needed more comfortable but decent clothes for this type of
travel, and informality—jeans, cashmere sweaters, sunglasses, and blazers—
proliferated. Jackie Kennedy’s security guard recounted that she enjoyed
sleeping across the seats when she was given a whole row in the front of a
plane, and of course she enjoyed arriving somewhere much faster.23
The late Duchess of Devonshire was related by marriage to the Ken
nedys.24 In 1963 the Duchess described in a letter the effect of flying: ‘We got
a lift off the Prime Minister who had chartered a Boeing 707 . . . 150 empty
seats behind . . . ’. She was returning with sadness from the funeral after
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John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Her point was that the whole plane had
been provided for such an exclusively small group of people: the Duchess
and her husband, along with the Duke of Edinburgh, a number of high-
ranking officials, and a couple of secretarial staff and detectives.25 The
unexpected privacy and space, once again, were key to the recollection,
just as they were in advertisements for luxury air travel of the period
(Figure 6.7). This sense of private space is what the premium airlines now
emulate, with the introduction for the first time in May 2014 on Etihad
Airways of ‘The Residence’, a completely private three-room cabin on
board the A380, with its own bed, living, and shower rooms. This product
outdid similar offerings called ‘Suites’, introduced by several airlines in
2014, which did not offer Etihad’s private shower or a butler trained by the
Savoy in London. The approximate price of a return flight Sydney–London
in this manner was $60,000 in 2014, ten times the cost of a Business Class
ticket and several times more than the cost of conventional First Class.
Although contemporary marketing panders to the general public’s love
of small luxuries, ‘meta-luxury’ as it has been called is still palpable in the
travel industry.
Comfort of course relates to luxury, and being at ease might be an aspect
of luxury, but comfort is also socially generated and conditioned. Full-
length fur coats were essential fashion accessories for both well-off men
and women until the 1920s, as cars could not be heated (the early models
were completely open) and steam or hot-water central heating was not
widespread outside the United States until the 1920s or later. By the 1930s
cars had also achieved new levels of comfort. Commodious interiors and
more space for fitted luggage (to be stored within the very structure of the
car) allowed for leisure travel. In this period the car became a potent sym-
bol of design and ‘streamlined luxury’, and car interiors sometimes even
matched lady’s dresses (Figure 6.8). Cars were extremely expensive, and
only later did they become a mass means of transport in the United States
in the 1940s and in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. For example, in Austria
201
Fig. 6.7. ‘The Luxury of Gracious Living is Reflected on the Monarch’, late 1950s adver-
tisement of the company BOAC. BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation) was estab-
lished in 1940 and operated until it was merged with British Airways in 1974. The overnight
flight from New York to London promised ‘the comfortable privacy of your own foam-soft
sleeper berth’ with ‘lavish dinners sparkling with select wines and served graciously from
silver carts’. There was a lower deck cocktail lounge and the option of sleeper berths.
202
Fig. 6.8. Image from the German magazine Sport im Bild, 1933. The illustrator uses a
cubist language to capture the metallic modernity of the luxury car. The smart chauffeur
would have been wearing a form of livery, or uniform. Trunks were held in the compart-
ment at the rear of the vehicle.
in 1930 there was one car for every 376 inhabitants. As a historian of the car
notes: ‘The 1930s marks a time of transition in which the automobile starts
to change from being a curiosity to providing competition for the railway
and from being a plaything of the rich to an item of daily use for broader
sections of the population.’26
Comfort also extended to interiors. Air-conditioning, which became
widespread in both commercial and domestic environments in the USA,
Asia, and Australia after the 1950s, rendered certain ‘colonial’ modes of
dress such as the linen and safari suit redundant. Not all luxuries are wel-
come; the Queen Mother reported to the Queen that Princess Mar
garet, unused to air-conditioning, complained, as she often did in private,
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luxury
about the ‘cold in her sleeping cabin’ and ‘coughing rather ostentaciosuly
[sic.]’ on the train laid on for her and her mother when they visited South-
ern Rhodesia on a tour in 1953.27
The twentieth century also saw a return to more sober materials and
restrained shapes for the ultra-rich. More than in previous centuries, the
novelty of new materials that imitated older, more established, and more
expensive ones reached new heights. In 1943 the British design critic John
Gloag praised the imaginative potential of plastics but feared that they would
‘create a new rococo period’ marked by extravagance, excess, and ornament.
The use of plastic, he argued, was an act in which ‘the artificial becomes the
real’.28 To a modernist this was a great lure, but if faux-luxury was created
from a plastic masquerade, then mass world corruption might ensue. Roland
Barthes, in that prose of his that manages to be bald and poetic at the same
time, wrote of plastic: ‘it is the first magical substance which consents to be
prosaic . . . The hierarchy of substances is abolished. A single one replaces
them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are
told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.’29 In the words of one com-
mentator, ‘plastic becomes the site of an apocalyptic cultural battle’.30
From Bakelite to rayon, most of the synthetic materials made in large
numbers especially in the United States, were ersatz and surrogate. Mater
ials such as Formica laminates, used widely in the auto and aircraft interiors
and as the light casings of communication devices, imitated materials from
the natural world such as timber and marbles. Yet few of these imitations
exactly resembled what they copied. As the historian of modern plastics
Jeffrey Meikle notes of the post-war materials, the ‘more novel an object’s
form became, the more artificial and thus totally controlled it seemed’. The
vast majority of plastic mouldings were meant to simulate wood:
Too smooth and uniform to be products of the same natural processes that
yielded wood’s irregular growth, pattern, and texture, they too suggested
an unprecedented act of instantaneous transformation . . . When viewed on
a surface of polished black Formica, on the other hand, they seem to
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emerge smoothly, without interruption, almost naturally, as artificial flora

of the “fourth kingdom” of chemical synthesis.31
Plastic jewellery, handbags, ladies’ shoes, and even flowers might be a new
type of luxury for an aspirational bourgeoisie, as was so wickedly pointed
out in the 1958 film by Jacques Tati, Mon Oncle. We are a very long way here
from that Louis XV inlaid purple-wood table purchased by Mrs Dodge.
Luxury in the twentieth century might be expressed in different ways,
in the smooth industrial design of a new refrigerator by Raymond Loewy,
a Western Electric telephone with its light streamlined design, or a fibre-
glass chair by Charles Eames. In the post-war period people enjoyed the
over-the-top designs of Morris Lapidus. His Fontainebleau Hotel (opened
1954) was considered one of the most luxurious hotels in the world, but it
had none of the gilded woods, bronze stairs, or silvered mirrors associated
with ‘le goût ritz’. Instead it was conceived as a modernist set: ‘If you cre-
ate the stage setting and it’s grand, everyone who enters will play their
part,’ Lapidus remarked.32 The semicircular multi-storey hotel had enor-
mous public spaces with recessed lighting and sparse walls, very large bed-
rooms fitted out with Venetian or modified Louis-style chairs and
bedheads, and the famous cantilevered ‘staircase to nowhere’, which
floated in the air above a painted mural and marble basins (Figure 6.9).
Much of the aesthetic derives from post-war Italian schemes by designers
such as Fornasetti and Giò Ponti, which playfully referred to the classical
period while using modern materials and spindly forms. Other ideas were
undoubtedly derived from one of the first so-called lady decorators, the
American Dorothy Draper, who from the 1930s until the 1960s designed
hotels in both North and South America, featuring dramatic hallways with
black and white floors, oversized furnishings, and enormous lamps (includ-
ing that favourite of the Windsors, the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia,
which Draper redecorated in 1946). Such designs did not let guests forget
that they were in a hotel, and not a domestic space. They were also remi-
niscent of the public spaces of the ocean-liners, which were, by the 1970s,
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luxury
Fig. 6.9. Stairs of the Fontainebleau Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida, by architect Morris
Lapidus.
becoming unfashionable as a means of travel. People revelled in Lapidus’

novel use of lighting, plastic, potted plants, and contrasting colours and
theatricality. It was the type of design that would inspire Robert Venturi
and Denise Scott Brown to write Learning from Las Vegas (1972), a work
that embraced the kitsch styles of casinos and the facadism of many rural
towns and cities across North America.
LUXURY, CELEBRITY, AND THE NEW MEDIA
Part of the global success of luxury in the twentieth century was its ready
availability on magazine pages showing rich interiors, their owners, and
lifestyles. Magazines—but also movies—made ideas concerning luxury
democratic, in particular from the mid-twentieth century when colour
206
photography became more widespread. Vogue perhaps more than any other
magazine in the world embodies such dynamics. Founded in 1892 as a society
weekly in New York, Vogue was purchased by the publisher Condé Nast in
1909. The Condé Nast headquarters were subdued and elegant, with antique
furnishings and a servants’ zone. Nast wanted his stable of magazines to reflect
the connections between contemporary fashion, writing, and ideas, and
therein lay Vogue’s novelty. Its formidable ‘lady editors’ included Edna Chase,
then Carmel Snow, followed by Diana Vreeland (Mrs T. Reed Vreeland).
Lifestyle recording was common in the late-nineteenth- and early twen-
tieth-century illustrated periodical press after new flash photography had
been invented. Yet the real shift came when a new emphasis upon modern-
ist elegance and refined integration of word and image was promoted by
Vogue, as well as other magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar. Its main creator
was Diana Vreeland, who set the model for what later became the powerful
‘Lady of Fashion’. Today this is the role of Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue
since 1988, but in the post-war period Vreeland became the very first editor
of a fashion magazine to be popular with the masses. Born in Paris, she
favoured the dresses of Coco Chanel in her youth. Because of her striking
personal style she was spotted as a potential magazine writer, joining
Harper’s Bazaar in 1936, moving to the position of fashion editor there
from 1939. She worked extensively with the fashion photographer Louise
Dahl-Wolfe, with whom Vreeland acted as stylist and created various mis-
en-scènes that developed a particularly dynamic and American vision of
fashion and style.33 Vreeland finally became editor-in-chief of American
Vogue in 1963; she was fired in 1971.
Vreeland was well known for her series of columns ‘Why don’t you?’,
which appeared in Harper’s Bazaar from March 1936. The most infamous is
‘Why don’t you . . . rinse your blond child’s hair in dead champagne to keep
it gold, as they do in France?’ Others include ‘Why don’t you . . . order Schia-
parelli’s cellophane belt with your name and telephone number on it?’ and
‘Why don’t you . . . have a private staircase from your bedroom to the library
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luxury
with a needlework carpet with notes of music worked on each step—the

whole spelling your favourite tune?’ She was quickly satirized, but her con-
cern was fantasy and her milieu was in part Surrealist. ‘“Why don’t you?”
was a thing of fashion and fantasy, on the wing . . . It wasn’t writing, it was
just ideas. It was me, insisting on people using their imaginations, insisting
on a certain idea of luxury.’34 Indeed with Vreeland luxury came to be part
of the fantasy of millions of American housewives, and a few men, too.
Diana Vreeland appears to have been responsible for a new type of editor
ial format at American Vogue in which the highest-quality colour photogra-
phy fused with lifestyle. Vreeland’s innovation was a new layout with text
and image arranged in a dynamic manner with photographs of different
sizes, sometimes not much larger than a large stamp, and other times double-
bled for maximum impact. The images and texts were republished on
high-quality paper in 1963 as Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People.35 Vree-
land favoured women and men who lived in some splendour, although she
did also shoot the bohemian house of Truman Capote and several space-age
interiors. Vreeland was also interested in style icons such as the Standard Oil
heiress Millicent Rogers, who in the 1940s took native American lovers at
her compound in New Mexico, wore clothes by ‘America’s First Couturier’
Charles James, and had a fondness for wearing antique Navajo bracelets,
gold she had crafted herself to look ‘pre-Columbian’, and stars that turned
out to be Russian military orders.36 The surrealist fashion designer Elsa
Schiaparelli said of her: ‘If she had not been so terribly rich, she might, with
her vast talent and unlimited generosity, have become a great artist.’37
Film, too, had a powerful impact on luxury throughout the twentieth cen-
tury. Celebrity was devoured by the press and by its millions of readers. One
of the most potent means of learning about new tastes, attitudes, and fash-
ions was by going to the movies. Australians were the biggest movie-goers in
the world per capita, going to the movies every week. Nineteen-thirties mov-
ies presented the lives of the rich on the big screen, and department stores
encouraged the links by creating commercial tie-ins to the clothes worn by
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cinema stars. This was not always considered good taste. For example,
looking today at magazine culture of the 1920s and 1930s, one would
assume that the lure of Hollywood was universally lauded. This was not
the case. It was certainly true that cinema became very important in
spreading fashion ideas: the up-market David Jones department store in
Sydney, for instance, had a whole section devoted to its ‘Cinema Fashion
Shop’ on the second floor of the store, selling copies of stars’ clothes. Yet
cinema images were not always approved of; the more expensive woman’s
magazine Home disparagingly called them ‘lower class’ and ‘tasteless’.38
Those who did not have to go to the movies for fashion inspiration
sometimes appeared rather indignant. The far-too-often pungent Cecil
Beaton was rather critical of the infamous American silent movie star Mae
West. Of her apartment, he said:
everything was off-white, cream and pale yellow. Such a riot of bad taste as
you could not imagine to be taken seriously . . . the piano was painted white
with painted 18th century scenes adorning the sides, a naked lady being
admired by a monkey as she lay back on drapery and cushions, was the
centrepiece of one wall. On the piano was a white ostrich feather fan, heart-
shaped pink, rose-adorned boxes of chocolate, nothing inside but the dis-
carded brown paper. A box of Kleenex was enclosed in a silver bead
box . . . She was rigged up in the highest possible fantasy of taste . . . the mir-
rors reflected the figure standing as she wished to be presented, a trunk of
artifice, a tall, svelte woman, who had with ostrich feathers, stoles, fur, high
hair created her own silhouette.
Beaton might have not approved, but this was very much the style that
Hollywood stars promoted, both on and off stage, with great effect among
the masses.
In the post-war period, Hollywood stardom presented a more restrained
view of luxury. It promoted traditional views of fashion with bustles, pet-
ticoats, and crinolines in what has been seen as a ‘fully fledged emulation
of the rococo’ that reassured people in the post-war period that tradition
had not been erased.39 Such fashions were promoted in the films of the
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luxury
1950s, many of which took co-joined luxury and femininity as their

themes—notably Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955), with the ice cool
Grace Kelly. It must be remembered that Princess Grace of Monaco’s wed-
ding dress was made by an American wardrobe designer, Helen Rose of
MGM studios, and that the whole event, including Grace’s arrival by yacht
and the courtly greeting offshore with Prince Rainier, was stage-managed
by Hollywood, carefully designed to be viewed in black and white on tele-
vision sets around the world.
Hollywood—not always appreciated for its self-humour—sometimes
used luxury as a theme of parody in the 1950s. Movies such as Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes, one of the great hits of 1953 and starring Marilyn Monroe,
presented all the caricatures of luxury consumption that we so much enjoy
chuckling over today. A blonde and a brunette from Little Rock seek their
fortune and affirm it through diamonds. What the movie did not make so
apparent was that the ladies in this film are really prostitutes. The film is
based on the novel by Anita Loos, entitled ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’: The
Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady, first published in 1925. Set in
New York, Paris, London, and Vienna, it is the story of a group of flappers
out to get rich and help themselves to a few of life’s luxuries. The irony, of
course, is that the girls are in fact themselves the luxuries for their male
admirers.
All the themes presented in the Hollywood movie are set out in the line
drawings and chapter titles that accompanied the original work: ‘Kissing
your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts for-
ever’ (Figure 6.10); ‘Fate keeps on happening’; ‘Paris is devine [sic.]’; ‘Brains
are really everything’. The girls are seeing a ‘button king’ manufacturer
and an aristocrat. They attend the Trocadero and receive orchids, as well as
‘a nice string of pearls’ and a ‘diamond pin’.40 They are taken on a trans
atlantic crossing: ‘the steward said as soon as he saw Dorothy and I that he
would have quite a heavy run on vases.’41 Of course, they stay at the Ritz:
‘When a girl can sit in a delightful bar and have delicious champagne
210
Fig. 6.10. ‘Kissing your hand may make you feel very good but a diamond bracelet lasts
forever’, frontispiece, Anita Loos, ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’: The Illuminating Diary of a
Professional Lady, intimately illustrated by Ralph Barton (London: Brentano’s Ltd; New
York: Boni & Liveright, Inc., New York, 1926).
cocktails and look at all the important French people in Paris, I think it is
devine [sic.]’42 More flowers arrive: ‘Sir Francis Beekman sent me 10
pounds worth of orchids every day while we were in London.’43 Such camp
eccentricity had become the butt of comedy by the 1950s. Eccentricity,
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luxury
Fig. 6.11. Weegee (Arthur Fellig), ‘The Critic’, 22 November 1943, gelatin silver print,
25.7 x 32.9 cm. Mrs George Washington Kavanaugh and Lady Decies were attending the
Metropolitan Opera, New York. Austrian-born photographer Weegee posed this image, in
which a drunken woman brought to the scene from a dive at the Bowery was propelled
into the path of the two grande-dames in their heavy make-up, ermine coats, bandeau
tiaras, sautoir necklaces, multiple diamond bracelets, and an enormous orchid corsage.
Weegee originally called the photograph ‘The Fashionable People’, and it exists in numer-
ous versions, including this cropped one, which cuts out the rest of the crowd. It was pub-
lished in Life Magazine, 6 December 1943.
unusual posing, too many hot-house flowers, extreme fashions, and jewel-
lery were becoming old-fashioned, even comical (Figure 6.11). As we have
seen, modernism promised a new and more rational future. Women might
not need to dream about fur coats and silk slips anymore; there were nylon
ones available and the heating was better anyway. A new view of luxury
was around the corner.
212
THE NEW OLD: JET SET AND THE LADIES WHO LAUNCHED
On the opposite coast of America, the seaboard where much of the old
money (a relative concept in the United States) resided, the post-war
period created a rather different view from the West coast Hollywood pop-
ular version of cinematic luxury. Truman Capote made the notion of the
‘ladies who lunch’ infamous, which led to his own notorious social unrav-
elling.44 His unfinished novel Answered Prayers, published as La Côte
Basque 1965 in instalments in Esquire magazine in 1976, centred around
an exclusive Manhattan restaurant and the conversation and appearance
of Lady Ina Coolbirth, a thinly disguised portrait of the 1950s New York
socialite and fashion icon Slim Keith, co-mingled with vignettes of Jackie
Kennedy and her sister Lee. The forty-page plot unfolds, taking about the
same length of time as an afternoon lunch, full of word pictures of the
mainly women diners: ‘A redhead dressed in black; black hat with a veil
trim, a black Mainbocher suit, black crocodile purse, crocodile shoes.’45
The air is thick with luxury.
The image of sartorial and domestic simplicity promoted by Hollywood
at this time did not wash with all the ‘ladies who lunched’—the wives of the
rich and powerful American elites. Francophiles Jackie Kennedy and her
sister Lee lived in beautiful but relatively simple apartments in New York.
Lee, like Princess Radziwill, had previously commissioned for her London
and country houses the great Italian decorator Renzo Mongiardino to cre-
ate striking murals and wall hangings in which Sicilian peasant scarves
were glued and lacquered to the walls. He then worked with her on her
striking Manhattan apartment, which featured (among other things)
crimson walls. Alongside the sense of ‘boho chic’ were always fine French
furnishings.46 Classical busts, eighteenth-century ormolu clocks, and can-
dlestands mixed it up with cheap wicker baskets and tourist discoveries
such as beads and polished stones. The mark of a sophisticate was to add
some contemporary art, as Lee did with her Francis Bacon Man in a Cage.
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luxury
The new luxury of the East Coast American elites of the 1960s was nei-
ther popular nor purist in quite the way Coco Chanel had stipulated.
Indeed, even Coco by this time did not disdain the past and had moved
into the Paris Ritz surrounded by eighteenth-century French furniture and
rich textiles. Francophilia in high-style American living was given the stamp
of approval by no less than the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. She brought
over the French firm of Jansen to fix up parts of the White House in 1960,
and her personal decorator was ‘Sister’ Parish (Mrs Henry Parish III), who
preferred continental to English furnishings and created for Jackie her first
home when her husband was a senator.47 Jackie’s best friends were the
tasteful wives of multimillionaires such as ‘Bunny’ (Mrs Paul) Mellon and
Jayne Wrightsman. The latter had, with her husband’s oil money and full
support, created in the 1950s and 1960s the finest collection of French fur-
niture in the United States, and built up an art collection including paint-
ings by the French baroque painter Georges de la Tour and the elusive
Johannes Vermeer for their many private residences, much of which was
subsequently gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The
Wrightsman Galleries were decorated, of course, by Jansen. Jokes continue
to be told about Tous les Louis and Louis the hooey to describe the general
taste for the grand siècle of France that is still particularly loved by rich
Americans, despite the fact there was nothing democratic about the taste.
In the 1960s and 1970s, despite the rise of clubbing culture, cocaine use,
and countercultural movements, many of the mondaine members of the
international jet set clung on to an old-fashioned pleasure in conventional
luxuries. There was a certain return to the Edwardian period, an era of sen-
suality and experience culture. The beautiful people loved going to Studio
54 in their fine evening dresses by Yves Saint Laurent; as Diana Vreeland
said in an interview in old age: ‘I wanted to get where the action was.’ The
big difference from her going to a club in the 1930s was that as much cocaine
as champagne was now likely to be consumed in the dark sections of
the club. The pop artist Andy Warhol, a fixture at Studio 54, might have
214
appeared to be very bohemian, but he was wearing real art deco women’s
jewels and bracelets under his Brooks Brothers shirts, and he threw the
gems that he had bought from second-hand dealers on to the canopy of his
four-poster bed every evening (they were found there after his death). War-
hol loved collecting everything, from 1950s cookie jars to fine Federal fur-
niture; all of it was dispersed for vast sums after his untimely death. There
was a little bit of the kleptomaniac about a character like Warhol. He had a
full set of cutlery that he had taken from Concorde, an aircraft that had
only one class—first. Truman Capote also loved stealing souvenirs from
hotels. In the auction catalogue dispersing his property we find a large col-
lection of hotel silverplate from Claridge’s, the Hotel Bristol in Paris, and
the Four Seasons in London. He stole keys from the Connaught Hotel Lon-
don, the Fairmont Hotel San Francisco, the Hyatt House Hotel Los Ange-
les, and the Navarro in New York City. What he was stealing was a little
piece of luxury to take back to his New York apartment in Brooklyn and
later the UN Tower. His apartment, photographed for American Vogue by
Horst P. Horst in the early 1960s, contained many items of little to no value.
Victorian rosewood sofas then out of fashion, metal trivets that had once
stood in fireplaces, old French metal milk pails used as waste-paper bas-
kets, a Victorian velvet cocaine case given by Andy Warhol, an old flower
tub used as an ice bucket. The overall effect was considered worth reporting
at length in American Vogue. But what was going on here?
THE REAGAN YEARS AND THE END OF AN ERA
The 1980s marked a crisis for style, aesthetics, and taste in twentieth-
century life. Dissatisfaction with modernist design and poorly considered
urbanism and housing schemes saw the rise of a new historicism from the
late 1970s. Prince Charles made a rare statement of dissent by a British
royal for the times and opined that contemporary architecture was ugly;
that really made the news, as members of the royal family do not usually
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luxury
make controversial comments. Charles favoured the designs of architect

Quinlan Terry, who created well-proportioned and thoughtful buildings
that were nonetheless pastiches of Georgian architecture. All around the
world, from Chelsea in London to the suburbs of Sydney, developers
began to build low-ceilinged air-conditioned flats and townhouses, com-
plete with garaging for cars, that pretended they were from the eighteenth
century. Cable television and a proliferation of homeware, decorating,
and ‘shelter’ magazines popularized the look, which demanded a full pan-
oply of antiques to go with the house. Women’s fashion was also retrospec-
tive, with a very American style echoing the glamour of the 1930s. Shoulder
pads, peplum skirts, taffeta ballgowns, and lace day dresses all made an
appearance once again. These were the Reagan and Thatcher years.
The 1980s also saw a reaction against plastic, foam, and fibreglass.
Instead, the ‘English Country House’ look took the world by storm. It had
been presaged by the dress and textile designs of Laura Ashley, but com-
bined with the new wealth of the ‘yuppie’ class (young upwardly mobile
professionals) suddenly everyone wanted festoon curtains, English chintz,
and masses of ornaments. It was a very ‘feminine’ period in terms of style,
the era of the Sloane Ranger, girls with pearls, and ironic features about
debutantes in Tatler magazine. Antiques of all descriptions reached prices
that they had probably not seen since the late nineteenth century. It was
the heyday of luxury decorating magazines such as Architectural Digest,
which began to feature the homes of the rich and famous, often saying so
on their covers. Robin Leach’s corny but very watchable Lifestyles of the
Rich and Famous launched on television in 1984 and ran for ten years; it was
the first such reality TV show. There were also large markets for the finest
avant-garde jewellery, hand-made punk clothes, cutting-edge art, custom-
ized craft-ware, vintage cars, fine wine at auction, and custom-guitars.
Yet the 1980s are unlikely to be remembered in the future as an age of
luxurious good taste, although they were years of great fun. One of the
most intriguing scandals of the Reagan Presidency (1981–9) was his wife’s
216
response to living in the White House. Some people were clearly out to get
these former Hollywood stars, and Nancy Reagan’s redecoration of their
private rooms and her commissioning of a new White House dinner ser-
vice caused a scandal. The White House, the palace of the people, has
always been a problem for those who live in it, as its fittings are often old-
fashioned and sometimes inadequate. Although there were numerous
dinner services that had been commissioned for different administra-
tions—the tradition extends back to a Paris delivery of 1817—Nancy Rea-
gan felt that the supply was too small, and she ordered one for her own era.
Lady Bird Johnson had previously ordered a service for 140 guests, but
Nancy Reagan ordered one of 19 pieces each for 220, which came to a
grand total of 4,370 pieces of American-made Lenox ivory china with a
grand red band and etched gold borders and crest. Although it was paid
for by a foundation, its cost of nearly $210,000 caused quite a fuss.
The redecoration of the Reagans’ private rooms was undertaken by Ted
Graber, a society decorator from Beverly Hills who had trained under Billy
Haines, the incredibly good-looking gay movie star of the silent era who
became one of the first Hollywood decorators. The bedroom was papered
in a newly blocked Chinese wallpaper with birds and bamboo by the Amer-
ican firm Gracie, and the furniture was mainly antique, with a Chippendale
gold mirror. Another sitting room had extremely pretty strié painted green
walls and gilt furniture in an Upper East Side taste. It was a typical scheme
for a wealthy transatlantic woman of her generation; aspects of it resem-
bled Dynasty (interestingly enough, the ‘good’ female character in Dynasty,
Krystle Carrington, had a traditional bedroom quite similar to Nancy’s,
whereas the ‘evil’ Alexis Colby, played by Joan Collins, lived in a sexy silver
and white modernist apartment with purple highlights).
Nancy Reagan’s scheme was unkindly, if trenchantly, attacked by the
American decorative arts scholar Debra Silverman, who, in her clever and
cutting book Selling Culture (1986), claimed that the Reagans and their best
friends the Bloomingdales, the department-store owners and inventors of
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luxury
the Diner’s Card, were trying to identify themselves with ancien régime
splendour at the expense of traditional democratic American virtues and
values.48
Europe arguably produced some more enlightened forms of luxury at
this time, perhaps best exemplified by Karl Lagerfeld. ‘Kaiser Karl’ is cer-
tainly a man who understands luxury, history, and time, and his large col-
lections of finest quality furnishings are proof that luxury can be expressed
in different ways. Lagerfeld was an early adapter of the approach to his-
torical interiors promoted by the scholar Mario Praz, who studied water-
colours and paintings in order to understand the past.49 One of Lagerfeld’s
residences, in Rome, was an exercise in the chaste taste for things Biede-
meier, which became fashionable at this time. Lagerfeld quickly moved
on. He first acquired a beautiful Belle Époque Louis XVI-style villa near
Monaco, which he filled with Memphis postmodern design. He then cre-
ated a large Paris hôtel particulier, which appeared inside as if Marie Antoi-
nette and friends had just left the room. The contents were sold by
Christie’s Monaco in 2000.
DISPERSAL: THE END OF AN ERA
The 1980s and 1990s saw the selling of the contents of the great Manhat-
tan apartments owned by socialites and philanthropists and decorated by
Jansen and his contemporaries such as Sister Parish in a predominantly
French idiom, with their American flourishes such as bar and card rooms.
Jayne Wrightsman’s Palm Beach home was one of the first to be sold, in
1984. The Windsor sale was 1986. The late Comtesse Diane de Castellane’s
collection (incorporating some of the possessions of her grandfather, the
profligate Boni) was sold in Monaco in 1995. There followed the sale of the
effects of Alice Tully, the Steuben glass heiress, in 1994, and of Mrs Charles
Allen, Jr, a great beauty with an exquisite Jansen apartment dominated by
blanc-de-chine white figures, in 1997. Mrs Antenor Patiño also sold the
218
contents of her grand and much upholstered New York apartment in 1997,
and Mrs John Hay Whitney (Betsey Cushing Whitney) was sold up in 1999.
She had been one of the great society figures of the 1950s, with multiple resi-
dences decorated in the English country-house manner. Other important
sales included: Greta Garbo in 1990; William S. Paley (Babe Paley’s hus-
band) in 1991; Jackie Kennedy in 1996; Pamela Harriman (American Ambas-
sador to France) in 1997; and Dorothy Hirshon (formerly Mrs Jack Hearst)
in 1998. Marella Agnelli’s New York apartment was sold up in 2004; Her
Royal Highness The Princess Margaret’s private collections were sold by her
heirs in 2006; the rest of Mrs Antenor Patino’s collection was sold in 2010;
Mrs Paul ‘Bunny’ Mellon died in 2014. The contents of the residence of soci-
ety decorator Alberto Pinto (of Paris) were also dispersed in this period of
transition. He lived like a contemporary Roman emperor, with unusually
shaped green velvet rooms and dozens of dinner services in vast spaces.
These were all very different women (and a few men), but the sales of
their goods do reveal a number of interesting common features. By the
early twentieth century the outfitting of a home had become the domain
of women. This had not been the case in the nineteenth century, when
men had been intimately connected with the choice of design and decora-
tion of houses. As a result, there is a strong ‘feminine’ basis to these twen-
tieth-century designs, based on a great deal of upholstery, coordinating
colours, and distinct private spaces for men and women—for example, in
their dressing rooms and studies. The second point is that these people all
relied on the services of very skilled decorators. Some could even re-create
the effects of a room at the Palace of Pavlosk or a Proustian fantasy. People
brought Europe home in miniature. They also all had in common a taste
for very rare antiques. They ate from French, English, or Russian eigh-
teenth- or nineteenth-century plates, they sat on French Louis or Germanic
Biedermeier chairs, their flowers were arranged in eighteenth-century
tôle (tin) ware, and eighteenth-century buckets served as champagne ves-
sels. They had the best paintings and prints that they could afford. All had
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luxury
large libraries with many antique books. Many relied on painted effects on
walls and floors, museum-quality carpets, and also custom-made furni-
ture to complete the look. Many of the pieces they owned had a prove-
nance to important figures of the past: Marella Agnelli, for instance,
owned two impressive Louis XVI ormolu-mounted ebony and Japanese
and European lacquer cabinets-on-stands that had belonged to the eigh-
teenth-century English novelist and eccentric William Beckford and a
great deal of porcelain from the last Tsar’s yachts. Most had American, but
the very rich had English or French, decorators. All of them had French,
and many also had Russian, furniture. French furniture was Greta Garbo’s
private passion, along with the Renoir and other paintings that she kept
concealed behind a rose damask curtain in her Manhattan apartment.
Recent years have seen the demise of the very last of the great hostesses,
most notably perhaps the Americans Brooke Astor (who died in 2007),
Bunny Mellon (who died in 2014 aged 103), and the Southern beauty and
socialite Carol Petrie, who died in January 2015 at the age of 90. Her retailer
husband Milton Petrie, believed to be worth $1 billion, owned ‘Toys R Us’
among many other businesses, and she lived in a beautiful Manhattan
apartment full of good antiques designed by David Easton. Mrs Astor was
the third wife married into one of the great American plutocrat families.
She was well known for her Park Avenue apartment, with its famous brass
library by Albert Hadley, her luxurious lifestyle and gala dinners, dazzling
gowns by Oscar de la Renta, conjoined with serious philanthropy. Bunny
Mellon, second wife of one of the United States’ richest financiers, was also
the Listerine and Schick razor heiress. She was a more private person, pre-
ferring to take her private jet (with its own runway) when travelling
between her beloved garden in Middleburg, Virginia, and her numerous
other residences around the world. Although enormously wealthy, Bunny
preferred furniture made by her estate craftsmen after her own designs.
Her gardening clothes might have been by Hubert de Givenchy, but she
shunned publicity and could never be called vulgar.
220
Fig. 6.12. Jean Schlumberger (French, 1907–87), flower pot (pot de fleurs), 1960, ame-
thyst, emeralds, diamonds, black garnet ore, terracotta, 18, 20 and 22 carat gold, 7¼
inches H x 4 inches W x 4 inches D (18.4 cm x 10.2 cm x 10.2 cm). Schlumerger began his
career designing buttons for Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris. He then moved to work for Tiffany,
New York. Mrs Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon owned numerous jewelled pot plants by Schlum-
berger, which she dotted around her various houses, possibly as little jokes, as she loved
growing her own fresh flowers in very expensive hothouses. They were a modern take on
the Fabergé artificial vases that she might have afforded herself, but her commissions are
of their time and place, and look very 1950s, with their spikey air. That the central jewelled
head detaches to become a brooch is a part of the whimsy.
The sale of Bunny Mellon’s effects took place during the writing of
this book, at Sotheby’s in New York. Her furnishings, which included
some eighteenth-century furniture in poor condition mixed in with
much wicker, wood, and metalwork, netted $218 million. Her table linens
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luxury
embroidered in blue with a simple tree fetched more than $20,000 per set.
One of her most extraordinary objects, given to the Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts, was a jewelled flowerpot by the society jeweller Jean Schlum-
berger. Made in 1960, it includes a giant amethyst, emeralds, diamonds,
black garnet, and, at the heart of the piece, a terracotta pot from her gar-
den covered in 22-carat gold strap-work (Figure 6.12). The flower head can
be detached and worn as a brooch. It is an astonishing bravura of high and
low, of the exclusive and the demotic, with a design that does not teeter
into the kitsch. Mellon owned many such bibelots, which must have
amused her sense of the chic of poverty.
CHANGING TIMES
The interwar period brought forth new and bold ideas about luxury and
the luxurious. It was an era that faced forward optimistically with a pha-
lanx of new science, medicine, and technology that improved daily life,
but was always marked by anxiety and paranoia connected with geopol
itics, the cold war, and massive and divisive social change, particularly
regarding the place of women and minorities. The excesses of the previous
generation were seen as both decadent and old-fashioned. Luxury for the
new era had to be provided with a new veneer of respectability and accep-
tance. Yet the tension between restraint and opulence always remained
beneath the surface. By the 1950s, this could be seen in the diverging
notions of luxury emerging from America: one democratic and participa-
tory, as proposed by Hollywood films and the printed media; the other still
staunchly elitist and connected to wealth and power, as in the case of con-
tinental and English luxury and the Manhattan society that could afford to
access it. New technologies now became almost more important than the
envelope of the house, indicating perhaps something of a return to Victo-
rian priorities. Private planes, music, television, and elaborate security sys-
tems cost a great deal of money. For American cereal-heiress Marjorie
222
Merriweather Post, running an impressive household in the 1950s was as

much about a private movie theatre, piped music to all parts of the house,
and a private propeller plane decked out in modern chintz, as it was about
her fine collection of eighteenth-century antiques, paintings of deceased
Russian nobility, and Sèvres porcelain. It was also very much about staff—
in her case, ones who measured each place setting at dinner. This is a con-
tinuation of a particular British caricature of luxury. It also included true
eccentricities, such as an individual rainwater filtration system in the roof
to deliver pure water to her private dressing room, where she had her very
long hair washed and permanently waved several times a year in a nine-
hour process. The public knew about Mrs Post’s interests, such as square
dancing, as they could study her in the magazines, and she regularly
invited college students to take dinner with her, all of which was covered in
the media. Where luxury existed, it was now expected that more people
should be allowed to see it.
The post-war period was also one of less analysis and preoccupation
with definitions of luxury. In a society in which welfare and economic
achievement for the masses was more than a dream, luxury came to be
perceived as something of marginal importance, a little irritating or even
embarrassing, a niche hobby for the rich or—worse still—the pretentious.
The counterculture of the 1960s suggested that cheap wine, good drugs,
and lots of sexual relations were much more exciting and desirable than
sitting at a fancy restaurant eating foreign food. When Coco Chanel
returned to work in 1954 (after her 1939 ‘retirement’ to Switzerland), her
controlled and modernist ‘chromatisme Chanel’ was a striking foil to this
counterculture and the deliberate vulgarity, especially in the 1960s. Cha-
nel herself once said that she would not be surprised if women might start
showing their ‘ass’ in the future; the sight of belly buttons and midriffs was
enough to horrify her in the 1960s and 1970s. The middle classes grew in
education, spending power, and influence around the First World, and
luxury had never defined their existence.
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luxury
When luxury returned with a vengeance in the deregulated environ-

ment of the 1980s, it was at first reported on rather ironically and often
with great humour, as in magazines such as Tatler in Britain and the Amer-
ican Vanity Fair—and people sat up and noticed. Extreme luxury almost
had to be explained again, often by resorting to running explanatory sto-
ries on the great ‘clothes horses’, couturiers, hostesses, and patrons of the
past. Indeed, such stories provided most of the content of these maga-
zines. The cost of antiques, old jewellery, and antique or ‘vintage’ costume
began to soar. A new generation, particularly of young women and gay
men, began to rediscover a legacy that had gone out of fashion in the
1970s. They rediscovered the joys of interwar Hollywood films, afternoon
tea, and evening cocktails, and enjoyed watching the hugely successful
television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1981).
Rather further up the price scale, billionaires such as Malcolm Forbes
(owner of Forbes Magazine among other things) staged parties in which
guests where flown in from all around the world, events that evoked the
glamour and profligacy of the Edwardian period or the 1930s. Forbes
famously spent $2.5 million on his birthday in Morocco in 1989. And the
great stars of the 1950s such as Elizabeth Taylor were still on hand to under-
line the references to luxuries past.
224
Everything that Money Can Buy?

Understanding Contemporary Luxury
•
FROM RUSSIA WITH MONEY
In late 2013, two Russian multimillionaires in their thirties competed at a

London Mayfair club as to who could spend the more on drinks. In just
two and a half hours they spent over £131,000 ($200,000) on fifty-five
Magnums of Cristal, ninety-six bottles of Dom Pérignon (at £325 each),
twenty champagne cocktails, six expresso martinis, seven mojitos, six
Bellinis, ten bottles of Peroni, ten measures of 18-year-old Glenmorangie
whisky, eleven bottles of vintage Krug champagne, eight bottles of Belle
Époque Rosé and sixteen of Armand de Brignac, two magnums of Belve-
dere vodka, and two bottles of Chivas Regal whisky and, to digest it all,
twelve bottles of mineral water.1 Luckily they were not hospitalized. The
news was widely reported in newspapers in the following days with com-
ments about how the Russian nouveaux riches were behaving in London as
if it were Monte Carlo in the Belle Époque.
Inebriation might be the appropriate expression to capture the Russian
multimillionaire story, one of alcoholic profligacy and wealth that had lit-
erally gone to their heads and livers. But they are hardly exceptional: their
compatriot Yevgeny Alexandrovich Chichvarkin, mobile-phone tycoon
turned wine merchant in London after leaving Russia, has explained that
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luxury
to drink a bottle of 55-year-old Glenfiddich whisky (cost around £123,000)

on a night in with friends is not excessive if you are part of a group of
people who can afford yachts worth millions of dollars.2 The reality is that
the public rejoices in such insane excess: it is the stuff of dreams, a fairy tale
for the twenty-first century. Tales abound of six-star hotels, of gold-plated
cars, and of watches worth £33 million.3 There are many resonances here
of the hedonism of the 1980s and the television series Lifestyles of the Rich
and Famous. The difference is that today this hyper-consumption might
be photographed with an iPhone and placed immediately on the Web via
Instagram; and one does not have to sit up until late to watch the Ameri-
can TV series. The fact that such excesses are all around us in the media
and on the Web renders them somehow more ‘normalized’. Such luxury is
therefore not completely unreachable, as we can see it, often immedi-
ately—and this makes it both appealing and an easy target for dismissal in
the moralizing presses of countries as different as England, the United
States, France, and Sweden.
Luxury in the twenty-first century is on everyone’s lips because it is per-
ceived to embody the increasing disparity of wealth between a restricted
global elite and the majority of us: ‘the rich’ versus ‘the rest’. This opposi-
tion used to be a topic of concern in the differential between the developed
West and the rest of the world, but after a generation of growth for the
emerging economies, wealth disparity has become a home debate for
countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia,
bringing a new set of concepts and concerns regarding luxury. With a chief
executive earning 202 times more than the person at the bottom of the
company, English journalist Zoe Williams argues that ‘the tolerance band
of human ability simply isn’t wide enough for any one person to be 202
times better than anyone else’.4 The perceived immorality of income dis-
parity is mirrored in the accompanying contemporary consumption:
while most of us have to do with a reasonably cheap bottle of wine, a small
number of people can afford a bottle that costs not just several times as
226
OUP UNCORRECTED
OUP CORRECTED
PROOF
PROOF
– FIRST
– FINAL,
PROOF,
03/02/16,
03/02/16,
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everything that money can buy?
much but thousands of times as much. It seems that the multiplication of

such consumption has increased since the mid-twentieth century. If one
studies the liquor bills for a society party from the 1950s or even a luxury
hotel menu from the 1910s, the prices are not thousands of times those of
the everyday person’s tipple.
Yet some might argue that the plutocrats of this world have not had it so
easy since the global economic crisis of 2007–8. The crisis hit some parts of
the luxury market hard. In mid-2013 the only Ferrari dealer in Greece had
closed, having sold its last car more than a year earlier. The problem was
not the fact that the rich of Greece could no longer afford to buy Ferraris,
but that it was no longer advisable to be seen spending enormous amounts
of money on cars when the country faced financial ruin. The rich—bank-
ers, stockbrokers, and CEOs in particular—were in the firing line of a blame
game and had to keep their profile low. In some cases, the reputation of
entire areas had to be sanitized. At the beginning of the crisis in 2009, it
was rumoured that in Larissa, in rural Thessaly, there were more Porsche
Caynennes per capita than anywhere else in Europe.5 To make things
worse, governments started to pursue their wealthy citizens by asking how
their declared income matched the high values of their cars, jewellery, and
villas. In Italy, several owners of yachts were arrested, as on their tax returns
they had declared they were on the verge of indigence. Luxury and fashion
producers were not unaffected by all this: in 2012, two major Italian houses
were accused of not paying tax on their revenue.6 Luxury and luxury pro-
ducers were linked to the disappearance of money to tax havens and off-
shore funds. They had literally ‘run off ’ with the profits.
The point here is not to accuse such figures of wasteful consumption,
but the realization—by the taxman—that certain forms of luxury—
those for the very rich—are both an enjoyment and also an asset. Yet, in
some cases, the investments are not worth the money, as people can over-
pay. Take, for example, the fantastic villa at 116 Ocean Drive, Miami,
which sold for $41.5 million (£25 million) in September 2013. It
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luxury
included a swimming pool with inlaid 24-carat gold tiles and gold-plated
bathroom fixtures. In the 1990s it had welcomed guests such as Madonna,
Cher, and Elton John. In 1997 it made the front page of all newspapers in
the world when its then owner, Gianni Versace, was shot on its doorstep.
Versace had spent more than $20 million on renovations to the building
when he purchased it in 1992, and the family sold it in 2000. With the
crash of the property market, the villa failed to find a buyer for the asking
price of $125 million in 2012, and it was then reduced in early 2013 to a
mere $75 million, to be sold for just over half that sum in late 2013.7
Luxury is therefore for the super-rich an investment, something that
can be owned for a period of time, later to be sold—hopefully for a profit.
This often happens with the advent of divorce, court cases, bankruptcy, or
estate planning (divorce, we are told, is one of the main drivers of the auc-
tion market for decorative arts). This is the case for mansions, villas, works
of art, and even the bottle of wine discussed above—such bottles are drunk
much less frequently than one can imagine. This is because the rich like to
enjoy life but like to part from their money somewhat less. Some research
suggests that they are actually often quite parsimonious and like to maxi-
mize the financial value of their luxury. For instance, instead of buying an
expensive jet, why not opt for a timeshare? There are schemes and clubs
for all pockets, ranging from exclusive groups that allow access to a variety
of planes whenever and wherever, to cheaper providers like Lux Jet, a com-
pany that promises its customers can ‘Fly like a VIP this summer’ at a price
under £1,000 from London (alas Luton) to Ibiza, Palma, or Cannes. All of
this with ‘no gate queues; no security queues’.8 Less than $350,000 can buy
a membership of a residence club with properties all over Europe. An art
icle published in 2009 in the UK newspaper the Independent reported that
share ownership of yachts was on the up after the economic crises, as, in
the words of Martin Gray, founder of Fractional Sailing, ‘for gilded mil-
lionaires struggling to manage declining fortunes and bruised egos, it is
the prudent way to keep up appearances’.9
228
LUXURY FOR THE REAL HOUSEWIFE
It would be a mistake to understand the power of luxury by blaming it on

the rich and seeing it as a divisive force. In reality, luxury has become
something to aspire to for vast strata of society. We might not be among
those who can afford a bottle of whisky with a price tag similar to a small
flat, but we are told that we can purchase instead ‘luxury chocolate’, or
foods that are part of the ‘taste the difference’ range. Advertising tells us
that we are unique, that we all need to be distinctive, and that luxury is the
capacity to reward ourselves with something a bit pricey but not unreach-
able. It might be a perfume from a well-known fashion brand, designer
kitchen equipment, a rare olive oil, or wine from one of France’s classic
wine-growing regions. Although consumers today tend to think that peo-
ple have always loved French and Italian products, this is not the case. In
the case of French regional wines, the allure of such products was created
only between the end of the nineteenth century and the Vichy years of
the Second World War, a period in which the consumption of regional
products was linked to a new vision of tourism made possible via the
improved roads of the Routes Nationales 6 and 7. This led to a renewed
emphasis on ‘regional styles’ and ‘folkloric traditions’ adapted to a com-
pletely new luxury market that stressed the importance of terroir and
region, rather than just urban gastronomy. The Appelation d’Origine
Côntrolée (AOC), which protects consumers concerning the true identity
of French wine, dates from only 1919 and gave new power to growers,
rather than to wine merchants.10
The true achievement of luxury in the twenty-first century has been its
ability to beguile as many people as possible in much the same way as mass
consumption did in the post-war Western world. It plays on our inner feel-
ing of wanting ‘something better’, and nurtures the rampant individual-
ism of self-fashioning (inauthenticity, or narcissism perhaps?) that has
come so much to shape our societies since the 1980s.11 Perhaps we all
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luxury
secretly dream of being little Russian oligarchs who can shop for antiques
at Steinitz and take over whole floors of hotels.
Figures confirm the assumption that luxury is not just the hobby of a
small rich elite. Since 1982 the cost of luxury (measured by an index with
the scandalous name of ‘Cost of Living Extremely Well’) has gone up 2.5
per cent more quickly than inflation in the United States. This means that
to live the life of luxury has become very expensive. Yet the net worth of
America’s richest (another index named ‘Forbes 400’) has increased twice
as fast as the cost of luxury. For those of us unfamiliar with indexes, this
means that in the Unites Sates there are now many more people who can
afford ‘to live extremely well’, even if such a life is quite costly compared to
that of just a generation ago.12
Yet, the pervasiveness of luxury goes beyond being merely wealthy.
A simple trip to a shopping street or to a mall reveals that luxury is not just
about the group of people ‘living extremely well’. In the Unites States
alone, there are more than twenty million citizens who have assets of at
least $1 million. Half of them belong to the group of the so-called baby
boomers. Born between the end of the Second World War and the late
1950s, baby boomers were the children of the economic expansion of the
1950s and 1960s, the young professionals (yuppies) of the 1980s who later
profited by the rise of the value in their properties in the 1990s and early
2000s. They are keen to indulge in fine up-to-date fashions, luxury cos-
metics, and fine wines, and consume at levels that would have been
unimaginable for the generation that preceded them (fittingly called ‘the
silent generation’) and that perhaps will be out of the reach of the genera-
tion that has followed them, which is more acquainted with economic cri-
ses, joblessness, up- and re-cycling, and casual or precarious work.13
New York Times reporter Guy Trebay puts it well when he observes that
today ‘the client most crucial to luxury goods purveyors is no longer a Rocke
feller but a Real Housewife’.14 Yet, there is luxury and there is luxury. Social
scientists have been creative in their categorizations: they put forward the
230
idea that contemporary luxury is segmented according to both income and

social/cultural capital. One such categorization uses the value of the object
(and related income necessary to purchase it) and distinguishes between
‘exceptional luxury’ (rare and precious objects, of the highest quality, made
on commission), ‘intermediate luxury’ (objects of great quality, produced
in small batches), and ‘accessible luxury’ (sometimes known as ‘masstige’,
the realm of the luxury brands).15 Another typology is slightly more refined
as it identifies four categories of luxury: ‘true luxury’ includes those items
for which money is not a constraint, such as top-range cars, jets, and yachts;
‘traditional luxury’ includes instead fashion, jewellery, fragrances, pre-
mium wines and spirits; ‘modern luxury living’ relates instead to the search
for status and identity through travel, technology, services such as hotels
and spas, and online luxury; and, finally, ‘life’s little luxuries’ is composed of
the truly mass-market luxury range of affordable fashion, shoes, imported
or locally produced ‘organic’ foods, and body-care products.16
Typologies are attempts at distilling a more complex reality. However,
they are useful, as they point to the fact that there is a vast pool of luxury
goods that are not necessarily beyond the reach of many people but are
accessible and considered almost necessary for mere mortals. This, how-
ever, has created two problems. The first is how top luxury (that of the
super-rich) differs from the rest of the luxury market. Sometimes referred
to as ‘metaluxury’ or ‘über luxury’, the top end of the luxury market now
needs to be extravagant (or elitist) beyond belief, because basic luxury is
within the reach of too many today.17 It is no longer sufficient to go to the
best restaurants; one has to have a top chef employed privately at home; it
is not enough to take holidays in some of the best resorts; one needs to buy
or rent an entire island. Metaluxury aspires to be ‘out of the market’ (to
own something that is extremely rare, sometimes unique, such as Bunny
Mellon’s unique vivid blue diamond, which sold in late 2014 for the record
price of $32.6 million), precisely because most luxury is today increasingly
standardized and comes with a pegged price tag attached to it.
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luxury
The second problem of the enlargement of the conceptual space and

market potential of luxury has been a change in the nature of production
and the image of some of the best-known brands in the world. In the late
2000s journalist Dana Thomas accused the luxury industry of ‘selling off ’
the key asset of luxury: its lustre. In a provocative book entitled Deluxe:
How Luxury Lost its Lustre, she investigated the shallow world of the luxury
brands through its producers and its customers.18 What some had seen as
the triumph of the ‘democraticization of luxury’, she saw instead as a strat-
egy on the part of luxury brands to maximize their profits by trying to
address all sorts of clients.19 A case in point might be Yves Saint Laurent, a
well-known producer of expensive haute couture and prêt-à-porter in the
1960s and 1970s, whose business expanded dramatically in the 1980s
thanks to accessible luxury such as perfumes. Between 1979 and 1989 the
sales of Saint Laurent perfumes increased sixteen times.20 Accessible luxury
used to be positioned at a much higher level, with higher entry points in
terms of price. Since the 1980s, there has been a true ‘luxury inflation’, and
now almost everything can be presented as a luxury product. Sometimes
producers combine meanings that are conceptual opposites, such as that of
‘affordable luxury’: cinemas now often have ‘classes’, like an ocean-liner of
the past, with better chairs, lap blankets, and even a drinks waiter. We are
told, as another example, that Korean carmaker Hyundai developed a
strategy to produce ‘affordable luxury’ sedan cars, and by 2015 this had
become the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian automobile indus-
try.21 This is a semantic shift that would have been incomprehensible to an
Edwardian gentlemen or even to a 1950s white-collar worker.
How did it happen that luxury became so omnipresent? The last thirty
years have seen a transformation of mere commodities into luxuries. While
in the eighteenth century a number of luxuries available only to the few
became more widely obtainable commodities (populuxuries) through pro-
cesses of imitation, substitution, and replacement (for example, of silver
with silver plate) and production on a large scale (thus reducing costs of
232
production per unit), the last generation has experienced the opposite
trend. What once were thought of as simple, undifferentiated commodities
are today perceived as luxuries. A good example of this phenomenon is
something that might not immediately come across as a luxury: coffee. In
1950s America, a cup of coffee cost a dime. It was an undifferentiated com-
modity that was part of the consuming habits of the entire North Ameri-
can population. Today, coffee is both a commodity and a ‘luxury’. Anyone
entering one of the thousands of outlets belonging to well-known chains
such as Starbucks or Costa is presented with a large variety of sizes and
types. These might not be luxuries per se, but the segmentation of the mar-
ket has allowed for niche coffee to find customers. Those who want a genu-
inely more select experience might wish to sip their coffee at the Pedrocchi
Café in Padua (the nineteenth-century French author Stendhal was one of
its customers) or the Café Florian in Venice, the first coffee shop in Europe.
Here coffee costs a multiple of what it might cost at Starbucks and is most
certainly not served in paper cups with your name on it. Yet, even if you do
not care for such a refined atmosphere, you might still decide to purchase
an Italian coffee machine and opt for a rare type of coffee. For instance,
kopi luwak is a coffee produced by wild Asian civets eating and defecating
coffee berries. By passing through the civets’ bowels, the berries acquire a
special aroma. For those who think this is unpleasant, prices suggest oth-
erwise. Only 1,000 lb (454 kg) of this special coffee are produced every
year, and it is sold at more than $300 a lb.22
One could cite a whole host of similar examples, with products ranging
from beer to wallets and pens: an affluent society will always find new ways
of spending its money. If economists with a social conscience warned us
against the peril of overconsumption, they did not foresee that one of the
strategies used by corporations would be not to try to sell us twenty jump-
ers a year when we need only two. They prefer to sell us two sweaters that cost
as much as twenty. The sweater or jumper is no longer an undifferentiated
piece of knitwear, but is a finely woven, ethically sourced, environmentally
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luxury
friendly garment produced by a famous brand, often backed by a great

deal of advertising. This is what fashion studies expert Patrizia Calefato
calls ‘the luxurification of consumption’ through advertising, shopping,
fashion, and the media.23
We are clearly simplifying the importance both of marketing and of con-
sumer psychology, as our aim is to show that twentieth-century luxury was
born out of perfectly ordinary products, because these were, and still are,
what people want and indeed need. The potential to sell large diamonds or
eighteenth-century furniture is rather limited compared to clothing, bags,
and indeed pens and coffee, things that people tend to use on a daily basis.
And this explains why commodities are presented to us as luxuries and we are
asked to pay prices that confirm that they are indeed luxuries. The process of
mere commodities being turned into luxuries is well exemplified in the sphere
of ‘technoluxuries’. In the early 2000s, the author and academic James B.
Twitchell proposed the idea that personal technologies ranging from micro-
waves to Walkmans become omnipresent (and more recently this would
apply to cellphones and smartphones), yet they still retain an ‘air’ of exclusiv-
ity that differentiates them from mere mass-market consumer goods.24 Apple
is a case in point: a brand considered by some to belong to the luxury sphere
and by others to cult or mass culture. Although producing iPhones, iPads,
and iPods in their millions, Apple projects an air of dramatic design, present-
ing goods in a beautiful white cubic sliding box rather like perfume packag-
ing, and adopts marketing strategies similar to those used for luxury goods.
For instance, its shops are minimalist boutiques, with the most famous
among them in Manhattan dominant amid the luxury shops of Fifth Avenue
(Figure 7.1). Little merchandise is on display, and well-trained hipster atten-
dants glide over to advise the clients that the new product has generally
already sold out. This is even more the case with brands such as Vertu and
Prada, which have made real luxury products out of mass technologies such
as mobile phones, which they sell in the gigantic luxury shopping malls of
Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Singapore.25
234
Fig. 7.1. The glass cube for the Apple Store, Fifth Avenue, New York, designed by Bohlin
Cywinski Jackson.
THE EXPERIENCE OF LUXURY
In a world in which extravagance has become a mass phenomenon, how

does luxury retain its appeal? Notwithstanding the fact that luxury is often
accused of being about material overindulgence, since the early 2000s the
nature—but also the value—of luxury has increasingly become imma
terial, paradoxical as this might sound. In the words of one contemporary
commentator, ‘luxury is today more a condition than an object’.26 In other
words, luxury is not just about acquiring an object, but is rather a way of
living, of thinking, and of aspiring. Luxury aims to recover its uniqueness
not by offering expensive and exclusive goods, but by providing an experi-
ence that is unique in the acquisition and enjoyment of such goods (and
increasingly services) that might not necessarily be exceptional per se. The
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luxury
philosopher Yves Michaud talks about the need of individuals to experi-

ence the intensity of emotions via luxury. He argues that luxury is pre-
sented as the key to ‘authenticity’ against a world that is increasingly dull.27
One could, on the contrary, suggest that the world increasingly values the
‘inauthentic’: postmodernism encouraged all sorts of slippery characters
to conjure up identities and professions in which everything was ‘contin-
gent’, ‘relative’, and about ‘appearances’. This is not the sensual economy
we described as characterizing the late Victorians and the Edwardians; a
good French wine today might be explained on the menu as smelling of
‘smoky violets’ (as at the Wine Library in Woollahra in 2015), because con-
sumers lack the aesthetic and sensory training of wealthy, well-educated
Edwardian diners, who really knew what they were smelling and tasting.
All of this is somewhat problematic for the luxury brands. Those cus-
tomers who really want something beyond the object are less likely to be
lured simply by the straightforward use of anything as crude as a mere
logo. It is perhaps for this reason that Prada in 2014 began to reduce the
emphasis on the emblematic triangle that appears even on the back of its
T-shirts. Customers now explain that they want something beyond labels.
For such consumers, ‘true’ luxury means the rejection of established asso-
ciations like that between luxury goods and brands. Therefore, in the sec-
ond decade of the twenty-first century, we have seen the emergence of ‘no
branding’: upmarket products that conspicuously display the lack of any
visible logo.28 This phenomenon can be explained in two ways. On the one
hand, customers wish to distinguish themselves from what is increasingly
perceived as a mass market for luxury brands and choose a product that is
not the average choice of most people. Some also fear that the conspicuous
display of brands connotes a negative image of overindulgence and deca-
dence. The ‘no logo’ therefore makes the product more about the experi-
ence, often intimate or shared only by those who can actually see the
difference between an everyday bag and the luxury bag with no brand
logo. A different interpretation of ‘no logo luxury’ comes instead from
236
retailers who have realized that in order to keep sales high they need to
have a more discreet approach to branding. Therefore, they are investing
more in highly visible retail spaces rather than on the placement of their
logo. For the customer, this means that the ‘luxury element’ comes not
from the logo but from the experience of having purchased the good from
a luxury shop, sometimes in a prominent location, an experience that is
worth as much if not more than the product itself.
Marketing gurus have understood that the consumer needs to feel
unique rather than to be sold a unique product. A simple, but effective,
example might be perfume. Rather than selling well-known branded fra-
grances, a handful of London perfumers are now offering clients the
chance to create their own scent. They follow the example of Parfumerie
Fragonard, where, in its workshop in Eze, not far from Nice in the south of
France, the company provides professional help to customers to create
their own distinctive essences, which they can then purchase.29 Here lux-
ury is not just about purchasing a perfume that is unique, but is also about
the opportunity to create it yourself, so that you become an artisan in your
own right. It is as much about acquiring skills and understanding processes
as it is about the total customization of the product.
The importance of customization is particularly present in luxury ser-
vices. The Gateway Canyons Resort & Spa, a luxury ‘discovery resort’ on
the border between Colorado and Utah, offers the option of custom-made
cowboy boots and hats as well as a complete documentary of a client’s stay
produced by a professional photographer. Built by John Hendricks, the
founder of the Discovery Channel, Gateway Canyons has only fifty-eight
exclusive rooms and fourteen ‘casitas’ and provides among its many cus-
tomized services ‘Native American artists who offer beading classes where
the spouses have taken home the jewelry that they made’.30 The Peninsula
chain of hotels, a luxury brand that originated in Hong Kong but is now
branching into Europe, offers cooking classes for children, flower-arrang-
ing for ladies, and golf for men (players are helicoptered to the golf course).
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luxury
Clearly this is a form of innovative marketing, but one that is still predi-
cated on traditional gender roles, made explicit by the images on the web-
site: attractive women, not men, arrange the bouquets.
A different kind of customized service is that of the ‘genie on call’: the
concierge. An omnipresent figure in all high-society films, the concierge used
to be the man in the lobby of a posh hotel, often accommodating impossible
requests from his wealthy customers. Today, the concierge is a large part of
the ‘lifestyle management services’ industry, catering to the needs of the
super-rich. Companies such as Quintessentially Lifestyle, Les Concierges,
T’Rouge, Concierge India, Concierge Alliance Global, and AmEx offer dif-
ferent levels of membership, costing anything between $1,000 and $15,000
a year. Les Concierges, based in India, had 250 corporate and 700 individual
members in 2013. They can access services ranging from the booking of
theatre seats, to legal and medical help anywhere in the world.31
The idea of providing service and enhancing the purchasing experience
is fast becoming essential for high-end market products. This has long
existed in different forms for the very rich, and has often revolved around
travel. In the 1920s, an all-woman chauffeur company called the ‘X
Garage’, led by the cross-dressing Marion Barbara ‘Joe’ Carstairs (a Stan-
dard oil heiress), offered to drive customers from Kensington, London, as
far as Morocco.32 And the Australian-born country girl Lady Sheila Mill-
banke (1895–1969, née Chisholme), who married an earl, a baronet, and a
Russian prince, operated an exclusive travel agency through Harrods
when she had run out of her money late in life.33 Some of the brands work-
ing in the ‘exclusive luxury’ sector are well aware of the importance of ser-
vice in supporting the reputation of their products, even if this comes at a
cost. While most watchmakers will not service models produced before
the 1960s, the world-leading horological firm Patek is able to offer a service
by which each of its watches (going back to 1839) can be maintained
through an archive of five million components and the use of original tools
going back 175 years.34 The acquisition of a Patek product is only the start
238
of a relationship between customer and firm that will continue over the
years and across generations. The Patek business lineage acts as an insur-
ance that this is going to continue over the next 175 years, and this is pre-
cisely how all their advertising campaigns are structured.
In this new vision of luxury, more than simple money is required from
its consumers. Time and knowledge are key concepts in the very notion of
twenty-first-century luxury. The idea is not new. The sociologist Thorstein
Veblen, author of the famous Theory of the Leisure Class, published in
1899, believed that ‘distinction’, the need to appear different from others,
was not just achieved through the purchase and use of luxurious and
expensive objects. It was also performed through the conspicuous expendi-
ture of time in what we might call useless activities. Instead of working and
earning money, those who can afford it simply spend money in activities
that are financially unrewarding, such as playing golf, going to parties,
driving around in luxury cars, and enjoying long holidays in exotic loca-
tions. One might object that these activities are linked to pleasure, but it
turns out that not all of them are: the interminable high-society balls of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were certainly not a simple plea-
sure but served to signal social position and belonging, marked allegiances,
and sometimes also social charity.35 Today, spending time in ‘useless’ activ-
ities gives employment to an entire range of services, from hairdressers to
golf caddies.
Leisure and service activities also require knowledge, sometimes very
specialized. When such activities wish to signal distinction, they must be as
exclusive as possible. The example of golf is fitting: it is not simply a matter
of paying enormous sums to join a private club; one has also to be able to
play the game. The same applies to other leisure sports such as tennis or
polo. A dinner in a fancy restaurant requires good knowledge of etiquette,
of ingredients and wines, plus a bit of French, the lingua franca of luxury
food. Going to an auction similarly requires the need to know something
about art as well as the process of bidding. One has to spend an inordinate
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luxury
amount of time to be able to engage in a proper way in useless activities.

Luxury requires culture. Those who do not know how to behave might be
as rich as Midas but will not go very far in society. And this explains why the
new rich of China are fast becoming the most committed golfers in the
world and fly to Old England to rent an estate and play the part of gentry
squires shooting animals for the weekend. Discreet services exist in cities
such as London to show the wives of the newly arrived rich Chinese how to
behave, and their children might be schooled at home in how to eat food
and sit at the table by a new, more private version of a nanny combined
with a butler. Many of the service providers are the divorced wives of
extremely wealthy men, especially from Asia, who can now sell back their
expertise in the marketplace.
One of the ‘experiential’ areas that in recent years has been subject to
intense ‘luxurification’ is that of food. A meal, or the use of ingredients to
produce food, is part of an experience that is both extremely material
(involving all the senses) but also fleeting (as nothing remains after a
meal). We have already seen the importance of banquets and feasts in the
Roman, medieval, and early modern courts. Food remains one of life’s
necessities and the source of great pleasure. We are all well aware of the
kudos and cost of a Michelin-star restaurant. Started in 1900 by the
Michelin Brothers (the tyre manufacturers) as a guide to visit France by
car, over the course of the twentieth century the Michelin Guide came to
embody the best of food internationally. Yet the criteria for receiving one,
two, or three Michelin stars have little to do with either price or luxury
per se. Food, but also wine, spirits, and confectionary, are appreciated not
just because of their price or intrinsic taste but because of their lifestyle
association. So, no one can claim to have visited Paris without paying a
visit to Ladurée, the famous patisserie where one can supposedly savour
the best macaroons in town. It is surely the experience of the patisserie
with its faux-ancien régime interior that helps make these macaroons taste
so much better than any others.
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Yet, Ladurée (just like its neighbour, artisan boulanger Eric Kayser) is in
fact to be found in several countries. In 2014 it even took over a small
antiques shop in a far-flung Sydney suburb, becoming a favoured locale
for purchasing gifts for university farewells and ‘hen nights’. While empha-
sizing the unique experience of artisan-made pastries, its business has
become multinational, even if few can pronounce it properly. Even more
than material goods, experience is replicable anywhere in the world. It
might not be the same as sitting in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but it is a good
approximation. The same can be said of music, one of the greatest luxuries
of rich and poor alike until the twentieth century. In this case, technology
(the invention of recording and the gramophone) has allowed it to become
a mass product.36 Yet quality remains a distinctive feature, and so, if one
wants to hear the best of Bach performed by great musicians with perfect
acoustics, one must first spend considerable amounts of money travelling
to attend a concert in one of the major metropolitan concert halls. Indeed,
fine music, five-star hotels, and luxury travel are the basis of the most
important luxury experience tour companies.
THE SPACE AND TIME OF LUXURY
This analysis of how in the rich West luxury has become something more
complex than the simple consumption of material goods can be pushed a
little further to show how the concept of luxury has come to shape our
views of both time and space. Sophia Coppola in her film Bling Ring (2013)
narrates the story of a group of Californian middle-class youngsters who
enter the houses of Hollywood celebrities to steal their luxury belongings.
The film plays on two important themes: the boredom and alienation of
middle-class life and the magnificent spaces inhabited by the super-rich.
The appeal of luxury houses and palaces has been evident since at least
the Renaissance. The quest for space is perhaps a basic human need and
materializes itself in the power shown by the tall medieval towers erected
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luxury
by rich families of the Italian city states. In fact they were often built—
remember Versailles—to impress both the populace and foreign noble-
men. In the twentieth century any American billionaire worthy of the
name had to have a Manhattan tower, from Marjorie Merriweather Post in
the 1920s to the Rockefellers to Donald Trump.37 The ability to reproduce
images in print, as we have already noted, allowed us to peep into the
townhouses, luxurious apartments, chateaux, and country houses of the
rich and famous. This was the great innovation of Diana Vreeland at Amer-
ican Vogue in the early 1960s; she opened up the houses of Café Society via
the lush full-colour photography of Horst P. Horst and the journalism of
his partner Valentine Lawford.
Yet in the last generation this fascination has intensified to the point
where we think of houses and apartments not just as somewhere to live but
as an asset, as something that can be ‘traded up’ or ‘made up’. This is
because—of all commodities that have become luxuries—space is perhaps
the clearest example. Space (to have a roof over one’s head) is a necessity,
but, for most people in the West and many parts of the developing world,
physical space has become a luxury. Anyone trying to buy even the small-
est of apartments in London, New York, or Sydney is well aware of this.
Space has become expensive also outside the West. Exclusionary housing
markets now also exist in parts of cities such as Prague.38 The average cost
of a house in Beijing in 2010 was around twenty-five times the average
income, and it was calculated that the cost of a 100 square metre apart-
ment in central Beijing (c.$450,000) was equivalent to a salary of 1,000
years for a Chinese peasant.39
The proof that space has become the ultimate luxury is also to be found
at the top end of the market. In London, an apartment at 1 Hyde Park will
cost you the best part of $200 million.40 In New York, 432 Park Avenue in
Manhattan between 56th and 57th Street, the site of the former Drake
Hotel, is the tallest residential building in the Western hemisphere. Lux-
ury living here comes in a gradient from two-bedroom apartments (1,789
242
square feet) costing $9.7 million to full-floor six-bedroom penthouses

(8,255 square feet) at $95 million. Three- and four-bedroom apartments
are also available at $31.8 and $44.8 million respectively. There are also
studio flats for sale at prices ranging from $1.5 to $3.9 million on the 28th
and 29th floors, but these can only be purchased as maid’s quarters for
residents already owning an apartment. For those who enjoy their wine,
personal wine cellars are to be purchased for as little as $158,000.41
The examples of London and New York might not be indicative of gen-
eral trends, but they tell us that the entire property market has been mov-
ing upwards. As more and more people are excluded from buying their
own homes, property is seen as a luxury. This means that the rich will go
the extra mile to ensure that they have access to top-end luxury property.
In an increasingly populated and connected world, it seems to be difficult
to find space where calm and quiet reign. This is why luxury companies
offer deserted islands, apartments the size of football pitches with views
where no human being is to be seen, and holidays to the most remote parts
of the globe. The crowding of our cities is instantly deleted, in an act that
summons a very traditional view of luxury as extreme elitism—the ivory
tower one might say—oblivious of others, of social concerns, and of collec-
tive awareness. Yet this is hardly surprising: when space is bought at over
$2,000 a square foot in many world metropolises, privacy and spacious-
ness become luxuries that many cannot even dream of.
Time is also becoming a new luxury. Another film tells us why time itself
might be a rare commodity. Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfield are
the main characters in the film In Time, in which a dystopic world of the
future is represented where time can be quite literally purchased. There is
no longer any need for plastic surgery. Instead, there is the chance to live
for ever simply by buying up time, the only luxury that is not transactional.
Quite apart from the question of how long we live, time is perceived as a
rare good in our everyday lives. With time, however, there is a paradox
between the search for free time and leisure and the fact that those who
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luxury
have time to spare are either the unemployable (the traditional poor and
marginalized in society), the unemployed (the new poor, increasingly
middle class), or pensioners (a large part of whom are relatively poor). And
this is why time too has been ‘luxurified’ in the form of ‘quality time’,
intensity of experience, and short injections of pampering (spas, luxury
retreats for weekends, and so on) as an antidote to the ‘bad’ time (stressful,
busy, and unsatisfactory) spent indoors in offices, with annoying bosses,
noisy shop floors, and other workplaces. This allows us to distinguish
between people who simply have free time and those instead whose free
time is rendered ‘meaningful’ by being packed with activities considered
‘positive’. It is one of the key differences between the consumption of the
early twenty-first century and the last decades of the twentieth. Even
remote country towns in Australia with no decent shopping facilities have
a foot spa now, generally run by entrepreneurial immigrants—another
sign of the globalization of luxury. Once they might have opened a simple
Indian or Chinese restaurant, but, following the global food revolution
and the rise of gastronomy, the locals are now more likely to request
sheep’s milk cheese with local herbs followed by organic free-range lamb
and truffled potatoes.
THE NEW CHINESE LUXURY CONSUMER
For a long time, the luxury consumer had been European and more
recently North American. This is no longer the case. Already in 2004 The
Economist predicted that the Chinese would replace the Japanese as
‘the world’s most fanatical luxury shoppers’.42 The massive expansion of
the luxury market since 2000 has resulted not from higher levels of con-
sumption in Europe, the United States, and Japan, the classic luxury mar-
kets. Luxury has globalized: the new luxury consumer is as likely to be
Asian as European, American, or Japanese. The numbers are impressive.
The luxury goods market was estimated to be worth $86 billion worldwide
244
in 1990. By 2008 it had doubled in size to reach $170 billion.43 In 2013 the
luxury market was worth $75 billion in the United States, $25 billion in
Japan, $30 billion in China and Hong Kong (the latter being a third of the
entire Chinese market), and $4 billion in Brazil.44 Forecasts are equally
optimistic: it has been estimated that in the five years up to 2020, 440 mil-
lion consumers (5 per cent of the world’s population) will spend $1.2 tril-
lion on luxury goods, meaning an expansion of over 20 per cent of the
sector’s turnover in the six years after 2014.45
These impressive results have been achieved notwithstanding the fact
that since 2008 the world has been enveloped by the worst economic crisis
in living memory. Incomes in several Western countries have in fact gone
down. Luxury firms might well have been expected to face the challenge of
having no customers. At the same time, luxury brands overstretched them-
selves and effectively saturated their own market. This was the case, for
instance, in Japan. In 2005 more than 90 per cent of Tokyo women in their
twenties owned both an item by Louis Vuitton and one by Gucci, and more
than half of them owned an item produced by Prada and Chanel.46 With a
staggering 80 per cent of the Japanese population already owning luxury
items, an increase in sales was unlikely.47 With the economic downturn of
2007–8, the future of the luxury market did not appear all that rosy.
Even in the early 2000s, Asia was not yet the promised land of luxury.
Bangkok resembled a scene from the film Blade Runner. Its skytrain and
overhead highways were under construction, and the very few luxury malls
that existed were often approached across rubble. Hotel precincts were still
the main source of interesting shopping. In India the only imported luxury
goods to be seen were available in the lobbies of the few luxury hotels in
large cities such as New Delhi and Mumbai. The only country that had a
substantial number of outlets selling European luxury brands was Japan.
Gucci had opened its first shop in 1972 in Tokyo, followed four years later
by Louis Vuitton.48 China was literally virgin land for luxury. Yves St Lau-
rent had flirted with China in the 1980s; yet it appealed to him more as a
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land of inspiration than as one in which to sell luxury products. In 1991 the
Italian firm Zegna opened its first store in China, a move that was regarded
with bemused curiosity by the European luxury industry at the time.49 A
quarter of a century later, the picture could not be more different. China’s
250 million-strong middle class can afford to buy a variety of products that
could be defined as ‘life’s little luxuries’ or ‘affordable luxuries’.
But what is luxury in today’s China? The China Statistical Yearbook for
2010 shows that ownership of durable goods varies markedly by level of
income between the richest and the poorest in Chinese society. The own-
ership of traditional technologies such as washing machines, colour televi-
sions, refrigerators, landline telephones, and motorcycles does not vary
dramatically between the rich and the poor. Indeed, in the case of motor-
cycles, the richest in society are less likely to have one than the poorest.
However, the richest are seventeen times more likely to own a car than the
poorest in China. Some less expensive new technologies such as mobile
phones are now widely used by all strata of Chinese society, and the owner-
ship of mobile phones by the richest is just double that of the poorest.
Other goods, however, such as video cameras, pianos, and exercise equip-
ment are still ‘luxuries’ affordable only to the richest.
What emerges is a picture of China with at least three competing notions
of luxury. First, there are consumer goods that are now common among all
consumers. For this category of goods, luxury consists of owning upgraded
versions (larger flat TVs, smart phones, and so on). Second, there are goods
whose ownership is not yet widespread among the Chinese ‘affluent society’.
This is the case with cars, and therefore they retain a luxury appeal—at least
until they come to fall into the previous category. Finally, marketing is creat-
ing new luxuries by generating new needs. This is the case with dishwashers,
still practically unheard of by both rich and poor in China in the 2010s, but
whose market potential is enormous if a need for them is created.50
One of the distinctive features of luxury in China is that consumer
goods such as technologies and everyday appliances are more important
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than luxury fashion. Those who purchase LV bags and Hermès scarves are
a small but important minority. According to Goldman Sachs, out of those
250 million Chinese who can afford luxury, about one million of them are
active buyers of luxury goods—and fashion in particular—spending $7
billion a year. Luxury brands are of great appeal in particular to young
middle-class Chinese consumers, who have no personal recollection of
China under the duress of strict communism. Bruno Lannes, partner of
the global management consultancy Bain & Company, says that this cat-
egory of Chinese consumers ‘don’t need to wait until [they are] 40 or 50
years old to discovery luxury brands. There’s no reason for that. You can
do that at 25, even with your first salary. Why not. That gives you the taste
of what it is and what you can hope for in the future.’51
Luxury, at least in China, has created its own ‘luxury generation’.52 These
are the consumers who have made the fortune of those European luxury
brands that today account for the lion’s share of the market. The growth of
luxury consumption has been so great in China that the government is now
attempting to control it. Mainland tourists are now restricted in what they
can bring back from Hong Kong and elsewhere, and the government is
using the fashionable agenda of ‘sustainability’ in an attempt to convince
consumers that they should buy less. This is a brilliant strategy. A good sus-
tainable consumer who does not buy too much can feel very up to date and
not like his or her old-fashioned parents who accumulated things; he or she
might also buy fewer but more expensive things, with different meanings
within the consumer matrix. China is a very interesting case, as consump-
tion can perhaps still be effectively controlled there. We will see.
While the West imports endless quantities of cheap Chinese manufac-
tures, China has become a buyer of European luxury. Louis Vuitton, for
instance, as of 2013 had forty stores in China and was in the process of
building a shopping mall.53 Other European luxury brands have followed
the trend and capitalized on the fact that China is considered the best at
everything, apart from producing its own luxury goods and luxury brands.
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luxury
As the political scientist Shaun Breslin perceptively observes: ‘It is difficult

to compete with China, but it is possible to supply China.’54 Rolls-Royce
seem to have followed such advice and now counts China as its most impor-
tant market (as India had been at the time of the Maharajas). The last few
years have seen a growth of nearly 50 per cent in the number of ‘rollers’
sold worldwide, with the best sales performance in just over 100 years of
the company’s existence, surpassing the high levels of the late 1970s. And
all of this, The Times observes, notwithstanding the fact that the world is
passing though one of the worst economic crises in living memory.55
Everyone is well aware that the dominance of European brands is not
necessarily here to stay and that in the not-so-distant future Chinese firms
will probably be able to out-compete European and North American luxury
producers. Some firms have realized, therefore, that the potential of China is
not just about selling as much as one can. Italian luxury firms, for instance,
have been at the forefront in developing strategic partnerships with Chinese
businesses. This is the case of Italian clothing designer Giada, founded in
2001 by Rosanna Daolio after a long experience at Max Mara. In 2005 it
developed a partnership with the Chinese group RedStone. By 2011 the part-
nership had moved into financial investment, thus providing the capital and
know-how for a relatively small luxury firm to enter the Chinese market. By
2013 RedStone’s owner and CEO Yihzeng Zhao had become a well-known
name in Via Montenapoleone, Milan’s most fashionable shopping street.56
Partnerships, joint ventures, and associations allow for the improve-
ment of production, marketing, and selling techniques in China and for a
new injection of capital into smaller brands in Europe. The ultimate dream
is that of convincing Chinese customers to purchase a luxury product and
brand that is produced in China and perceived as Chinese.57 This is the
dream of Yang Lan, a renowned Chinese TV presenter, philanthropist,
and entrepreneur. Her latest project is the creation of her namesake jewel-
lery line that combines traditional Chinese design elements with precious
gemstones and metals sourced from all over the world. South African
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diamonds and jade from Burma sit alongside exquisite Chinese pearls.
The range is priced between a few hundred and several million US dollars.58
THE NEW GLOBAL LUXURY CONSUMER
In India too, luxury has become big business. It is estimated that in 2013
the luxury market in the subcontinent was worth $6 billion. Although
India is still a relatively small market for luxury brands, growth over the
previous decade was impressive. The sale of luxury cars grew up to 40 per
cent a year and that of personal luxury goods between 15 and 20 per cent a
year and by 2013 was worth $2 billion. Personal luxury goods were valued
at $1.5 billion, with the remaining $2.5 billion spent on hotels, fine dining,
and wines and spirits. This might be partly explained by the fact that
between 2006 and 2013 the number of dollar millionaires (individuals
whose onshore liquid assets were at least that figure) almost trebled from
46,000 to 132,000.59 In 2013 more than 1.1 million households in India
had an annual disposable income of $100,000.60
Figures alone cannot capture the fact that in India luxury is something
very different from in China or other parts of Asia. The subcontinent has a
very long tradition of luxury production and consumption. For centuries
India produced the best of cotton cloth, fine muslin, and beautiful jewel-
lery. The riches of the Mughal court were second to none. In the colonial
period, the rich Maharajas embraced European luxury, building magnifi-
cent palaces furnished with all the European comforts and luxury novel-
ties, and purchasing one-fifth of all Rolls-Royce cars produced in the world.
In India this historical legacy is as much a burden as it is an asset. For the
new Indian middle classes, one of the barriers to engaging with luxury is its
perceived exclusivity. The shopping malls of Mumbai had a hard job at
convincing potential customers that they did not have to be dressed in the
same high-spec brands that were for sale in order to enter a mall selling
Zegna or Emporio Armani. This is because the luxury consumers of India
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luxury
are neither super-rich nor members of a traditional wealthy middle class.

The key group consuming ‘affordable luxury’ is composed of HENRY
(High-Earning, Not Rich Yet) consumers, who are mostly relatively young
and earning between $60,000 and $80,000.61 This explains why luxury
consumers in India are very price conscious, sometimes preferring Indian
brands to the more expensive European ones.62
India is, indeed, a country of great potential for European luxury
brands, but much of it remains unrealized. At the beginning of the twenty-
first century, luxury goods were a rarity in India. Louis Vuitton opened its
first shop at the Oberoi Hotel in New Delhi in 2002, followed by one in
Mumbai in 2004.63 Over the next decade the French luxury brand opened
another five shops. They were followed by Armani, Gucci, and Fer-
ragamo.64 Yet the luxury sector in India is still small, roughly a fifth of that
of China. China may have had over 1,000 luxury stores in 2013, but India
had only 70.65 Part of the slow growth of luxury retailing in India is due to
lack of infrastructure, complex bureaucracy, customs duties, and the exor-
bitant cost of rents. This means that luxury goods cost on average 30–40
per cent more in India than in other Asian markets.
The example of India suggests that the world is not yet a completely
homogenized consumer space, although there is hardly a place in the
world where luxury is not becoming omnipresent. Take Russia, for exam-
ple, where luxury has become the symbol of wealth, especially for those
88,000 millionaires who by 2010 had accumulated enormous fortunes
since the fall of communism in the early 1990s.66 Punk dissident group
Pussy Riot is now world famous for its protests against President Putin and
the Orthodox Church, but its main target has been the smart luxury brand
shops of St Petersburg and Moscow. On the other side of the world, in
Brazil, luxury is less about social inequality than economic growth. In the
two years between 2012 and 2014, more than $3 billion were spent in Bra-
zil in the construction of 100 new malls. A new level of wealth among the
rising middle classes has allowed for the expansion not just of luxury
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brands but also of luxury services. In 2011 Brazil was the second largest
market for cosmetic surgery, for gyms, and for beauty treatments.67
The folly of Russian oligarchs or the pampering of Brazilian middle-class
consumers are better known than the shape and size of the luxury market in
places like Africa. It is estimated that Africa currently has 280,000 million-
aires (18 per cent of the world total), though they are to be found mostly con-
centrated in cities like Johannesburg (23,400 of them), Cape Town (9,000),
and Lagos (10,000). Nigeria—and its capital city Lagos in particular—is a per-
haps surprising market for luxury. The country is, for instance, the fastest-
growing champagne market in the world, second only to France.68 In April
2013, Ermenegildo Zegna opened a store in Lagos, while Porsche opened its
first dealership in the exclusive area of Victoria Island, hoping to sell 300 cars
a year. Similarly Mercedes-Benz has seen a steady growth in sales over the
past few years.69 As for China, the long-term aim is not just to be a consumer
of European luxury goods. In March 2013, Maki Oh, a Nigerian womenswear
label, was presented at New York Fashion Week and featured in Vogue.70
BRIC BY BRIC
Luxury in the twenty-first century remains a complex phenomenon. Far

from having lost its lustre, luxury has achieved a global reach thanks to
increasing wealth in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries
and parts of the developing world. A small group of super-rich enjoy unprec-
edented access to super-expensive goods and services; and yet still struggle to
differentiate themselves from a much larger group of wealthy consumers for
whom luxury is something to aspire to. The luxury brand has played a key role
in the story of luxury since the mid-1980s, something that will be considered
in more detail in the next chapter. Yet, as we have seen, branded products are
not the totality of the ‘luxury phenomenon’. A great deal of importance is
increasingly attributed to the experience of luxury, either through the acts of
purchasing and consuming goods or through the enjoyment of services.
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Luxury Capitalism:
The Magic World of the Luxury Brands
•
D o we live in the greatest age of luxury? Recent commentators talk
about the ‘massification’ or ‘democratization’ of luxury and the loss
of the ‘lustre’ of its glow.1 The remit of luxury seems to have changed to
include the ‘boutique’, the ‘posh’, the ‘stylish’, and the simply overpriced.
Luxury has spread to every object, from ice buckets to suitcases, from soap
to chocolate. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 1950s, gift lines were
retailed in sumptuous settings at boutiques such as Christian Dior that
appeared like little palaces; their features continue today in the moulded
plastics and faux-fixtures of the concession stores from Bangkok to New
York. Yet the luxury industry today presents the acquisition of products
and the act of shopping in themselves as almost elevated forms of cultural
activity. The more cynical would see this as simply a new strategy to get
people through the doors, in a pacified postmodern delirium. Or are peo-
ple simply seeking new products and experiences that their grandparents
could not have dreamed of? Luxury becomes a buzzword to make a brand
recognized around the world but also to make any product appear as if it is
a one-off, with ‘signature shops’ now as popular as the great museums for
tourists on package holidays to Paris, London, or Milan.
This tension between the economic potential and the supposedly innate
exclusivity of luxury is evident in the so-called luxury brands that today
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luxury capitalism
produce and retail commodities that are often also to be found in super-
markets and discount outlets (which themselves use new forms of well-lit
and innovative portable display cabinets to make the products appear like
something from a luxurious department store). The magic world of the
luxury brand is one of the most important myths of the early twenty-first
century, one that is of recent creation and that has changed for ever the
meaning of luxury.
THE WOLVES OF BOND STREET
In the three years between 2010 and 2013 the high-end luxury global mar-
ket grew by 23 per cent, reaching an astonishing turnover of €250 billion in
2013.2 Europe still accounts for three-quarters of this market. The sector
employs an estimated 1.7 million workers worldwide. The World Luxury
Brand Directory (WLBD), initiated in 2011, included as many as 672 lux-
ury brands in 2013.3 Luxury is big business. Just a handful of conglomer-
ates own most of the brands that we recognize as belonging to the luxury
sector. They structure their business not as small craft workshops but as
multinationals, continuously seeking expansion into new markets and
engaging in hostile takeovers and in the politics of exchange rates, finance,
lobbying, and worldwide marketing.4 The big luxury brands—or to be
more precise the large holdings that own them—embody what could be
called the ‘luxury capitalism’ of the twenty-first century, one based not on
heavy industry, as was the case with steel, chemicals, and railways in the
nineteenth century, nor on oil and electronics as happened in the twen
tieth century. They are the ‘wolves of Bond Street’, and, in contrast to the
1980s ‘wolves of Wall Street’, they make their money not by selling at high
prices shares and futures that were bought cheaply, but by selling as expen-
sive new luxuries things that previously were cheap commodities.
The media have been kind to the luxury brands, repeating the trope that
luxury in the last generation has been ‘democratized’: many more people
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compared with just a generation ago are able to afford more than that which
is merely necessary. The superfluous has become the new indispensable
and an essential part of a comfortable life. As fashion became democratized
after the Second World War, so luxury has undergone a similar process since
around the end of the twentieth century. The luxury brands are the provid-
ers of a variety of goods, ranging from clothing to electronics, from food to
hotel rooms, that consumers aspire to possess or enjoy. They surely tap into
an existing demand. We prefer, however, to talk about a process of ‘indus-
trialization’ of luxury, which puts the emphasis not on demand and con-
sumers, but on supply and producers. Yet it should be clear that the
industrialization of luxury ‘is not only that of production. It is also that of
advertising campaigns, of launches, of types of distribution, of shop chains,’
and so on.5 The capitalism of luxury has created its own world—linked to
finance and global enterprise—and is fast reshaping our spatial world, that
of our districts, our streets, our desires, our ambitions, and our material
culture. This has been described by the novelist and academic Sarah Schul-
man as being a ‘gentrification of the mind’, going well beyond the economic
transformation of physical space in large metropolises.6
Luxury capitalism was not created overnight. Two developments made
it possible to reshape the sector into a world of multinationals and high
finance: first, the fact that from the 1950s licences were used to sell luxury
fashion. Dior was the first to create a modern company. Unlike previous
French couturiers, the maison Dior was established in 1946 with the capital
of Monsieur Boussac, the great cotton magnate of France, and only in name
was it owned by chief designer Christian Dior. By contrast, some of the best-
known luxury producers (including Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and Cartier) at
this time retained their traditional small scale—often as a family business—
positioning themselves as bastions of tradition in both their production and
their business models. By the 1970s, several of them were in financial trou-
ble. Notwithstanding the fact that they produced excellent products of
undisputed quality, they were unable to market them effectively and to
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luxury capitalism
seize the opportunities presented by expanding international markets.

Demand from non-European markets in particular required new capital
and organizational forms, as was the case with the push of Western luxury
producers into Japan in the 1970s. This led to the first phase of the restruc-
turing of the luxury sector, which, however, was more about keeping up
with the times than having an active role in shaping Western capitalism.
The real qualitative change for the luxury sector happened in the mid-
1980s, when the young and well-connected French financier Bernand
Arnault, with the help of the old guard of the French banking system,
acquired the holding that owned the Boussac group, which still retained a
substantial share in Christian Dior. He then acquired Lacroix in 1986 and
Céline a year later. In 1988 the LVMH group (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuit-
ton) was established.7 Fast forward twenty-five years, and in December
2012 the LVMH group had more than 106,000 employees and a revenue
of $36 billion. As of 2015, the company has sixty brands, many of which are
leaders in their market sectors. Among them are Moët & Chandon cham-
pagne (ranked 77th in the top 100 global brands in 2011), TAG Heuer and
Hublot watches (ranked 29th and 40th respectively in the top 50 Swiss
brands), and Christian Dior (ranked 14th in the top 50 most valuable
cosmetic brands).8
LVMH is truly a global conglomerate: its operations are based on a
worldwide network of stores: there were 3,200 as of December 2012: 1,300
shops in Europe (400 in France), 650 in the USA, 1,100 in Asia (of which
370 in Japan), and another 200 in other countries. In 2013 a third of its
revenue came from fashion and leather goods, 15 per cent from spirits and
wines, 13 per cent from perfumes and cosmetics, 10 per cent from watches
and jewellery, and a further 28 per cent from other sources.9 LVMH is also
in continuous expansion through acquisitions and alliances. In 2003,
LVMH signed a joint venture with De Beers, the market leader in diamond
production, controlling 40 per cent of world production.10 In 2013 it
acquired 80 per cent of the cashmere clothing firm Loro Piana and the
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luxury
Hotel Saint-Barth Isle de France on the Island of St Barthélemy in the

French West Indies.11 In 2012 alone, LVMH’s revenues grew by 19 per cent
to €28.1 billion.12 In that year Louis Vuitton, worth $23.5 billion, was one
of the most important ‘meta-brands’ in the world, classified seventeenth
by brand management company Interbrand.13
The alter ego of Monsieur Arnault is François-Henri Pinault, chairman
of Artemis, the family holding that controls PPR (Pinault–Printemps–
Redouté). As with Arnault, Pinault did not fall in love with luxury at first
sight. Until the late 1990s, the holding owned businesses as different as
retail stores and mail-order businesses operating in Western Europe, and
France in particular. In 1999, PPR acquired 42 per cent of Gucci, the
entirety of Yves St Laurent, and 70 per cent of the smaller Italian shoemak-
ing company Sergio Rossi. In the following two years it acquired Bouche-
ron, Alexander McQueen, Bottega Veneta, and Balenciaga, and formed a
partnership with Stella McCartney. Today PPR owns the entirety of Gucci
and Sergio Rossi, as well as Italian menswear couturier Brioni, majority
stakes in jewellery brand Qeelin, Christopher Kane (fashion), Sowind
(watches), and a minority stake in Altuzarra (which makes luxury, ready-
to-wear women’s wear). In other words, if you take a walk through a luxury
mall anywhere from Bangkok to Los Angeles, the whole sweep in front of
you is likely to be owned by one company. The strategy has been to acquire
brands that have the potential further to diversify and innovate. An exam-
ple is Bottega Veneta: when in 2001 PPR acquired the Italian leather goods
manufacturer, the company’s turnover was just €56 million. By 2012 its
196 shops around the world had a turnover of €300 million.14 Now, it
seems, everyone wants a woven leather wallet or pair of its expensive shoes.
Among the best-known luxury brands in 2009, four were French (Louis
Vuitton, Chanel, Hermès, and Cartier), four were Italian (Gucci, Prada,
Ferrari, and Bulgari), one Swiss (Rolex), and one American (Tiffany &
Co.).15 Of these, only Tiffany & Co. and Rolex remain independent luxury
brands. The others belong to major holdings—those of Messieurs Arnault
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and Pinault but also the Richemond Group, which owns Cartier, Mont
Blanc, Van Cleef & Arpels, Dunhill, Chloé, Piaget, Old England, and
Baume & Mercier.16 This group in 2010 had a turnover of €6.9 billion.17
There are also smaller but well-known and significant players, such as the
group headed by the Prada Group, which includes Prada as well as foot-
wear brands such as Miu Miu, Church’s, and Car Shoe.18
Business size is not the only distinctive feature of luxury capitalism. An
interview with François-Henri Pinault in the prestigious Harvard Business
Review in 2014 reveals two more hidden aspects in the life of the large lux-
ury conglomerates. The first is that the gigantic financial size is needed not
just to acquire more brands, expand into new global markets, and secure
continuous R&D. According to Pinault: ‘People tend to associate luxury
brands with Fashion Week, which showcases design, but the reality is that
to succeed, a company needs a logistics system that can deliver finished
products to stores in the world very quickly.’19 Responsiveness is key to the
long-term wellbeing of the luxury brands and can be secured only by large
and complex organizations. Large stocks of goods are rarely held in one
store any more; thanks to modern-day computerized stock management,
they can be shipped in daily according to demand. Yet all this is very differ-
ent, for instance, from any of the global supermarket chains. A Chanel
handbag clearly is not the same as a bottle of shampoo; the bag still has to
be made, with various stages of finishing. The financial model of luxury
is one of low turnovers and high profits. The Pinault group’s revenue in
2013 was half what it was a decade earlier, when it included many non-
luxury productions. Yet the move towards luxury has allowed the group to
increase its profits by over 40 per cent.20
LUXURY BRANDS AND THEIR CLUBS
At this point, we need to pause to ask a rather banal question: what is a

luxury brand? Luxury brands are like any other consumer brand, but their
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aim is to convey exclusivity and excellence by the quality and the look of
their products.21 This is achieved by drawing the attention of consumers to
the high quality or novelty of materials used, or the detailed workmanship
(sometimes hand-made products) employed. We are told, to cite just one
example, that each of the watch parts of the Damiani Masterpiece series is
produced from beginning to end by one worker, who spends up to six
months on a single timepiece.22 This comes at a cost in terms of product
development and the sourcing of materials. Above all, it is something that
needs to be hammered home to consumers, who might otherwise entirely
miss such facts and have only a very superficial appreciation of the time,
care, and sheer quality of the materials that have gone into making such a
product. Here marketing campaigns and advertising play a key role in
educating consumers, for better or for worse.
Exclusivity is even more difficult to achieve. It also requires the very
clearest communication with the potential consumer. And other subtle
strategies are here at play. Luxury brands might, for instance, create a sense
of exclusivity by limiting production. Most of us might think that the more
a firm sells the better, but in reality firms seek to maximize profits, and
these are a combination of the quantities sold and the price that each com-
modity commands. Luxury brands understand that it is better to create a
sense of absence, to convince their customers to pay more to obtain one of
the rare goods that they sell. Failure to do so might lead to disaster and
‘brand inflation’ (Figure 8.1). This was the case with Pierre Cardin, a highly
innovative and well-known brand in the 1960s, whose image suffered from
becoming too common and accessible. A similar fate seemed to loom for
Gucci, whose product line reached 22,000 items, but they were eventually
able to refocus the brand.23 Gucci, but also Prada, Vuitton, and any other
respectable luxury brands, achieve exclusivity by limiting distribution. In a
world in which the fake and counterfeit are often as good as the real and
original, it is the difficulty of getting hold of the latter—versus the omni-
presence of the former—that makes it genuine. And so we take it for granted
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luxury capitalism
Fig. 8.1. ‘Money Lent’, Pawn Shop, Corner George and Barlow St, Sydney, 2013. Despite
Australia’s good reputation among the Chinese for selling only genuine luxury goods in its
branded boutiques, the wares on sale here might be more dubious. The image also reveals
the ‘banalization’ to which luxury goods are easily subjected when they are taken out of
the context that their ‘houses’ hope to maintain.
that the more exclusive a consumer good is, the more difficult it will
become to acquire. This explains why consumers do not hesitate to be on
waiting lists to purchase the latest limited edition of a Prada bag or queue
for hours and sometimes even days to be the first to own a new iPhone.
A third and at first apparently rather circular way to define a luxury
brand is to say that it is one of the brands that are recognized as being
‘luxurious’. Of course, consumers have a say in what they perceive as lux-
ury, but a more clear direction comes from the many national organiza-
tions created to promote, protect, and first of all act as ‘luxury brands
clubs’. The most famous such club in the world is the Comité Colbert,
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founded in 1954 by Jean-Jacques Guerlain, owner of the luxury perfume

and cosmetic company that is today part of LVMH. The Comité owes its
name to Colbert, the controller-general of finances under Louis XIV, who
worked so hard to promote key luxury sectors of the French economy such
as the production of tapestries and porcelain. The connection with ‘old
luxury’ is, therefore, explicit. In 2015 the association included seventy-
eight luxury producers, ranging from Baccarat crystal to Givenchy and
Hermès fashions, the Ritz hotel to Pullman Orient Express, to cite just a
few. Among its members are some of the world’s main producers of cou-
ture, crystal, porcelain, hotels, gastronomy, leather goods, gold, silver,
and precious objects, perfumes and wine.24
The mission statement of the Comité is the promotion of French luxury,
though since 2011 it has also represented selected non-French firms such
as Montblanc (German pens and accessories) and Herend (Hungarian
porcelain). Alongside promotion, a main task of the organization is the
protection of luxury—for instance, against fakes and counterfeiting, or by
lobbying for protective European Union legislation.25 In practice, the
Comité is the gatekeeper of luxury, a way to limit the supply not of luxury
per se but, more to the point, of luxury brands. It is the equivalent of the
College of Heraldry for those who wish to show a noble descent. More
than half the members of the Comité Colbert are companies founded
before 1914, the remainder being founded in the interwar period (18 per
cent), and the period between 1946 and 1970 (17 per cent). Only 10 per
cent (eight companies) were founded after 1970, although these include
well-known brands such as La Maison du Chocolat (1977), the jeweller
Laurenz Bäumer (1992), and the perfumier Frédéric Malle (2000).26 The
exclusivity of belonging to the Comité Colbert is further highlighted by
the fact that some of France’s major cultural institutions such as the Musée
du Louvre, the Opéra de Paris, and the manufacturers of Sèvres, Gobelins,
and Beauvais tapestries and la Savonnerie carpets are membres associés of
this luxury club.27
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luxury capitalism
Similar associations exist for luxury in Italy (Fondazione Altagamma),

Britain (Walpole British Luxury), and Spain (Circulo Furtuny), and Germany
is currently constituting its own national luxury association. The Fondazi-
one Altagamma in Italy was established in 1992 by brands such as Alessi,
Les Copains, Ferragamo, Ferré, Zegna, and Versace.28 Altagamma is par-
ticularly active in commissioning research, and, together with the Comité
Colbert and other national associations and international bodies, is keen
to protect the luxury brands’ reputation. They are at the forefront in the
fight to preserve what could be described as the ‘aura of luxury’.
THE AURA OF LUXURY
A great deal of the power of luxury brands is based on their reputation.

Such reputation is not built just by producing high-quality goods or cre-
ated through advertising and skilful image-building. It has to be protected.
The protection of luxury today is first and foremost a protection of the
‘allure and prestigious image’ of the luxury brands. That sentence might
sound as if it comes straight out of a promotional brochure. In fact it is a
quotation from the European Union’s Court of Justice in 2009 as an expla-
nation of the First Trade Mark Directive.29 In the same document, the
Court of Justice defines such ‘allure and prestigious image’ as a way of
bestowing ‘an aura of luxury’.
It might appear unusual that a legal body should use such a ‘poetic’ turn
of phrase. But in reality it can be interpreted as the result of a watershed
change in the legislators’ attitudes to the protection of trademarks. Brands—
and luxury brands in particular—are first and foremost trademarks, a series
of letters and symbols that come to represent either specific products or
specific companies. Trademarks have been in existence since the eighteenth
century, but only in the twentieth century did they become widely recog-
nized by consumers and the public at large. They are an important tool for
our shopping, ensuring that we do not need to check the quality of each
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item that we purchase in a supermarket. When we buy a bar of a well-known

chocolate, we distinguish it from other chocolates because of its character-
istic wrapping and logo. We already know the quality of the product and we
trust that the product will be exactly the same as the one we bought a week
or a year ago. This is a by-product of the retailing and manufacturing inno-
vations of the nineteenth century, when increasing populations in coun-
tries such as the United States had to be satisfied with products whose
processes of production and intrinsic qualities could not be easily tested.
In the case of the luxury brands, their trademarks have come to signify not
just trust but also a cluster of ideas in the minds of consumers about the pres-
tige and appeal of the product. The double ‘Cs’ of Coco Chanel are not just
another trademark; they make us think of Paris, wonderfully dressed ladies,
beautifully tailored tailleurs, quilted bags, and red carpets. All these ideas
create an ‘aura of luxury’, something that is as difficult to define as it is diffi-
cult to protect. And yet it is this ‘aura’ that the luxury brands are determined
to defend even more than their logos. They do so through a variety of means
that include image-building through PR and advertising, endorsement by
testimonials, and protection via laws that give brands exclusive rights of use.
European legislation on the protection of trademarks has changed sub-
stantially since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This has hap-
pened under pressure from the luxury brands, whose range of activities
and products has noticeably increased to include not just clothing and
accessories but also restaurants, cafés, and a variety of other consumer
goods. In the 1990s, a producer of cocoa pops could legitimately have used
the double ‘Cs’ of Chanel: this was possible as long as the product was suf-
ficiently different from the leather bags and clothing produced and sold by
Coco Chanel. Legislators thought that there would be no risk of confusion
on the part of consumers between the famous luxury brand Coco Chanel
and an (invented) cereal brand, Cocoa Chanel.
More recent legislation, however, has made this illegal. From the realm of
fantasy, we move to a real court case of 2007 between Louis Vuitton (LV) and
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the company Haute Diggity Dog, which was using the name Chewy Vuiton
(CV) for dogs’ toys. LV objected to the use of a mark that closely resembled
its own, claiming that Diggity Dog contributed to a trademark dilution by
blurring and tarnishing the image of LV. Legislators were initially uncon-
vinced that LV would suffer from the incursion: any trademark can be used
for the purpose of parody (and the comic effect was clearly apparent), and
LV and Diggity Dog were not operating in sectors with a strong enough level
of proximity for LV customers to be under the impression that LV produced
dogs’ wares.30 The existing law establishes that no one else can use the logo
LV or the Vuitton name, even if there is no risk of confusion between a
leather bag and dogs’ toys. This happened because the luxury brands suc-
cessfully convinced legislators that their ‘aura’ is potentially limitless and
indeed might one day include products as different as fashionable acces
sories and cereals. While trademarks connect to specific products, the aura
of luxury extends to the entire realm of notions and ideas.
A further important change in how the law deals with the ‘aura’ of lux-
ury relates to distribution. Would you buy a Prada bag from a market stall?
We know that such a bag sold in a market has a high probability of being
fake. But let us suppose, instead, that it is a ‘real’ product, legitimately
bought by a market-stall owner from a luxury wholesaler. Existing legisla-
tion says that this sale of ‘real’ products is illegal, as the owner of the trade-
mark (Prada in this case) has the right to allow only certain retailers (its
own concessions and stores, most likely) to sell Prada goods. This goes
against common sense, as most traders would want as many sellers for
their products as possible. Yet luxury is traditionally at least partly about
limiting supply, and this is why the luxury brands have fought (and won) a
battle for legislation that allows them to control not just the production
but also the distribution of their products. This is seen as key to preserving
an ‘aura of luxury’, as the allure and prestige of Prada or other luxury
brands might conceivably be significantly tarnished if their products were
made readily available on all market stalls.31
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This restrictive legislation has two important consequences. The first is

that the luxury brands have the power of stopping Internet retailers. As
digital shopping is expanding year by year, the luxury brands are worried
that large retailers such as Amazon or Ebay could profit from trading their
branded products. Legally—at least in Europe—the luxury brands can con-
trol retailing. The second consequence relates to consumers: is it in the
interest of consumers that supply is limited? Is not the principle of the free
circulation of goods infringed as a consequence of the power given to the
luxury brands? There is no easy answer to this question. Certainly, most
consumers are probably not aware that the legitimate quest for protection
by the luxury brands might be at the expense of their rights as consumers
to access goods freely at the cheapest possible price.
More insidious enemies of luxury—which challenge the very reputation
and aura of luxury brands—are counterfeit products. Louis Vuitton, the
most copied luxury brand in the world, in 2010 had 40 in-house lawyers
and 250 outside investigators and was spending $18 million a year fighting
counterfeiting.32 Counterfeiting is large and increasing by the year. In
2013 the US agencies seized goods under their Intellectual Property Rights
(IPR) enforcement measures in more than 22,000 separate incidents for a
value (had they been genuine) of $1.7 billion. China is the country of ori-
gin of nearly 70 per cent of the merchandise seized by US customs, valued
at a staggering $1.1 billion. Clearly, counterfeiting affects not just the lux-
ury brands, although in the United States, for instance, luxury handbags,
wallets, watches, and jewellery make up 70 per cent of all seized counter-
feit merchandise.33 A similar picture emerges in Europe. In 2013, €768 mil-
lion worth of goods were seized by EU customs for infringing IPR. In
Europe, however, the scale of counterfeiting is four times larger than in the
United States. With 87,000 incidents in 2013, a total of 36 million articles
were seized. Watches accounted for 21 per cent of all value, followed by
sunglasses (12 per cent), clothing (11 per cent), bags and wallets (10 per
cent), perfumes and cosmetics (7 per cent), sportswear (5 per cent), and
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other items (34 per cent). The countries most active at prosecuting
infringements of IPR are Germany, the UK, and Italy.34
One of the challenges of the fight against counterfeiting is to under-
stand consumers’ psychology. The luxury brands and their associations
rely heavily on the law and seek the protection of the authorities. Anyone
passing through a French airport will have noticed posters with a crocodile
(the logo of Lacoste, a well-known French sportswear brand), informing
passengers that the introduction of counterfeits into France is an offence.
Needless to say, such posters are greeted with a wry smile, because fakes
and counterfeits have become socially acceptable. At the end of the twen-
tieth century counterfeit goods were purchased by those consumers who
could not afford the original. There were also always tourists who bought
such things home for fun; they were often cheap imitations, substandard
even to the naked or inexperienced eye. Today counterfeits are not just to
be found everywhere from Shanghai to San Francisco, but are often sold
to people who could well afford the original.35 Youtube videos tell you
how to distinguish a counterfeit from a real product, as the quality of cop-
ies and fakes is sometimes as high as that of the original product. Indeed,
as we shall see, slowly but surely the focus of regulation seems to be shift-
ing away from the protection of the luxury brands and their profits towards
the notion of protection of consumers, who are the ultimate judge of what
they consume.
ETHICS AND SOCIAL FUNCTION OF A LUXURY BRAND
The economic strength of the luxury sector and the public position that
the luxury brands have in today’s society naturally raise the question of
their social role. The luxury economy is founded upon a specific model of
consumption. It constructs a series of dreams through advertising and, for
example, rarefied shop interiors, and communicates to us all via television,
glossy magazines, and, increasingly, the Internet. By the very action of
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creating desire, luxury becomes a maker of social identities. The teenage

girl who dreams of having a $1,000 bag from a famous luxury brand is a
potential individual customer for the luxury sector. Yet when a thousand
or a million similar teenagers hold the same dream, the object of their
desire becomes part of the politics of consumption. Luxury brands are
therefore increasingly asked what they do for their consumers and for the
national and global communities with which they interact.
Luxury has an undesirable nature that pushes states, groups, and indi-
viduals to argue for more regulation. This is not the regulation to protect
the brand, but rather a regulation to protect consumers, perhaps from
themselves. Regulation remains relatively light in this area, although the
issue of consumer credit and a rise in bankruptcies should be a topic of
concern both for government and the big brands (luxury included). We
are not advocating a return to state interference in personal consumption
along the lines of the medieval sumptuary laws. However, consumers’
preferences can be managed via taxation, in particular through the impo-
sition of consumption taxes, such as VAT. Some European states already
apply a ‘luxury tax’ in the form of higher VAT rates on expensive goods or
specific categories of commodities classified as ‘luxurious’, such as sports
cars, yachts, second houses, or jewellery; Sweden is one example.
The luxury brands might shy away from regulation, though they have
taken the notion of (voluntary) social responsibility somewhat more seri-
ously. ‘Social responsibility’ relates both to the products that they sell and
their role as companies in the wider society. An area that in recent years
has been at the centre of attention is their responsibility towards the envi-
ronment, and the respect shown in the use of natural resources and
towards human beings. ‘Sustainability’ has become a new keyword in lux-
ury, with many luxury brands claiming that their products are long-lasting
and can be used over several generations, thus limiting waste and harm to
the environment. Examples here include Savile Row suits and the advertis-
ing campaigns for Chopard watches.
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luxury capitalism
A further area of socially responsible action has been charity. Several of the
large brands are now engaged in charitable causes, mostly in Third World
countries. Their detractors comment upon the fact that such charitable
causes are selected to create maximum visibility and are turned into power-
ful marketing tools for the promotion of the brand itself. The ethical limits
are perhaps sometimes tested, as in the case of Angelina Jolie’s 2011 LV cam-
paign, where she is shown on top of a traditional Cambodian boat in Cambo-
dia’s Siem Reap Province, holding a large LV bag. In this case, LV has no
particular charitable link to Cambodia. Yet the advertisement reads ‘A single
journey can change the course of a life’, possibly referring to the well-known
fact that Jolie and her husband, Brad Pitt, adopted a Cambodian child. The
endorsement by Angelina gives apparent deepness of meaning to the prod-
uct and an ‘ethical’ context that the product by itself does not have.36 It is
perhaps hard not to feel a little cynical as one looks at such an image.
The luxury brands have also become major sponsors of the arts. The
French businessman and luxury retail billionaire François-Henri Pinault,
for instance, opened his art collection in Venice at the eighteenth-century
Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal, and then, following a renovation coor-
dinated by the famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando, moved it to the
Punta della Dogana, the city’s historic former customs’ house in 2009. The
Louis Vuitton Foundation opened its $143 million museum in the Bois de
Boulogne in Paris in 2014, a magnificent building specifically designed for
the purpose by Frank Gehry (Figure 8.2). Prada, which also has a founda-
tion in Milan supporting contemporary art, started a new literary prize in
2013, in association with the Italian publisher Feltrinelli. Literary talent,
however, was not allowed to roam entirely free. The 1,300 short stories
received from international authors had to respond to the questions:
‘Which are the realities seen by our eyes? And how do lenses filter such
realities?’ Needless to say, Prada’s interest at the time was promoting a new
line of eye frames called ‘Prada Journal’.37 More recently, Rem Koolhas, the
innovative architect, has designed an art space for Miuccia Prada (the
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designer and entrepreneur behind Prada’s current success) in Venice.38

Luxury brand–art collaborations, as they are known in the jargon, are a
fairly recent invention, whose popularity goes back only to about 2006–7.
A detailed study shows that, in just a few years, luxury brand–art collabora-
tions have become common for all brands and often have an international
nature. Yet nearly three-quarters of them are limited to the visual arts; only
rarely do they include the performing arts (4 per cent) and music (3 per
cent). In three-quarters of cases such collaborations are based on Western
art and just over a fifth (21 per cent) on the arts of Asia. Art that originates
from Latin America, Australasia, and Africa is clearly underrepresented.39
Since 1996, the Hugo Boss Prize, worth $100,000, has been awarded
annually to an artist who has made a substantial contribution to the con-
temporary art scene. The winner is also given the opportunity to showcase
his or her work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.40 Luxury leather
goods manufacturer Bottega Veneta started ‘The Art of Collaboration’ in
2002, a scheme through which every year the Italian brand selects an artist
to shoot avant-garde creative commercials. More recently, in 2012 the
champagne-producer Dom Pérignon launched ‘The Power of Creation’
collaboration, in which contemporary artists were asked to design limited-
edition bottles of the famous French champagne.41 Hermès, too, has its
special prizes for avant-garde craft practitioners, such as the Swedish con-
temporary knitter Sandra Backlund, at the well-known festival of Hyères
in Provence. Versace, a fashion brand that has made a virtue out of luxuri-
ous vulgarity, commissioned the emerging designer Anthony Vaccarello in
2013 to create a ‘capsule collection’—that is to say, a small non-seasonal
collection, made available online for the ‘digital generation’.42
These are just a few examples of the extensive engagement of luxury
brands with the arts, an association that was also strong in the specific case
of fashion throughout the twentieth century. It is an engagement that lux-
ury brands have used to promote both their image and good causes. Yet
some might see the increasing remit of luxury as a threat to traditional
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luxury capitalism
Fig. 8.2. Fondation Louis Vuitton, architect Frank Gehry, Paris, 2014. Gehry, one of the
generation of ‘starchitechts’ (architecture stars), is himself a brand, and has even designed
handbags of late for Louis Vuitton. The Louis Vuitton Foundation embeds the luxury
brand into a role as contemporary Maecenas of the Arts. The building is located in the Bois
de Boulogne, a park that in the nineteenth century was one of the main spaces in which
women and men of leisure showed off their carriages and fashions on fine afternoons.
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boundaries between business and charity, between artistic and commer-

cial forms, or indeed, as we shall see, between private space and the mar-
ketplace. Brands have transformed themselves into ‘brand worlds’—for
instance, Burberry now supports its own emerging singers, with the idea
being that new talent will in turn support the brand. Rather than sponsor
young people’s voices, the well-known Italian footwear brand Della Valle
chose instead to sponsor the restoration of major Italian monuments,
such as the Colosseum.
THE SPACES OF LUXURY
The American author and critic Edmund White, writing in the early years
of the new millennium, observed a process of what he termed the ‘bou-
tiquification’ of entire Parisian neighbourhoods. He complained that, in
fashionable Saint-Germain-des-Près,
one of the best bookstores, Le Divan, has been replaced by Dior, that one
of the few record stores in the area has been cannibalized by Cartier, and Le
Drugstore—a late-night complex of tobacco stand, restaurant and chem-
ist—has been supplanted by Armani. Louis Vuitton has installed a chic shop
right next to Les Deux Magots [a famous café in the area].43
Luxury is colonizing the spaces of our cities. In the 1960s, chain stores,
especially those selling clothing, became important parts of Western
Europe’s urban landscape. Chains such as Gap and Next in Britain, the
Italian Benetton, and (since 2000) a variety of other retail outlets that
include Dorothy Perkins, Zara, Nike, or Maxmara, have become ubiqui-
tous features of urban and metropolitan life. Together with supermarket
chains (now increasingly present in city centres with smaller ‘metro’ retail
units) and the equally pervasive chain coffee shops, clothing and accessory
chains have been accused of imposing homogeneity not just in the visual
appearance of what have been described as ‘clone towns’, but also in the
experience of shopping.44 This is a phenomenon particularly marked in
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Northern Europe and North America, but its effects are now visible from
Lisbon to Istanbul, from Riga to Rome.
Yet since the early years of the new millennium a new process has been
at play: a new wave of specifically luxury outlets has come to dominate our
cities. The luxury brands have claimed their own space within the very cen-
tre of the city. With the expansion of demand for luxury, both established
and new luxury brands, from Chanel and Dior to Bottega Veneta and Marc
Jacobs, could no longer find sufficient retail space and visibility within
department stores or in their old and cramped venues in exclusive back
alleys. Their new clientele is quantitatively and qualitatively different from
the customers that they had in the 1980s and even 1990s. By pursuing
larger sales and in the attempt to attract even wider numbers of customers,
luxury brands have had to move to prime locations, especially in large cit-
ies, sometimes fighting for space against supermarkets and mass retailing.
The example of the famous Galleria in Milan might help explain this
change and the consequent paradox that it has created. Just off the beauti-
ful Piazza Duomo in the centre of Milan, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
was built in the 1870s to rival the grand Parisian arcades, adding a bit of
class to the city of Milan that in the nineteenth century was better known
for its factories than its fashion. For over a century, the Galleria retained
its architectural uniqueness and shopping exclusivity: it was the mecca
of elite shopping, with high-class artisanal names, including Samini and
Prada, the latter then known for small luxuries, bags, and travel goods.
Today the experience of the Galleria is different. The two most prominent
outlets are the famous fast-food chain McDonalds and (one might say) the
even more well-known luxury chain Louis Vuitton. Hordes of tourists pass
through the Galleria, dropping into Louis Vuitton before indulging in a
Big Mac, unless they have a very expensive glass of champagne at Biffi, in
order to amuse themselves watching the tourists jostling about.
The physical closeness of ‘mass’ and ‘luxury’ in the Milanese galleria
might appear exceptional, but a similar trend can be seen in many shopping
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streets in London, Paris, and New York, and also in smaller centres such as
Bologna in Italy or Nice in France. In the attempt to amplify desire, the
luxury brands have consciously chosen both the strategies and the locations
formerly used by mass retailing. The historic city of Bologna, for instance,
with its medieval towers and Renaissance square, is a mecca of luxury shop-
ping. We were once asked by a colleague where ‘the real people’ of Bologna
shop, as in the city centre nothing can be found but luxury brand shops.
Within the space of just a few hundred yards there is LV, Armani, Frette
(purveyors of luxury bed and bath linens), and two Gucci outlets. These
luxury retailers have now colonized both the spaces where mass retailers
once did business as well as those of independent shops, who can no longer
afford the high rents. The ‘new luxury’ of the luxury brands has replaced the
‘old luxury’ of specialized bookshops, antiques shops, tobacconists, haber-
dashers, glove and millinery vendors, and traditional bars and cafés.
The effect is disorienting: in some cases the homogeneity of mass distri-
bution has mutated into an homogeneity of luxury: from city to city we
find again and again the same luxury brands, the same products, and the
same shop-window dressings. In other cases, luxury has taken over the
historic parts of town. Take Ferragamo’s headquarters in Florence, for
instance: occupying the Renaissance Palazzo Spini Feroni in the centre of
Florence, Ferragamo has an impressive number of spacious shop win-
dows overlooking the Arno River, just a few steps from the Ponte Vecchio.
While Ferragamo has been there since the 1930s, other famous brands
have moved in, creating a ‘citadel of luxury’ in which elegant shops, ornate
churches, and world-famous museums seem to form a seamless cityscape.
Ferragamo itself is not just a shop but also a museum, thus transporting
the cultural tourism that surrounds the shop into its own premises. This
idea was taken by Prada to a new extreme with its recent ‘Pradasphere’
pop-up shops in spaces such as London’s Harrods or Hong Kong’s Ferry
Pier, which simulate very accurately the appearance of an extra-glamorous
museum, once you enter their portals. Charming attendants whisper
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gently about the genesis of the brand, as they display examples of Prada’s
early travelling cases and art deco handbags in beautifully lit vitrines.
The visibility of luxury retailing is integral to the creation of desire and to
securing big sales. Yet it is also a curse, if it leads to a tarnishing of the image
of the brand. This is the reason why access and exclusivity have to be negoti-
ated spatially as well as via advertising and marketing. Despite what has
been said about the rise of online shopping, space still matters. This means,
in practical terms, that one must secure the use of areas of a city that have
cultural cachet and historical fame. In Paris, luxury concentrates itself in
well-known areas of the city, in the rue Saint-Honoré (already the centre of
the luxury trades in the eighteenth century) and especially in the Champs
Elysées, perhaps the best-known boulevard in France, with large pavements,
cafés, and panoramic views of the city. Today a stroll in the Champs is like
reading the Yellow Pages of luxury. The queues that snake around Louis
Vuitton probably leave the people who consider themselves to be ‘real’ fash-
ionistas disdainful and jaded. Yet the crowds must presumably be queuing
for something. And, indeed, the materials and textures on sale inside are still
as luxurious, high quality, and high price as they have ever been.
But what to do when there is no cultural cachet or history to rely upon?
This is very much the case in Dubai. A city of malls that rises from the des-
ert, Dubai is fast becoming a world shopping mecca.45 A visit to the famous
Mall of the Emirates, however, shows that luxury is both an opportunity
and a challenge. Located next to the Bhur Dubai, the tallest building in the
world, the mall has more than 560 international brands and 700 stores.
The many luxury brands and designer outlets have been assembled around
a court, at the centre of which is not an ordinary café but the Armani Caffé
Dubai. A cascade of diamond-shaped glass strings, two large escalators,
and high-pile carpet provide an element of drama and distinguish this part
of the mall from the rest, where the non-luxury stores are located. Another
of the city’s well-known malls, the Dubai Mall, went a step further. Here,
one can walk through a charming European luxury alley (see Figure 8.3).
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Fig. 8.3. A Dubai mall imitating a street in Paris or London, 2013. It is unclear which city
this architecture is meant to suggest. It resembles the luxury shopping pedestrian mall
adjacent to Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, made famous in many American
films, which is itself a simulation of various European locations or a cobbled street in either
Paris or London.
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It is unclear if this is supposed to be Paris or London, but the mock

eighteenth-century architecture provides a sense of differentiation from
the rest of the mall and combines a classic Parisian arcade and an idyllic
shopping street. All this is within a synthetically cooled shopping mall on
the edge of a desert, with the heat outside standing at 45 degrees centi-
grade. Then again, if Dubai does not have the architecture of Paris or
London, why not simply build it?
There is a popular argument that the spread of luxury brands brings
homogeneity and eliminates the diversity of different types of retail busi-
ness that are able to flourish throughout the world. However, this is actu-
ally rather difficult to support if one looks at the global picture. Luxury
goods are, in fact, perhaps sold through a wider variety of types of outlet
than is the case in any other sector. The spaces of luxury are multiple. As an
example, let us contrast two emerging Asian economies, China and South
Korea. In 2014, while in China two-thirds of all luxury products were sold
in shops located in shopping malls, in Korea 75 per cent of luxury goods
were sold in department stores. Both in South Korea and Japan—but the
same can be said for France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Germany—
few luxury goods are sold in shopping malls. Yet among European coun-
tries there are substantial differences as well. In the United Kingdom, 40
per cent of luxury goods were sold in well-known department stores, com-
pared to 35 per cent in France, 28 per cent in Germany, and only 8 per cent
in Italy. In Italy, 81 per cent of luxury goods were sold by independent
shops (so called ‘street-level’ shops), which now constitute a substantial
share of the shopping streets of the Bel Paese.46 By contrast, in none of the
major Asian luxury consumer economies (India, China, Japan, South
Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore) did the street-level retailing of luxury
goods account for more than 6 per cent of sales. In the case of Hong Kong
this is remarkable, as the metropolis has more big brands than any capital
city in the West: eight Gucci stores compared to six in London and Paris,
seven Hermès stores compared to just five in London, three in Paris, and
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two in New York.47 India stands out for the high percentage (47 per cent) of
luxury goods sold in duty free and especially within hotel corridors off the
lobby, a nice older take on luxury shopping and one that guarantees secu-
rity and peace. Brazil and the Middle East have in common the fact that 91
and 85 per cent respectively of luxury goods were sold in shopping malls.
In the United States, 21 per cent of luxury goods were sold in outlets, a
form of luxury retailing that seems to have similar success only in Japan.48
Retailing is key to the success of the luxury brands. Luca Solca, manag-
ing director of global luxury goods at BNP Paribas, reports that luxury
brands are effectively becoming retailers and that in the next few years
direct distribution will increase at the expense of franchising and sale
via department stores.49 Essentially, therefore, we are likely to see luxury-
brand shops mushrooming in our city centres, shopping malls, and air-
ports. The strategy of focusing on mono-brand shops, however, comes at
a cost. Louis Vuitton sells its products through its own boutiques, ensuring
a total control of its image and a cull on fakes. Yet it is one of the few luxury
brands that has not launched a perfume, as this would necessitate its distri-
bution via perfume concessions in department stores and elsewhere.50 The
brand prefers instead to invest in its own distinctive shop outlets in some
of the world’s most prominent streets, squares, and boulevards.
While the brand is the same and the goods are more or less standardized
across the globe, this is not the case for the experience offered to custom-
ers. LV, for instance, has an architecture department that was founded in
1998 and manages the architecture, layout, and furnishing of all its 460
stores. It cooperates with architects of the calibre of Peter Marino and
Jun Aoki.51 ‘Signature shops’ are becoming landmarks in the best-known
shopping streets in the major global cities. Architect Peter Marino has
made a name for himself by working for luxury brands such as Chanel (five
shops between 2001 and 2005), Fendi (two shops), Vuitton (four), and
Dior (three), as well as Armani, and Barney’s Stores in New York and
Beverly Hills.52 Giorgio Armani in 2001 commissioned Tadao Ando to
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restructure the old Nestlé building in Milan. The new 3,400 square metre
space accommodated a theatre and the Armani showroom and commer-
cial offices. The Prada boutiques, designed by significant contemporary
architects such as Herzog & de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas, present them-
selves as akin to a gallery crossed with a skatepark. Dior Homme, mean-
while, employed contemporary artists such as Ugo Rondinone to design a
changing room of black rubber that vibrates like a heartbeat. Much money
is spent in order to create a unique experience.
THE LIMINAL SPACES OF LUXURY
The expansion and industrialization of luxury have created a kind of ‘lux-

ury invasion’ of our everyday lives.53 But at the same time one of the dan-
gers for luxury brands is that of overexposure. In targeting expanding and
increasingly amorphous markets, they have had to resort to increasingly
generic media channels: television, newspapers, magazines, and now
increasingly the Internet. They do so both by targeting precise customer
segments in terms of age and income, but also by communicating in the
most generic way possible. An example of the broad generic approach is
the prodigiously successful Dior campaign ‘J’adore Dior’, in which famous
actresses from the past and supermodels from the present participate in a
catwalk at the centre of which is not fashionable clothing but a bottle of the
‘J’adore’ perfume. Waiting in a London airport, one of the authors was
subjected to ‘J’adore Dior’ for a couple of hours. Beaming screens invaded
the boredom of the quotidian toil of early twenty-first-century airport
alienation. It is unknown quite what percentage of the other passengers
that day resisted the impulse of purchasing ‘J’adore’ for their loved ones.
Airports represent the ‘liminal’ spaces of the twenty-first century par
excellence, threshold spaces of ambiguity and sometimes disorientation,
where the traveller is caught between cultures and traditions. It is therefore
perhaps no surprise that they have been relentlessly colonized by luxury
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brands. The main creators of the modern duty-free system were the Ameri-
can Chuck Feeney and Robert W. Miller, who set up the Duty Free Shoppers
Group corporation in 1960.54 For a long time, duty free was synonymous
with cheap alcohol and cigarettes, but since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 air-
ports have become places where people are trapped for increasingly long
periods. And among these crowds of potential consumers there are, typi-
cally, large numbers of businessmen and holidaymakers with sufficient dis-
posable income to travel over long distances. Luxury has here found its
captive audience. Heathrow Terminal 5 is a case in point: designed by Rich-
ard Rogers and inaugurated in 2008, the building is 400 metres long and 170
metres wide and cost in excess of £4 billion. It also includes more than 100
shops and restaurants. The giants of British retail distribution such as W. H.
Smith and Boots are present, but the terminal also has shops by Gucci (which
also has shops in three of the other four terminals), Mulberry (with shops in
all five terminals), Montblanc, Prada, Tiffany, Dior, and Harrods, to name
but a few. Meanwhile, in Terminal 4 the keen brand-spotter will spy luxury
names such as Zegna, Etro, McQueen, Hugo Boss, Bally, Burberry, Bulgari,
Paul Smith, and Ferragamo.55 More than 30 per cent of all perfumes and 20
per cent of all cognac worldwide are bought at duty free.
Travellers do not just purchase luxury goods at airports when they hap-
pen to be travelling; increasingly, they actually travel around the world in
order to purchase luxury goods. This is especially the case with Chinese
consumers. A 2014 report reveals that, of Chinese travellers abroad, 100
per cent admitted to going shopping, compared to 90 per cent who said
they had been sightseeing, 85 per cent who had sampled the local cuisine,
and just over 20 per cent who had been to bars, nightclubs, or pubs while
on holiday.56 In 2014 the most popular destinations for the rising Chinese
middle classes were Hong Kong, Macao, South Korea, Thailand, Japan,
Taiwan, and Singapore, all relatively local destinations and with excellent
European and North American branded goods shopping. The United
States, Britain, and France were only the eighth, ninth, and tenth most
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popular destinations. Yet the dream destinations for Chinese travellers are
all European, including France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Switzerland,
Germany, Spain, Greece, and Sweden.57
What is important here—and should be carefully evaluated by the
dream countries for Chinese travellers—is that shopping constitutes 43 per
cent of total spending by travellers (equivalent to nearly $2,000).58 Those
going to Europe in 2013 splashed out on luxuries including bags, clothes,
and shoes, jewellery, and watches, spending in France just over 7,000 Rmb
(Chinese Yuan) on bags alone (this is about $1,100, which is double what is
spent on luxury goods by Chinese tourists in other countries). Australia,
too, is an increasingly attractive destination for Chinese tourists in terms
of luxury goods, as they escape the high taxes and duties that they face at
home.59 The same can be said of the European destinations, though more
subtle reasons than money push Chinese consumers to buy abroad. These
reasons are mostly to do with perception: the Chinese think that the lux-
ury goods that they purchase in Paris or Milan are of better quality than
what they can get in Beijing or Shanghai. They trust that, away from the
world centre of counterfeiting, the probability of buying a fake is lower,
and, above all, they like buying the product in or near to its place of origin.
There is nothing more rewarding than buying Dior in Paris, Armani in
Milan, or Burberry in London (whether or not their products are manu-
factured in these places is, of course, another question).
The mismatch between reality and perception or between the ‘dream
space’ of luxury and its actual retail manifestation is nowhere more evi-
dent than on the Internet. The luxury brands have long resisted cyber-
space, finding it difficult to protect and control their image. This is why
even today some luxury brands use the Web as nothing more than a shop
window, although others such as Prada cleverly use the Web to show cus-
tomers parts of their collections and to generate interest in the product,
rather than selling it there per se.60 Attitudes vary considerably. A study
completed in 2011 showed that the high-end jewellery- and watch-maker
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Cartier was very Web savvy, with more than 100 pages on its website,
whereas similarly traditional companies with similar pedigrees, such as
the silverware firm Christofle (founded 1830), had just forty pages, and the
luxury bed-linen company Yves Delorme (founded 1845) had no website
at all.61 Hotel brands such as the exclusive Peninsula had only partial web-
sites until about 2012; they now have very detailed magazine-style sites
with histories and images of the brand, shots with models using the spaces
of the hotel, and vignettes of Peninsula ‘experiences’.
If the online message proposed by the luxury brands remains partial at
best, the same can be said of their engagement with the Web as a tool to sell
their products and interact with their clients and the public at large. In
2006, Guy Salter, then deputy chairman of Walpole, the association repre-
senting British luxury brands, warned the sector that the development of
an online retailing strategy was a priority. Nearly a decade on, e-commerce
is growing but struggles to re-create the experience, attention to detail,
and customization offered in shops. The luxury brands fear for the worst.
The Internet has made the difference between original and counterfeit dif-
ficult to detect. A considerable proportion of the stock for sale on the Web
is blatantly infringing copyright and is sold at one-tenth of the original’s
price (a Louis Vuitton counterfeit purse can be acquired online for, say,
$115 instead of $1,100).62 Yet Tim Philips, in his book Knock Off (2005),
claims that the luxury brands’ lack of an online presence actually encour-
ages the purchase of counterfeits, with consumers trusting dubious online
retailers in the absence of legitimate online retailers.63 Online retailers of
counterfeits also undermine the integrity of traditional distributive chan-
nels: a few years ago a Birkin handbag sold on Ebay became the subject of
an intense bidding war that ultimately led to the bag being sold for more
than double its original price tag of $6,000.64 In this case, the artefact was
genuine, and what bidders wanted was to avoid a long waiting list.
But the Web consists of much more than just advertising and marketing.
A great part of what people think about a brand comes from cyberspace.
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Fashion blogs, for instance, are as recent as 2003. Yet already by 2006 blog-
gers had achieved enormous prestige in the hierarchy of the fashion indus-
try and within fashion communication. That year, forty bloggers were for
the first time given press passes to attend New York Fashion Week. Four
years later, Dolce & Gabbana took the decision to sit the bloggers in the
front row, elbow to elbow, one might say, with the aristocracy of fashion
such as Anna Wintour of American Vogue and Suzy Menkes of the Interna-
tional Herald Tribune.65 Bloggers replicate traditional formats to be found
in the fashion press, but the Web also increasingly has the potential to be a
tool of interaction. The mid-market luxury handbag brand Coach, for
instance, in 2012 used the Web to launch a campaign to ‘Design a Coach
Tote[bag]’ that led to 3,000 design submissions, the best of which were
eventually put into production. This is crowd-sourcing, a form of participa-
tion that is not about buying but about interacting with the brand at a more
creative level. Apart from the thousands of submissions, the campaign pro-
duced six million page views and more than 100,000 people rated the
designs submitted.66
LUXURY AND NATIONAL IDENTITIES
Luxury is today a phenomenon that goes beyond the confines of national

markets and local denominations. Yet simply to equate luxury brands with
a handful of globally known labels is overly reductive. ‘Internationally rec-
ognizable’ brands are well advertised and supported by the power of cap
ital. However, the world of the luxury brands also includes important
‘niche brands’ and products that are unique and more exclusive than the
big brands, even though they might not be as well recognized by consum-
ers. Many of the tailors in Savile Row in London, for instance, do not
advertise in luxury and fashion magazines, but their products and the
prestige of their logo are well above those of any high-street luxury brand.
They might have one or two shops only, but their clientele is truly global.67
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The idea that ‘niche’ necessarily means restricted geographical reach is

incorrect. Take a relatively small firm like the Italian company Furla, for
example; an independent brand that produces ‘affordable luxury’ hand-
bags, wallets, and shoes, and that exports 76 per cent of all its production.68
A third type of brand that is key to understanding the luxury market is
the ‘collective brand’. The most recognized among them is ‘Made in Italy’,
a concept that was invented in the 1950s to promote Italian fashion and
design. The idea of a collective trademark goes back to the nineteenth cen-
tury and extends to regional products that excel in quality, such as the cut-
lery of Sheffield, the wines of Champagne, and the glass of Bohemia or
Murano. National and regional denominations rely on formal and infor-
mal mechanisms such as the use of collective trademarks of systems of cer-
tification. The best known among them is that of the Champagne region.
A proposal for the granting of a special ‘appellation’ goes back to 1908, but
it was only in 1927 that the French government intervened to delineate the
borders of the Champagne region, and nine years later it created an ‘Appel-
lation d’Origine Contrôlée’ for Champagne.69
There is an apparent contradiction in the fact that, in an age of global-
ization, brands are deeply national, indeed often regional and subnational.
A French product is sold across the world simply because it is French. Yet
the definition of what ‘French’ might mean for producers and consumers
alike is less than clear. The global recomposition of the luxury market has
in recent years presented a unique opportunity to reshape the geographies
of luxury provenance. Since the eighteenth century, specific nations—with
France at the top of the pyramid, followed by England and in the twentieth
century Italy—became synonymous with fashion, style, and luxury. France
remained the home of both fashion (haute couture) and luxury in the
twentieth century, though the rise of luxury has shown the importance of
Italy as well. Britain, by contrast, suffered from a perceived stuffiness of
elite culture and the success instead of demotic pop culture (Carnaby,
rather than Bond, Street), to the detriment of Britain’s traditional luxury
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industry (high-quality men’s shoes, trench coats, impeccable tailoring

Savile Row-style, or the magnificence of Edwardian outfitters). Only since
the mid-2000s has the British luxury goods industry made a comeback,
though not necessarily in its traditional forms.
The case of British luxury is indicative of the complexity of the relation-
ship between the national identity of luxury and its global ambitions.
While English men’s tailoring enjoys the patronage of a select interna-
tional clientele and steady business, British luxury brands have also made
inroads in global markets. Burberry is perhaps the best known among
them. Under the able stewardship of head designer and later CEO Chris
Bailey, what used to be a rather decayed niche brand has become the
embodiment of modern luxury. The 2014 Burberry campaign visually
conveyed the secret of the brand’s success: it shows English fashion model
Cara Delevingne transformed into a modern Mary Poppins dressed in
Burberry and holding a Burberry-patterned umbrella while flying over the
stormy skyline not of London but of Shanghai.70 The transposition of
Mary Poppins to China is far from a coincidence: with China accounting
for 20 per cent of Burberry’s sales, this is part of a reshaping of a classic
British children’s character (admittedly written by an expatriate Austra-
lian author) into a hybrid that blends the essence of Britain and the skyline
of the rising oriental economies. Britishness needs to be marketed to
Chinese consumers.
A great deal of the national appeal of brands is created by cultural asso-
ciations cemented through the clever use of advertising at a global level.
Globalization, however, creates at the same time a sense of brand displace-
ment. The ‘country of production’ of a product is often different from the
‘country of origin’ of the brand: the brand might be French or Italian,
whereas the product might have been produced in China or South Korea.
When Burberry moved production to China in 2007, the loss of 300 jobs in
the Rhondda Valley of Wales made world news: Kate Moss, Prince Charles,
and the Archbishop of Canterbury were all dismayed. Burberry was
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accused of ‘corporate greed’, public opinion felt betrayed, and people

wondered whether a search for cost reduction was necessary when a Bur
berry shirt cost £60.71 At the same time, exposés by the likes of Dana
Thomas and Naomi Klein put forward a new ethical dimension, revealing
that the working conditions and workers’ wages of luxury production in
China, South-East Asia, and other developing countries were little or no
better than in the sweatshops churning out cheap commodities. The situ-
ation becomes even more complex if one considers an example such as the
city of Prato in Tuscany, where many Chinese workers are employed in
sometime clandestine workshops to produce handbags for leading Italian
fashion brands. It was rumoured in 2007 that these workshops produced a
bag for €20 that was later sold for €400.72
The luxury sector is playing with fire, as globalization of production
and distribution threatens to blur the identity of brands. Are consumers
negatively affected by the fact that Jaguar or Louis Vuitton might be pro-
duced in China rather than England and France respectively? Marketing
researchers such as Qing Wang at the Warwick Business School think that
they are, at least in those cases when the symbolic value of the luxury brand
is intangible and emotional. The preservation of a close relationship
between manufacturing and origin is important when brands rely on an
identity that associates them with key values of their country of origin.73
By contrast, no one cares or even is surprised that Nike, iPhones, and even
Land Rover cars are produced in Asia, because it is their technological fea-
tures and attributes that bestow upon them the ‘luxury’ label. In 2013,
Bentley, the British luxury car producer, announced the move of part of its
production to Bratislava, Slovakia. Unlike the Burberry story, this particu-
lar story hardly made the headlines anywhere, notwithstanding the core
importance of ‘Britishness’ to the Bentley brand. The Queen’s car-maker
is, of course, actually owned by the very German company Volkswagen,
which in this case saw an opportunity to reduce costs by offshoring pro-
duction to Slovakia, where the Porsche Cayenne is also produced.74 The
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entry level VW Polo is made in South Africa, but one has to ask the sales
representatives to find this out, and the more expensive models are still
made in Europe. How is a consumer to know?
THE TIME OF LUXURY
The luxury brands have not just invaded the spaces of streets and depart-
ment stores. They also play with the concepts of Time and History. As dis-
cussed in the Introduction, luxury finds its raison d’être in quality (real or
perceived), aesthetics, expense, and the past.75 The past is often invoked
in luxury brands’ marketing campaigns as a quest for ‘authenticity’. It is
claimed that products ‘embody’ skills, quality, and traditions that have
been passed down from generation to generation of craftsmen and skilled
producers. ‘Authenticity’ means appropriating the ‘thickness’ of the past,
its tradition and patina, all of which are key to an ‘aura of luxury’.76
Two periods that continue to attract the collective imagination of con-
sumers are the Italian Renaissance and the French eighteenth century.
They have been used by the luxury sector as the backdrop to convey a
sense of exclusivity, a world of excess, taste, and fun. Italian brands use the
Renaissance architecture of Rome, Florence, and Venice, not just in a quest
for national identity, but in the association between the magnificence
and splendour of the Italian Renaissance courts and present-day luxury
products. French luxury uses the eighteenth century, with references to
the architectural splendour of Louis XIV, Louis XV’s fashion-mad mis-
tress Madame de Pompadour, and Louis XVI’s queen, Marie Antoinette.
Countless advertising campaigns have been set at Versailles, still the most
coveted imaginary centre of French luxury, over two centuries after the
Revolution.
The luxury sector wishes to give lustre to its brands by invoking their
pedigree. A bit like a noble family, it uses the past to provide a sense of
continuity and success. For some brands, this is no invention. The oldest
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among them belong to the watch and jewellery market and include brands
such as Breguet (est. 1775), Tiffany (1837), Cartier (1847), Bulgari (1884),
and the more recent Rolex (1908). The leather and accessories market
includes well-known luxury brands established in the nineteenth century
such as Hermès (1837), Louis Vuitton (1854), and the early twentieth-
century Prada (1913), Ferragamo (1920), and Gucci (1922). By contrast,
and with the exception of Burberry (est. 1856) and Chanel (1910), all the
best-known luxury brands in clothing and fashion were established after
the Second War World: Dior (1946), Givenchy (1952), YSL (1962), Armani
(1974), and Versace (1978).77 To get around this perceived lack of long-
term pedigree, some of the most illustrious brands from the history of
fashion have in recent years been resurrected by the big luxury conglomer-
ates. For instance, Balenciaga (maison closed in 1968) and, more recently
still, Schiaparelli (maison closed in 1954). The 2013 relaunch of Schiaparelli
coincided with the auction sale of Schiaparelli’s 1938–9 Zodiac jacket,
which achieved a staggering £110,000 and a great deal of publicity.78 (It is
rumoured that this outfit was in the personal wardrobe of Marlene Diet-
rich.) Similar smart clothes were also seen in the 2011 movie W.E. about the
Duchess of Windsor filmed by Madonna.
The age of a brand is, of course, not the only indicator of its pedigree.
Continuity is just as valuable.79 We mentioned earlier that two important
brands such as Chanel and St Laurent did not even mention their founders
on their websites. This is because in both cases they failed to produce an
heir and therefore their life stories cannot be told as the foundation of a
dynasty.80 Quite different is the case with Hermès, a company whose CEO,
Axel Dumas, is part of the sixth generation of the Hermès family.81 The
same can be said of Bulgari (fourth generation), Esteé Lauder (third gen-
eration), Prada (third generation), and Riedel (eleventh generation).82 The
search for a long-term pedigree often also encourages luxury brands to
bask in the illustrious reflected glory of previous (famous) owners of their
products. Watchmaker Patek, for instance, is proud to have had among its
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customers Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Andy Warhol, Eric
Clapton (who collected them), Joe DiMaggio (who celebrated his signing
of the first six-figure sum in Major League Baseball with a Patek), Pope Pius
IX, and Queen Victoria, who apparently owned the first keyless winding
stem Patek.83 The New York Cartier show in 2009 showed Mary Pickford’s
vanity case, the tutti-frutti dress clips that belonged to Cole Porter’s wife,
Grace Kelly’s poodle pin, and jewellery belonging to wealthy customers
such as Mrs J. P. Morgan and Gertrude Vanderbilt. The show could not do
without Elizabeth Taylor’s many jewels, including ‘La Peregrina’, a pear-
shaped pearl that had been owned by (among others) Queen Mary I of
England and the Spanish queens Margarita and Isabel, before Richard
Burton purchased it at auction for Taylor in 1972 (it was then remounted
in a necklace of diamonds and rubies by Cartier).84
The past is deeply ingrained in many of the products sold by luxury
brands. One of the best-known logos in the world, the LV monogram, has
been used since it was patented by Georges Vuitton in 1905 and is said to
have been inspired by the quatrefoil in stone of the Palazzo Ducale in
Venice and other medieval decorative motifs.85 Tiffany’s Blue Box and
Hermès’ Orange Box have been in use since 1837 and 1945 respectively.
Cartier’s logo has been in use in a nearly unaltered form since the early
twentieth century, and Bulgari’s distinctive logo in Roman letters since
1933. Prada still uses the Savoy royal family’s coat of arms as the ‘official
supplier of the Royal Family of Italy’ (conferred in 1919), even though Italy
has been a republic since 1946.86
Prada’s attachment to royal symbols is indicative of how luxury capital-
ism wishes to hide carefully its modern organization behind the veneer of
history. Unlike high fashion in clothing, which is now often future ori-
ented, luxury often sees value in the past, even if that is simply understood
as ‘timelessness’. Frédéric de Narp, president and chief executive of Cartier
North America, says that ‘there is no fashion at Cartier, there are no
seasonal products. There is just the timelessness of something valuable
287
luxury
cherished for generation after generation.’87 Ironically, of course, it was

often society women and figures of style, with their fingers very much on
the pulse of the times, such as Cartier’s jewellery director Jeanne Tous-
saint, who came up with many of the ideas for those famous Cartier jewels
of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, such as the iconic ‘big cat’, which are now
so central to the ‘timeless’ Cartier image. Such women can hardly be said
to have been beyond fashion in any sense, although some may well have
been in advance of it.
The luxury brands today play a major role in the market for elite goods
and in reshaping the notion of luxury embraced by most Western and also
now many Asian people. The creation of large conglomerates and the
emergence of luxury as big business is recent, yet it has had profound
implications for our everyday lives. Luxury brands have created new
desires, have reshaped communication, have colonized our shopping
streets, and have even used history and time itself to create a sense of
lineage and pedigree in real or sometimes mythical past.
288
Conclusion
Luxury: Towards a Richer History
•
The author J. B. Priestley wrote of England in the 1930s:
Modern England is rapidly Blackpooling itself. Notice how the very mod-
ern things, like the film and wireless and sixpenny stores, are absolutely
democratic, making no distinction whatever between their patrons: if you
are in a position to accept what they give—and very few people are not in
that position—then you get neither more nor less than what anybody else
gets, just as in the popular restaurants there are no special helpings for
favoured patrons but mathematical portions for everybody. There is almost
every luxury in this world except the luxury of power or the luxury of pri-
vacy. (With the result that these are the only luxuries that modern auto-
crats insist upon claiming for themselves. They are far more austere than
most of the old tyrants ever were, but they are all greedy for power and
sticklers for privacy.)1
Priestley was not the only one to complain about the debasement of lux-
ury, what he called ‘Blackpooling’ after the well-known working-class
seaside resort in the north-west of England. He blamed a democracy or
levelling of consumption that provided ‘no special helpings for favoured
patrons’. Rising levels of consumption were eroding the traditional luxury
of the upper and the more privileged sections of the middle classes. Power
and privacy remained as the only real surviving luxuries, according to
Priestley.
289
luxury
Fast forward eighty years, and we can hear echoes of Priestley’s com-
plaints in many popular and academic treatments of luxury today, though
couched in more politically correct tones. One of the leading scholars of
fashion, the philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky, observed in the early 2000s
that ‘Luxury has multiplied and “exploded”: there is no longer one lux-
ury, but several luxuries, of various levels and for different consumers’.2
Lipovetsky proposed the argument that one can see a ‘democraticization’
of luxury in which luxury—or better to say access to luxury goods—has
come to be perceived as a contemporary ‘right’. The other side of the coin
is that such a ‘right of access to the superfluous’ must be supported by a
large-scale system of distribution. The luxury market increasingly resem-
bles the contents of a supermarket because it is aimed at satisfying the
needs of the masses. The fashion journalist Dana Thomas has written in a
similar vein of how luxury has ‘lost its lustre’ (indeed, this was the subtitle
of her book).3 Lipovetsky, on the other hand, takes a lesson from history
and argues instead that new forms of luxury continually emerge aimed at
providing something more than ‘luxury for everyone’. In this view, luxury
is a dynamic entity, continually evolving over time.
Indeed, as we have seen in our journey through the history of luxury in
this book, the concept of luxury and the material forms that it assumes
have never been fixed in time. The notion of luxury is always historically
contingent. The world of Renaissance luxury, for instance, has to be under-
stood in relation to the rise of court culture. A prince’s splendid buildings,
fine clothing, and fabulous jewellery did not simply express expenditure or
consumption—as they might do in the present—but functioned as badges
of dignity and honour. The pursuit of luxury at this time was the duty of a
ruler, as it embodied the riches and power of the state. By the eighteenth
century, the notion of luxury had been reconfigured under the pressure of
new ideas about its civic and economic value and the influence of new
commodities from Asia and other parts of the world. New luxury goods
satisfied the aspirations of richer and poorer consumers alike and helped
290
conclusion
to shape modern consumption patterns and at the same time to drive

innovation in manufacturing, at least in Europe. The eighteenth century
bears many resemblances to the present, albeit the history of luxury is far
from linear. The nineteenth century might be seen as the golden age of
luxury, but this was the luxury of the rich entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, of
robber-barons and of impecunious noblemen. Luxury became elitist, high
class, and whimsical. It was a tool to distinguish a new international class
of rich, well-connected, and mundane elites ranging from the ‘million dol-
lar princesses’, to the interwar jet set and café society. The period from the
Second World War to the late twentieth century was, by contrast, one of
decreasing wealth inequality.4 Luxury remained, but its forms were more
discreet and its appeal more limited. It was only in the 1980s that luxury
reappeared in the media as a leitmotif; yet since then its rise has been
meteoric. By the early 2000s it had entered the popular consciousness
to such a degree that—as Lipovetsky argues—it came to be perceived as
a ‘right’.
The latest incarnations of luxury should be read not as some ‘absolute’,
but in the light of the long historical evolution of the concept and the
changing material and social practices that it has assumed over time,
although this is not to deny that some of the features of contemporary
luxury are indeed new. The period since the 1980s has seen a new form
of capitalism based on the global production and distribution of ‘luxury
goods’—bags, clothing, cars, fragrances, and other consumer goods—whose
production and distribution rely on ubiquitous and powerful conglomer-
ates. This new form of luxury has found new consumers as well. Its success
is based on satisfying what we might call the ‘aspirational society’, an ever
more global society in which consumers increasingly feel they have the
‘right’ to luxury.
One of the problems of narrating a history of luxury derives from the
fact that in each era there was no singular idea of luxury. Luxury—both as a
concept and as a material practice—has been the subject of vehement
291
luxury
debate and disagreement since antiquity. Both vituperated against and

welcomed in almost equal measure, luxury is today both the embodiment of
deep inequality and at the same time—some argue—a form of participation
in democracy. It is a force of economic growth (a large-scale and expanding
industry) as well as the cause of massive consumer debt. It is a source of
exploitation of labour (especially in the developing economies), while also
providing a vital underpinning for highly skilled craftsmanship and manu-
facturing ingenuity. These brief contrasting examples help remind us that
luxury thrives on its own internal ambiguity.
In our history, we have given space not just to the desires and ambitions
of consumers. Production remains an important part of the story of lux-
ury. Throughout its long history, luxury has been linked to skilful crafts-
manship and innovation. Often sitting somewhere between the realm of
the artist and that of the artisanal craftsman, the producer of luxury goods
has pushed the technical, technological, and aesthetic boundaries of the
material world since antiquity. Today the idea is prevalent that luxury cap-
tures the essence of dying skills: the hand-crafted and labouriously pro-
duced object that requires a set of traditional skills, often acquired through
years of training. We like the rarity value that such craft production con-
fers, which often of course results in high prices for the finished object.
We like to emphasize the local, the unique, and the peculiar, setting these
comforting qualities against more alienating narratives of global homo-
geneity and industrial mass production. The global brands that today
dominate the ‘luxury industry’ understandably struggle to reconcile this
aspiration to authenticity, to quality, and to craftsmanship, with the ‘indus-
trial’ model of their production.
A final, related contradiction that characterizes luxury particularly
acutely in the present is a tension between its universalizing ambitions and
its innate local nature. Luxury goods are often seen as the ‘genuine’ fruit of
the genius loci—a quality captured by the French word terroir (as for
instance in the case of champagne). Luxury thrives on the knowledge of
292
conclusion
the particular, of local contexts, and it relies on clearly defined communi-

ties of producers and consumers alike. Yet at the same time, luxury—like
fashion—aspires to be global, to be enjoyed by transnational elites whose
only real connection might well be their shared enjoyment of the same
luxuries. An international group of rich businessmen meeting in Hawaii
might, for instance, have very little in common other than that they are
expected to be conversant with the quality of a specific type of champagne
from a specific cellar.
As we were finishing the writing of this book, we visited a new type
of luxury exhibition entitled ‘What is Luxury?’, held at the Victoria and
Albert Museum in the spring and summer of 2015. This exhibition took a
brave stand, and banished shopping bags with large logos or dresses by
famous couturiers. There were no ‘J’adore Dior’ and no LV monograph
wallpaper. There was no whisky, cognac, or champagne, or diamond rings,
even though such objects understandably represent the essence of luxury
for many contemporary consumers. But the very absence of the expected
panoply of luxury items from the exhibition posed interesting questions.
Might not luxury be moving in exciting directions in the not-too-distant
future? For instance, what if currently omnipresent chemical materials
deriving from hydrocarbons become scarce? Could plastic then become as
rare as gold? Could privacy—as Priestley once suggested—become the ulti-
mate new luxury, especially in an age when the vast majority of us will
probably have to be ‘connected up’ online? Can we envisage a future in
which luxury and commercial capitalism once again separate from each
other? Is it an idle luxury to indulge in such speculation?
293
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 03/07/16, SPi
Notes
Introduction. Luxury: A Rich History and a History of Riches

1. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 348.
2. See, e.g., John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought: Eden to Smollett
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Christopher Berry, The Idea
of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1994); William Howard Adams, On Luxury: A Cautionary Tale:
A Short History of the Perils of Excess from Ancient Times to the Beginning of the
Modern Era (Washington: Potomac Books, 2012).
3. See, e.g., Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005); Berry, Idea of Luxury; Richard Goldthwaite, ‘The
Economy of Renaissance Italy: The Preconditions for Luxury Consumption’,
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2 (1987), 15–39; Guido Guerzoni, and
Gabriele Troilo, ‘Silk Purses out of Sows’ Ears: Mass Rarefaction of Consumption
and the Emerging Consumer-Collector’, in Marina Bianchi (ed.), The Active Con-
sumer (London: Routledge, 1998), 174–98; Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor:
Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2005). And in French: Jean Castarède, Le Luxe (Paris: Puf, 1992);
Philippe Perrot, Le Luxe: Une richesse entre faste et confort, XIIIe–XIXe siècle (Paris:
Seuil, 1995); Jacques Marseille (ed.), Le Luxe en France du siècle des ‘lumières’ à nos
jours (Paris: ADHE, 1999); Olivier Assouly and Pierre Bergé (eds), Le Luxe: Essais
sur la fabrique de l’ostentation (Paris: Institut français de la mode, 2004); Yves
Michaud, Le Nouveau Luxe: Experiences, arrogance, authenticité (Paris: Éditions
Stock, 2013).
4. See, e.g., Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 2000); Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury
Lost its Lustre (London: Penguin, 2008).
5. Michaud, Le Nouveau Luxe, 56.
6. Olivier Assouly, ‘Le Luxe, un art de la dépense’, in Universalia 2011 (Paris: Encyclo-
paedia Universalis, 2011), 154.
7. Sekora, Luxury, 24.
8. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institu-
tions (New York: MacMillan, 1899); Georg Simmel, Philosophie der Mode (Berlin:
294
notes
Pan-Verlag, 1905); Werner Sombart, Luxus und Kapitalismus (Munich: Duncker

& Humblot, 1913; English trans. Luxury and Capitalism, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1967).
9. Personal communication with Dr Glenn Adamson, Museum of Art and Design,
New York.
10. Olivier Assouly and Pierre Bergé (eds), Le Luxe: Essais sur la fabrique de
l’ostentation (Paris Éditions de l’Institut français de la mode et Éditions du regard,
2005); Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain; Berry, Idea of
Luxury; Jean Castarède, Histoire du luxe en France (Paris: Eyrolles, 2007); Goldth-
waite, ‘The Economy of Renaissance Italy’; Richard Goldthwaite, ‘The Empire of
Things: Consumer Demand in Renaissance Italy’, in Francis William Kent, Patri-
cia Simons, and John Christopher Eade (eds), Patronage, Art, and Society in
Renaissance Italy (Canberra: Canberra Humanities Research Centre; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 153–75; Perrot, Le Luxe; Thomas, Deluxe; Jan de
Vries, ‘Luxury in the Dutch Golden Age in Theory & Practice’, in Maxine Berg and
Elizabeth Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delec-
table Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 41–56; Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the
Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2005).
Chapter 1. Luxury, Antiquity, and the Allure of the Antique

1. Allison Karmel Thomason, Luxury and Legitimation: Royal Collecting in Ancient
Mesopotamia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
2. Kelly Olson, ‘Matrona and Whore: The Clothing of Women in Roman Antiquity’,
Fashion Theory, 6/4 (2002), 413.
3. John Baines, ‘On the Status and Purposes of Ancient Egyptian Art’, Cambridge
Archaeological Journal, 4/1 (1994), 69.
4. Cit. in David Braund, ‘The Luxuries of Athenian Democracy’, Greece & Rome,
41/1 (1994), 44.
5. Braund, ‘Luxuries’, 46.
6. Cit. in John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought: Eden to Smollett
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 35.
7. Krishan Kumar, ‘Greece and Rome in the British Empire: Contrasting Role Mod-
els’, Journal of British Studies, 51/1 (2012), 79.
8. Quintillian, Institutes 8, pref. 19–20.
9. Cit. in Andrew Dalby, Empire of Pleasures: Luxury and Indulgence in the Roman
World (London: Routledge, 2000), 267.
10. Cit. in Sekora, Luxury, 30.
11. Cit. in Grant Parker, ‘Ex Oriente Luxuria: Indian Commodities and Roman Expe-
rience’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 45/1 (2002), 57.
295
notes
12. Cit. in Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2008), 315.
13. Dalby, Empire of Pleasures, 10–11.
14. Francesca C. Tronchin, ‘Roman Collecting, Decorating, and Eclectic Practice in
the Textual Sources’, Arethusa, 45 (2012), 338–9.
15. Cit. in Dalby, Empire of Pleasures, 271.
16. Lowell Bowdith, ‘Propertius and the Gendered Rhetoric of Luxury and Empire:
A Reading of 2.16’, Comparative Literature Studies 43/3 (2006), 315.
17. Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci and Anna E. Plisecka, ‘Luxury in Ancient Rome: An Eco-
nomic Analysis of the Scope, Timing and Enforcement of Sumptuary Laws’, Inter-
national Journal of Roman Law, Legal History and Comparative Law, 1 (2012), 216.
18. Barbara Levick, ‘Morals, Politics, and the Fall of the Roman Empire’, Greece &
Rome, 29/1 (1982), 56.
19. John H. D’Arms, ‘The Culinary Reality of Roman Upper-Class Convivia: Integrat-
ing Texts and Images’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46/3 (2004), 431.
20. Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, 329–30.
21. Anton Ervynck, Wim Van Neer, Heide Hüster-Plogmann, and Jörg Schibler, ‘Beyond
Affluence: The Zooarchaeology of Luxury’, World Archaeology, 34/3 (2003), 428–41.
22. Corrie Bakels and Stefanie Jacomet, ‘Access to Luxury Foods in Central Europe
during the Roman Period: The Archaeobotanical Evidence’, World Archaeology,
34/3 (2003), 542.
23. Ervynck et al., ‘Beyond Affluence’, 437.
24. Alexandra Livarda, ‘Date, Rituals and Socio-Cultural Identity in the North-West-
ern Roman Provinces’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 32/1 (2013), 107, 108.
25. Lucia Amalia Scatozza Höricht, ‘Le Orificerie romane’, in Rosanna Cappelli (ed.),
Bellezza e lusso: Immagini e documenti di piaceri della vita (Rome: Leonardo Arte,
1992), 63.
26. A. Heron de Villefosse, ‘Le Trésor de Boscoreale’, Monuments et mémoires, 5 (1899),
39–43.
27. Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, ‘The Waiting Servant in Roman Art’, American Jour-
nal of Philology, 124/3 (2003), 444.
28. Dunbabin, ‘Waiting Servant’, 454.
29. Dunbabin, ‘Waiting Servant’, 463.
30. Olson, ‘Matrona and Whore’, 399.
31. Cit. in Scatozza Höricht, ‘Le Orificerie romane’, 63.
32. Phyllis Culham, ‘The “Lex Oppia” ’, Latomus, 41/4 (1982), 788.
33. Culham, ‘ “Lex Oppia” ’, 793.
34. Courtesy Kelly Olson, communication with the authors.
35. Scatozza Höricht, ‘Le Orificerie romane’, 65.
36. Olson, ‘Matrona and Whore’, 387–420. We thank Dr Olson for sharing her work
on men’s dress currently in progress.
296
notes
37. Cit. in Neil W. Bernstein, ‘Adoptees and Exposed Children in Roman Declama-
tion: Commodification, Luxury and the Threat of Violence’, Classical Philology,
104 (2009), 339–40.
38. Bernstein, ‘Adoptees’, 342.
39. Karen Rose Matthews, ‘Expressing Political Legitimacy and Cultural Identity
through the Use of Spolia on the Ambo of Henry II’, Medieval Encounters, 5/2
(1999), 156–83.
40. Jonathan Scott, The Pleasures of Antiquity: British Collectors of Greece and Rome
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1.
41. Cit. in Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy,
1400–1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 292.
42. Isobel dos Guimarães Sá, ‘The Uses of Luxury: Some Examples from the Portu-
guese Courts from 1480 to 1580’, Análise social, 44/192 (2009), 595.
43. Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, 4–5.
44. Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, 13.
45. Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, 14–21.
46. Cit. in Manfred Pfister (ed.), The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Italies of British Travellers
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 145.
47. Cit. in Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (New York: Putnam, 1969), 159.
48. Cit. in S. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (1619–1800) (New York: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1969), 234–7.
49. Cit. in Scott, Pleasures of Antiquity, 221.
50. H. Roux Ainé, Herculaneum et Pompéi : Recueil général des peintures, bronzes,
mosaïques, etc. (Paris: Librarie de Firmin Didot Frères, 1840), pp. xvi–xvii.
51. Cit. in Diego Saglia, ‘Consuming Egypt: Appropriation and the Cultural Modal
ities of Romantic Luxury’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 24/3 (2002), 324.
52. Cit. in Saglia, ‘Consuming Egypt’, 320.
53. Saglia, ‘Consuming Egypt’, 321. The service remained with the Dukes of Wel-
lington until 1979, when it was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Today all but one plate is on loan to English Heritage and displayed at Apsley
House, London.
54. See, e.g., Timothy Mowl, Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (London: John
Murray Publishers, 1996).
55. Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domes-
tic Interior in England (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993), 237.
56. Cit. in J. Mordaunt Crook, ‘Strawberry Hill Revisited – II’, Country Life, 14 June
(1973), 1730.
57. [Horace Walpole], A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole, Youngest Son of
Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex.
With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c. (Strawberry-Hill:
Thomas Kirgate, 1784), p. iii.
297
notes
58. Jeffrey Cass, ‘Homoreroticism and Orientalism in William Beckford’s Vathek:

Liberalism and the Problem of Pederasty’, in Diane Long Hoeveler and Jeffrey
Cass (eds), Interrogating Orientalism: Contextual Approaches and Pedagogical
Practices (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), 107–20.
59. Aaron Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-sex Desire (New York: William
Morrow & Company, 1997), 70.
60. Anita McConnell, ‘William Beckford’, in Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds),
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 731–7.
61. William Hazlitt, ‘Fonthill Abbey’, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed.
P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1933), xviii. 173.
62. Hazlitt, ‘Fonthill Abbey’, xviii. 174.
63. Saglia, ‘Consuming Egypt’, 325.
64. Horace Walpole’s letter to his cousin, Henry Conway, 5 August 1761, In J. Mordaunt
Crook, ‘Strawberry Hill Revisited – I’, Country Life, 7 June (1973), part I, no pagi-
nation in W. S. Lewis’s proof copy, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
Chapter 2. Luxury, the Church, and the Court in the

Late Middle Ages and Renaissance
1. Ronald Recht, Believing and Seeing. The Art of Gothic Cathedrals, trans. Mary
Whittall (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 114. French
edn, 1999.
2. Recht, Believing and Seeing, 84.
3. Recht, Believing and Seeing, 99.
4. Maureen C. Miller, Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe,
c.800–1200 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 41.
5. Miller, Clothing the Clergy, 45.
6. Miller, Clothing the Clergy, 145, 153–6.
7. See, e.g., Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in Four-
teenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
8. Odile Blanc, ‘From Battlefields to Court: The Invention of Fashion in the Four-
teenth Century’, in Désirée G. Koslin and Janet E. Snyder (eds), Encountering
Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images (New York: Macmillan Palgrave,
2002), 157–72; Sarah-Grace Heller, ‘Fashion in French Crusade Literature: Desir-
ing Infidel Textiles’, in Koslin and Snyder (eds), Encountering Medieval Textiles,
103–19; Françoise Pipponier and Perrine Manne, Dress in the Middle Ages (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), esp. 99–113.
9. Georges Duby, Art and Society in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000),
46. French edn, 1995.
298
notes
10. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1999; Mineola, NY: Dover Publi-
cations, 1999), 228.
11. Edwin Hall, The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and Enigma of Van Eyck’s
Double Portrait (Berkeley and Los Angeles, and London: University of California
Press 1994), 115.
12. Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Régime’,
trans. J. Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
13. See Chapter 3.
14. Luca Molà, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000).
15. Lisa Monnas, ‘Silk Cloths Purchased for the Great Wardrobe of the Kings of Eng-
land, 1325–1462’, Textile History, 20/2 (1989), 283–307; Lisa Monnas, Merchants,
Princes, and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300–1500
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008).
16. Cit. in Jeffrey S. Widmayer, ‘The Sumptuary Laws of Manuscript Montpellier
H119’, Romance Notes, 46/2 (2006), 132.
17. Negley B. Harte, ‘State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-Industrial Eng-
land’, in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (eds), Trade, Government and Economy in
Pre-Industrial England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976), 134.
18. Sarah-Grace Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance in Thirteenth-Century
Sumptuary Laws and the roman de la rose’, French Historical Studies, 27/2 (2004),
312–13.
19. Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance’, 329, 335.
20. Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance’, 318.
21. Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance’, 319.
22. Law of 1294, cit. in Heller, ‘Anxiety, Hierarchy, and Appearance’, 345.
23. A. Liva, ‘Note sulla legislazione suntuaria nell’Italia centro-settentrionale’, in
A. G. Cavagna and Graziella Butazzi (eds), Le trame della moda (Rome: Bulzoni,
1995), 34.
24. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘Il corpo spogliato: Multe, scomuniche e stratagemmi
per il rispetto delle leggi suntuarie’, Micrologus, 15 (2007), 407.
25. Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford
26. Helmut Puff, ‘The Sodomite’s Clothes. Gift-Giving and Sexual Excess in Early
Modern Germany and Switzerland’, in Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff
Encarnacion (eds), The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation and Marriage in Pre-
modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 261.
27. Giovanni Pontano, De splendore (1498), cit. in Evelyn Welch, ‘Public Magnifi-
cence and Private Display: Giovanni Pontano’s “De Splendore” (1498) and the
Domestic Arts’, Journal of Design History, 15 (2002), 222.
28. Pipponier and Manne, Dress in the Middle Ages.
299
notes
29. Maria Hayward, ‘Luxury or Magnificence? Dress at the Court of Henry VIII’, Cos-
tume, 30 (1996), 37. See also Maria Hayward, Dress at the Court of King Henry VIII
(Leeds: Maney, 2007).
30. Hayward, ‘Luxury or Magnificence?’, 39.
31. Anne F. Sutton, ‘Order and Fashion in Clothes: The King, his Household and the
City of London at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, Textile History, 22/2 (1991),
253–76.
32. Kay Staniland, ‘Clothing Provision and the Great Wardrobe in the Mid-Thirteenth
Century’, Textile History, 22/2 (1991), 239–52.
33. Yassana Croizat, ‘ “Living Dolls”: François I Dresses his Women’, Renaissance
Quarterly, 60/1 (2007), 94–130.
34. For an anthropological analysis of colours in history and their meaning, see the
extensive work by Pastoreau. Michel Pastoreau, Colours of our Memories (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2012); and his ‘colour trilogy’: Michel Pastoreau, Blue: The History
of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Black: The History of a
Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Green: The History of a Color
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
35. Janet Arnold, Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds: Maney & Son, 1988); Susan
Frye, ‘Sewing Connections: Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Talbot, and
Seventeenth-Century Anonymous Needleworkers’, in Susan Frye and Karen
Robertson (eds), Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in
Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 165–82. See
also Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Mate-
rials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Roy Strong,
Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); Margaret Swain,
Figures on Fabric: Embroidery Design Sources and Their Application (London:
Adam & Charles Black, 1980).
36. Cit. in Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart
England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 81.
37. Timothy Mowl, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style (London: Phaidon, 2001), 22.
38. Christy Anderson, ‘Monstrous Babels: Language and Architectural Style in the
English Renaissance’, in Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossley (eds), Architecture and
Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture, 1000–1600 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 160.
39. Anderson, ‘Monstrous Babels’, 161.
40. ‘The Sea-Dog Table’, in Gervase Jackson-Stops (ed.),Treasure Houses of England.
Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting (National Gallery of
Art, Washington, New Haven, and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 108–10.
41. ‘Sea-Dog Table’, 108–10.
42. Chambers’ Cyclopaedia (1728, 2 vols, with the 1753 supplement): digitized by the
University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.
300
notes
43. Pamela Clabburn, The National Trust Book of Furnishing Textiles (London: Viking,
1988), 189–90.
44. Laurence Fontaine, The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early Mod-
ern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 223.
45. Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction, 96.
46. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and
Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1996), pp. xv–xvi.
47. Lars Kjaer and A. J. Watson, ‘Feasts and Gifts: Sharing Food in the Middle Ages’,
Journal of Medieval History, 37 (2011), 3.
48. Kjaer and Watson, ‘Feasts and Gifts’, 2.
49. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Court, Cloister & City: The Art and Culture of Cen-
tral Europe 1450–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25
50. Baldessare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Leonard Eckstein (New York:
Scribner’s, 1903), 278.
51. Maria Bogucka, ‘Gesture, Ritual, and Social Order in Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-
Century Poland’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (eds), A Cultural
History of Gesture (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 190–209.
52. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcot, 2 vols (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1982).
53. Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance (2nd edn, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987), 9.
54. On this point, see George W. McClure, The Culture of Profession in Late Renais-
sance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 155, 167.
55. Cit. in Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1986), 9.
56. Welch, ‘Public Magnificence’, 211–21.
57. Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, HyperArchitecture: Spaces in the Electronic Age (Basle:
Birkhäuser, 1999).
58. Cit. in Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996), 91.
59. Auslander, Taste and Power, 51.
60. Auslander, Taste and Power.
61. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1965), 266.
Chapter 3. Luxury and the Exotic: The Appeal of the Orient

1. NBC News, ‘Ming Bling: $36M for “Chicken Cup” in Record for China Porcelain’
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-08/-chicken-cup-sets-china-
auction-record-with-36-million.html> (accessed 2 November 2015).
301
notes
2. ‘Imperial Chinese Porcelain. Meiyintang Marvels: The Finest Private Collection

of Chinese Porcelain in the West is about to be Sold’, The Economist, 17 March
2011 <http://www.economist.com/node/18385704> (accessed 2 November 2015).
3. Peter Stabel, ‘ “Le Goût pour l’Orient”: Demande cosmopolite et objets de luxe à
Bruges à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Histoire urbaine, 30/1 (2011), 22.
4. Paul Freedman, ‘Spices and Late-Medieval European Ideas of Scarcity and Value’,
Speculum, 80 (2005), 1209.
5. Cit. in Muriel J. Hughes, ‘Marco Polo and Medieval Silk’, Textile History, 6 (1975),
121.
6. Cit. in Hughes, ‘Marco Polo’, 121.
7. Cit. in Hughes, ‘Marco Polo’, 123.
8. François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire ad 1656–1668, ed. Archibald George
Constable (London: Oxford University Press, 1916), 268.
9. Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, 268.
12. Mark Zebrowski, ‘Glamour and Restraint’, in First under Heaven: The Art of Asia
(London: Hali Publications Limited, 1997), 171–2.
13. Zebrowski, ‘Glamour and Restraint’, 177.
14. Gülru Necipolu, ‘Süleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the
Context of Ottoman–Hapsburg-Papal Rivarly’, Art Bulletin, 71/3 (1989), 401–27.
15. Opher Mansour, ‘Picturing Global Conversion: Art and Diplomacy at the Court
of Paul V’, Journal of Early Modern History, 17/5 (2013), 532.
16. Giorgio Riello, ‘ “With Great Pomp and Magnificence”: Royal Gifts and the
Embassies between Siam and France in the 1680s’, in Zoltán Biedermann, Anne
Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello (eds), Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplo-
macy in Early Modern Eurasia (forthcoming).
17. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence
in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 172.
18. Cit. in Maria Ruvoldt, ‘Sacred to Secular, East to West: The Renaissance Study and
Strategies of Display’, Renaissance Studies, 20/5 (2006), 652–3.
19. Isobel dos Guimaraˉes Sá, ‘The Uses of Luxury: Some Examples from the Portu-
guese Courts from 1480 to 1580’, Análise social, 44/192 (2009), 592.
20. Sabine Haag, Ambras Castle in Innsbruck (Vienna: Ambras Casle, 2013).
21. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of
the English Nation (Glasgow: J. MacLehose and Sons, 1903–5), vii. 116–17.
22. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, vii. 117.
23. Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, vii. 117.
24. Stabel, ‘ “Le Gout pour l’Orient” ’, 28.
25. R. W. Lightbown, ‘Oriental Art and the Orient in Late Renaissance and Baroque
Italy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32 (1969), 228–79. They are
302
notes
extremely rare, as only sixty-two pieces are known to exist. They are distinctive by
their mark bearing the symbol of the cathedral of Santa Maria Novella in Flor-
ence. Nine of the sixty-two known pieces are at the Musée de Sèvres on the out-
skirts of Paris.
26. This was the case not just in Europe, but also, for example, in India and Persia. See
Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, ‘Spaces of Global Interactions: The Material
Landscapes of Global History’, in Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds), Writ-
ing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 112.
27. See Gerritsen and Riello, ‘Spaces of Global Interactions’, 111.
28. Daniel Walker, Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1998).
29. Anne Goldar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
30. H. Walter Lack, Garden Eden: Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration (Cologne:
Taschen, 2001).
31. Jenny Uglow, A Little History of British Gardening (London: Chatto and Windus,
2004); Ronald Blythe, ‘Heavens on Earth: Writers and Gardens’, Country Life,
1 May (1986), 1172–4; Carolyn Fry, The Plant Hunters: The Adventures of the
World’s Greatest Botanical Explorers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
32. Peter McNeil, ‘Everlasting: The Flowers in Fashion and Textiles’, in Roger Leong
(ed.), Everlasting: The Flowers in Fashion and Textiles (Melbourne: National
Gallery of Victoria, 2005), 14–23.
33. Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, ‘East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Eurasia
in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Social History, 41/4 (2008), 887–916.
34. Beverly Lemire, ‘Domesticating the Exotic: Floral Culture and the East India Cal-
ico Trade with England, c.1600–1800’, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, 1/1
(2003), 65–85.
35. See John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century
England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s
Favourite: Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford
36. Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2013), esp. ch. 7.
37. Monika Bincsik, ‘European Collectors and Japanese Merchants of Lacquer in
“Old Japan” ’, Journal of the History of Collections, 20/2 (2008), 218.
38. Danielle O Kisluk-Grosheide, ‘A Japanned Cabinet in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 19/20 (1986), 85.
39. Alexandra Curvelo, ‘The Disruptive Presence of the Namban-jin in Early Modern
Japan’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 55 (2012), 584–5.
40. Rhonda K. Garelick, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (New
York: Random House, 2014).
303
notes
41. See Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch

Culture in the Golden Age (London: HarperCollins, 1987).
42. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits . . .
(London: C. Bathurst, 1795), 42.
43. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, ‘Introduction’, in Maxine Berg and Helen
Clifford (eds), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650–1850
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 3.
44. Jan de Vries, ‘Luxury in the Dutch Golden Age in Theory and Practice’, in Maxine
Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires
and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 43.
45. Olivier Assouly, ‘Le Luxe, un art de la dépense’, in Universalia 2011 (Paris:
Encyclopaedia Universalis, 2011), 152.
46. Cissie Fairchilds, ‘The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eigh-
teenth-Century Paris’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the
World of Goods (London and New York, 1993), 228–48.
47. Cit. in Brenda Collins, ‘Matters Material and Luxurious: Eighteenth and Early Nine-
teenth-Century Irish Linen Consumption’, in Jacqueline Hill and Colm Lennon
(eds), Luxury and Austerity (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999), 114.
48. Maxine Berg, ‘New Commodities, Luxuries and their Consumers in Eighteenth-
Century England’, in Berg and Clifford (eds), Consumers and Luxury, 63–85. See
also Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005). A more cautious view is expressed for the seven-
teenth century by Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in
Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
49. Giorgio Riello, ‘Asian Knowledge and the Development of Calico Printing in
Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Global History,
5/1 (2010), 1–29.
50. Christine Velut, ‘Between Invention and Production: The Role of Design in the
Manufacture of Wallpaper in France and England at the Turn of the Nineteenth
Century’, Journal of Design History, 17/1 (2004), 55–69.
51. John Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors (New Haven and London: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 2004).
52. M. Cassidy-Geiger (ed.), Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts,
ca. 1710–63 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
53. Oliver Impey, ‘Japanese Export Art of the Edo Period and its Influences on Euro-
pean Art’, Modern Asian Studies, 18/4 (1984), 686–7.
54. Impey, ‘Japanese Export Art’, 688.
55. Christoph Jeggle, ‘Economies of Quality as a Concept of Research on Luxury’, in
Rengenier C. Rittersma (ed.), Luxury in the Low Countries: Miscellaneous Reflec-
tions on Netherlandish Material Culture, 1500 to the Present (Brussels: Pharo Pub-
lishing, 2010), 36.
304
notes
56. Paul F. Hsai, ‘Chinoiserie in Eighteenth Century England’, American Journal of

Chinese Studies, 4 (1997), 239.
57. David Porter, ‘Chinoiserie and the Aesthetics of Illegitimacy’, Studies in Eigh-
teenth-Century Culture, 28 (1999), 27–54.
58. Cit. in David M. Mitchell, ‘The Influence of Tartary and the Indies on Social Atti-
tudes and Material Culture in England and France, 1650–1730’, in Anna Jolly
(ed.), A Taste for the Exotic: Foreign Influences on Early Eighteenth-Century Silk
Design (Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2007), 31.
59. Mitchell, ‘Influence of Tartary’, 42.
60. Ulrike Grimm, ‘Favourite, a Rare Place Exuding the Spirit of an Age when Chinoi-
series Reigned Supreme’, in Jolly (ed.), A Taste for the Exotic, 85
61. London Chronicle, 9–12 April 1757, vol. 1, 348.a
62. Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme: see full text at <http://www.gutenberg.org/
files/2992/2992-h/2992-h.htm> (accessed 2 November 2015).
63. ‘Turquerie’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 26/5 (1968), 233.
64. Julia Anne Ladweber, ‘Turkish Delight: The Eighteenth-Century Market in Turqueries
and the Commercialization of Identity in France’, Proceedings of the Western Society for
French History, 30 (2002), 206–7. See also Alexander Bevilacqua and Helen Pfeifer,
‘Turqueries: Culture in Motion, 1650–1750’, Past & Present, 221 (2014), 75–118.
65. Cit. in Ladweber, ‘Turkish Delight’, 204.
66. Fairchilds, ‘The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods’, 230.
67. Wan-Chen Chang, ‘The Goncourt Brothers’ Chinese Art Collection’, in A Taste
for China: Paris 1743–1930 (Paris: Musée Guimet and Hong Kong Museum of
Art, 2008), 101.
68. Chang, ‘The Goncourt Brothers’ Chinese Art Collection’, 111–12.
69. Chang, ‘The Goncourt Brothers’ Chinese Art Collection’, 113.
70. Marie-Catherine Rey, ‘A Taste for China: A Portrait of the French Lover of Chinese
Art’, in A Taste for China, 41–2.
71. Phyllis Floyd, ‘Documentary Evidence for the Availability of Japanese Imagery in
Europe in Nineteenth-Century Public Collections’, Art Bulletin, 68/1 (1986), 106.
72. P.-A. Renoir, ‘Grammar 1883–84’ (unpublished manuscript), cit. in Robert L.
Herbert, Nature’s Workshop: Renoir’s Writings on the Decorative Arts (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 152.
73. Jean-Paul Desroches, ‘Artistic Paris in the 1930s’, in A Taste for China, 128–31.
74. Monika Bincsik, ‘European Collectors and Japanese Merchants of Lacquer in
“Old Japan” ’, Journal of the History of Collection, 20 (2008), 222.
75. He later authored, as a result of his 1876–7 travels in Japan, Christopher Dresser,
Japan: Its Architecture, Art and Art Manufactures (London: Longmans, 1882).
76. Ellen E. Roberts, ‘A Marriage of “The Extreme East and the Extreme West”: Jap
anism and Aestheticism in Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Rooms in the Bella Apart-
ments’, Studies in the Decorative Arts, 13/2 (2006), 9–11.
305
notes
77. Cit. in Joe Earle, ‘The Taxonomic Obsession: British Collectors and Japanese
Objects, 1852–1986’, Burlington Magazine, 128/1005 (1986), 865.
78. Bincsik, ‘European Collectors’, 223.
79. See, e.g., the bestseller Edmund De Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden
Inheritance (London: Vintage, 2011), whose narrative rotates around a collection
of netsukes inherited from the author’s uncle.
80. Cit. in Phyllis Floyd, ‘Documentary Evidence for the Availability of Japanese
Imagery in Europe in Nineteenth-Century Public Collections’, Art Bulletin, 68/1
(1986), 115.
81. Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 168.
82. Robert Baldick, ‘Introduction’, in Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature
(A Rebours), trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), 13. (Origi-
nal edn 1884.)
83. Edgar Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat (New York
and Paris: Frick Collection/Flammarion, 1995).
84. ‘Fiat Chrysler to Spin off Ferrari into Separate Unit’ <www.bbc.com/news/
business-29817720> (accessed 2 November 2015).
Chapter 4. Housing Luxury: From the Hôtel Particulier

to the Manhattan Cooperatives
1. Mariana Valverde, ‘The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nine-
teenth-Century Social Discourse’, Victorian Studies, 32/2 (1989), 168–88.
2. On the concept of comfort, see John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensi-
bilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001).
3. Ursula Priestley and Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Rooms and Room Use in Norwich
Housing, 1580–1730’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 16 (1982), 93–123.
4. Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley, Creating Paradise: The Building of the English
Country House 1660–1880 (London and New York: Hambledon and London,
2000).
5. Peter Thorold, The London Rich: The Creation of a Great City from 1666 to the Pres-
ent (London: Viking, 1999).
6. M[onsieur] D’Archenholz (Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz), A Picture of Eng-
land: Containing a Description of the Laws, Customs, and Manners of England
(London: Edward Jeffery, 1789), i. 148–9.
7. D’Archenholz, A Picture of England, i. 148–9.
8. Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the 18th Century
(Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), and Daniel Roche, A History of Everyday Things:
306
notes
The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 2000).
9. Katie Scott, The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth-
Century Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 86.
10. R. G. Saisselin, ‘Neo-Classicism: Images of Public Virtue and Realities of Private
Luxury’, Art History, 4/1 (1981), 15. See also Charissa Bremer-David (ed.), Paris:
Life & Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (Los Angeles: Paul Getty Museum, 2011).
11. Rochelle Ziskin, The Place Vendôme: Architecture and Social Mobility in Eigh-
teenth-Century Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.
12. Scott, Rococo Interior, 104.
13. Saisselin, ‘Neo-Classicism’, 14.
14. Piero Camporesi, Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of Enlightenment, trans.
Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
15. Colin Jones, Madame de Pompadour: Image of a Mistress (London: National
Gallery and Yale University Press, 2002), 51.
16. Saisselin, ‘Neo-Classicism’, 20.
17. Saisselin, ‘Neo-Classicism’, 20, 30.
18. Ziskin, Place Vendôme.
19. Mimi Hellman, ‘Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-
Century France’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32/4 (1999), 415–45.
20. Ziskin, Place Vendôme, 24, 48–9.
21. Jean-François de Bastide, The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, trans.
Rodolphe el-Khoury (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), introduc-
tion by R. el-Khoury, ‘Architecture in the Bedroom’, 19–54; extract, 57–110.
22. See also Chapter 3.
23. John Carr, The Stranger in France, or, a Tour from Devonshire to Paris, Illustrated
by Engravings in Aqua Tinta of Sketches Taken on the Spot (London: J. Johnson,
1803), 184.
24. Yannick Chastang, Paintings in Wood: French Marquetry Furniture (London: Wal-
lace Collection, 2001).
25. John Morley, Furniture: The Western Tradition. History. Style. Design (London:
26. Reed Benhamou, ‘Imitation in the Decorative Arts of the Eighteenth Century’,
Journal of Design History, 4/1 (1991), 4.
27. Carolyn Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of
Eighteenth-Century Paris (Malibu and London: Victoria and Albert Museum and
the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996).
28. Bettina Dietz and Thomas Nutz, ‘Collections Curieuses: The Aesthetics of Curios-
ity and Elite Lifestyle in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 29/3
(2006), 54.
29. Dietz and Thomas Nutz, ‘Collections Curieuses’.
307
notes
30. Jones, Madame de Pompadour, 105–7.

31. See also Chapter 1.
32. Alan Phipps Darr et al., The Dodge Collection of Eighteenth-Century French and
English Art in the Detroit Institute of Arts (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), 55.
33. Anna Jolly (ed.), Fürstliche Interieurs: Dekorationstextilien des 18. Jahrhunderts
(Riggisberg: Abegg-Stiftung, 2005).
34. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996).
35. Mark Evans (ed.), Princes as Patrons: The Art Collections of the Princes of Wales
from the Renaissance to the Present Day. An Exhibition from the Royal Collection
(London: Merrell Holberton and National Museums & Galleries of Wales and the
Royal Collection, 1998), 69–120.
36. Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1997), 63.
37. John Martin Robinson, The Latest Country Houses, 1945–83 (London, Sydney, and
Toronto: Bodley Head, 1984), 40.
38. Francis Watson, ‘Mentmore and its Art Collections’, in Mentmore: Catalogue of
French and Continental Furniture, Tapestries and Clocks, sold on behalf of the
Executors of the 6th Earl of Roseberry and his family. Vol. 1. Furniture (London:
Sotheby Parke Bernet, May 1977), p. x.
39. Christoper Wilk (ed.), Western Furniture, 1350 to the Present Day (London: Philip
Wilson and Victoria and Albert Museum, 1996), 13.
40. Yannick Chastang, Paintings in Wood: French Marquetry Furniture (London:
Wallace Collection, 2001), 66.
41. Donald Albrecht and Jeannine Falino, ‘An Aristocracy of Wealth’, in Donald
Albrecht and Jeannine Falino (eds), Gilded New York: Design, Fashion, and Society
(New York: Museum of the City of New York and Monacelli Press, 2013), 22. Jean-
nine Falino, ‘Blazed with Diamonds: New Yorkers and the Pursuit of Jeweled
Ornament’, in Albrecht and Falino (eds), Gilded New York, 75.
42. Bernard Morel, The French Crown Jewels: The Objects of the Coronations of the
Kings and Queens of France Followed by a History of the French Crown Jewels from
Francois I up to the Present Time (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 1988), 375.
43. Albrecht and Falino, ‘An Aristocracy of Wealth’, 22.
44. Michael Hall, The Victorian Country House: From the Archives of County Life
(London: Aurum, 2009), 16.
45. Hall, Victorian Country House, 17–18.
46. Hall, Victorian Country House, 19.
47. Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (London: Chatto and Windus, 2012), 271.
48. Anne de Courcy, Margot at War: Love and Betrayal in Downing Street, 1912–1916
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2014), 37.
308
notes

51. Note written by Renoir in 1883–4, cit. in Robert L. Herbert, Nature’s Workshop: Renoir’s
Writings on the Decorative Arts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 120.
52. Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold: The American Duchess—in
her Own Words (1953; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012), 22.
53. Vanderbilt Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold, 9; see also p. 72 in this book for the
Field of the Cloth of Gold.
54. Mandler, Fall and Rise, 93.
55. Mandler, Fall and Rise, 163.
56. Oliver Garnett et al., Standen, West Sussex (London: National Trust, 1993), 40.
57. Oliver Garnett et al., Standen, West Sussex, 43.
58. The Jewels and Objets de Vertu of The Honorable Clare Booth Luce (New York:
Sotheby’s, 19 April 1988), no pagination.
59. Cit. in Charlotte Gere and Marina Vaizey, Great Women Collectors (London: Philip
Wilson Publishers and Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 156.
60. Ruth Brandon, The Dollar Princesses: The American Invasion of the European
Aristocracy 1870–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980).
61. Clive Aslet, An Exuberant Catalogue of Dreams: The Americans who Revived the
Country House in Britain (London: Aurum Press, 2013), 90–7.
62. Robinson, Latest Country Houses, 27.
63. De Courcy, Margot at War, 43–50.
64. De Courcy, Margot at War, 93–4. The famous couturier Lucille, Lady Duff
Gordon, was one of the survivors.
65. Robinson, Latest Country Houses, 44.
66. Greg King, A Season of Splendour: The Court of Mrs Astor in Gilded Age New York
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 393–4.
67. For the definitive account of the decline of the British land-owning classes see
David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain
68. Michael Hall, The Victorian Country House: From the Archives of County Life
(London: Aurum Press, 2009), 75.
70. Christie’s Magazines, June–July–August 2000, Collecting Issue, 42.
71. Cit. in Christie’s Magazines, June–July–August 2000, Collecting Issue, 42
72. Christie’s Magazines, June–July–August 2000, Collecting Issue, 45.
73. Steven Gaines, The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan (New York:
Back Bay Books, 2006), 41–2.
74. ‘List of Countries by the Number of US Dollar Billionaires’ <http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_number_of_US_dollar_billionaires>
(accessed 1 March 2015).
75. Gaines, Sky’s the Limit, 77.
309
notes

79. Gaines, Sky’s the Limit, 174–7.
80. Molly W. Berger, Hotel Dreams: Luxury, Technology, and Urban Ambition in
America, 1829–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
81. Huguette Clark, ‘Reclusive Heiress, Dies at 104’, New York Times, 24 May 2011.
See also Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr, Empty Mansions: The Mysterious
Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune (New York:
Random House, 2013).
82. An American Dynasty: The Clark Family Treasures (New York: Christie’s, Spring
2014).
Chapter 5. Luxury and Decadence at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

1. Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspec-
tive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
2. Jane Ridley, Bertie: A Life of Edward VII (London: Chatto and Windus, 2012).
3. Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste (1913; New York, Rizzoli, 2004), 25.
4. Sîan Evans, Mrs Ronnie: The Society Hostess who Collected Kings (London: National
Trust Books, 2013), 55.
5. Cit. in Anne De Courcy, Diana Mosley (London: Vintage Books, 2004), 201.
6. Cit. in Evans, Mrs Ronnie, 87.
7. Evans, Mrs Ronnie, 150. Mrs Greville left an estate worth approximately £39 mil-
lion in 2010 money. Her wines were sold at auction and included 1,000 bottles of
claret. Evans, Mrs Ronnie, 166.
8. De Wolfe, House in Good Taste, 134.
9. Alistair O’Neill, London: After a Fashion (London: Reaktion, 2007).
10. William Shawcross, The Queen Mother: The Official Biography (New York: Alfred P.
Knopf, 2009), 692.
11. Shawcross, Queen Mother, 164.
12. De Wolfe, House in Good Taste, 141.
13. De Courcy, Diana Mosley, 306.
14. Edgar Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat (New York
and Paris: Frick Collection/Flammarion, 1995).
15. Robert Baldick, ‘Introduction’, in Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature
(A Rebours), trans. Robert Baldick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959). (Original
edn 1884.)
16. Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou. Pierre Arizzoli-Clémentel, The Textile
Museum, Lyons (Paris: Musées et Monuments de France, 1996).
310
notes
17. John McMullin, ‘We Went to India’, British Vogue (December 1938).
18. Charles Scheips, Elsie de Wolfe’s Paris: Frivolity before the Storm (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 2014).
19. ‘Brilliant Balls in Paris’, British Vogue, 9 August 1939.
20. Sam Staggs, Inventing Elsa Maxwell: How an Irrepressible Nobody Conquered High
Society, Hollywood, the Press and the World (London: St Martin’s Press, 2012).
21. Donald Albrecht and Jeannine Falino, ‘An Aristocracy of Wealth’, in Donald
Albrecht and Jeannine Falino (eds), Gilded New York: Design, Fashion, and Society
(New York: Museum of the City of New York and Monacelli Press, 2013), 45.
22. Deborah Davis, Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and the
Black and White Ball (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006).
23. Lee Radziwill, Happy Times (New York: Assouline, 2000), 58.
24. Phyllis Magidson, ‘A Fashionable Equation: Maison Worth and the Clothes of the
Gilded Age’, in Albrecht and Falino (eds), Gilded New York, 111.
25. Amy de la Haye and Valerie D. Mendes, The House of Worth: Portrait of an Archive
(London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 56.
26. Jeannine Falino, ‘Blazed with Diamonds: New Yorkers and the Pursuit of Jeweled
Ornament’, in Albrecht and Falino (eds), Gilded New York, 59.
27. Robert L. Herbert, Nature’s Workshop: Renoir’s Writings on the Decorative Arts
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 36–7.
28. Shawn Waldron, ‘Horst’s World in Colour’, in S. Brown (ed.), Horst: Photographer
of Style (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 153–62.
29. Cit. in Christopher Rowell, Polesden Lacey, Surrey (London: National Trust, 1999),
69.
30. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to D’Arcy Osborne, 28 July 1934,
cit. in William Shawcross (ed.), Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (London: Macmillan, 2012), 202.
31. Charles Wilson, ‘Economy and Society in Late Victorian Britain’, Economic His-
tory Review, 18/1 (1965), 190.
32. Wilson, ‘Economy and Society’, 190.
33. Wilson, ‘Economy and Society’, 187.
34. Keith Thomas, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 5 February 2015, p. 43.
35. Andrew Godley and Bridget Williams, ‘Democratizing Luxury and the Conten-
tious “Invention of the Technological Chicken” in Britain’, Business History
Review, 83 (2009), 267.
36. Godley and Williams, ‘Democratizing Luxury’, 267–90.
37. Paul Johnson, ‘Conspicuous Consumption and Working-Class Culture in Late-
Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 38
(December 1988), 27–42.
38. Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold: An American Duchess—in
her Own Words (1953; New York: Hodder, 2012), 15.
311
notes
39. Charlotte Gere and Marina Vaizey, Great Women Collectors (London: Philip
Wilson Publishers and Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 113.
40. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to the Hon. Lady Johnston,
30 December 1989, cit. in Shawcross (ed.), Counting One’s Blessings, 508.
41. Valentin V. Skurlov, ‘In Search of Fabergé Flowers in Russia’, in Joyce Lasky Reed
and Marilyn Pfeifer Swezey (eds), Fabergé Flowers (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
2004), 107.
42. Jane Brown, The Pursuit of Paradise: A Social History of Gardens and Gardening
(London: HarperCollins, 1999), 258–9.
43. Anne de Courcy, Margot at War: Love and Betrayal in Downing Street, 1912–1916
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2014), 289.
44. Mary and John Gribbins, Flower Hunters (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 175.
45. Catherine Ziegler, Favored Flowers: Culture and Economy in a Global System
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 22.
46. Ziegler, Favored Flowers, 23.
47. Johnson, ‘Conspicuous Consumption and Working-Class Culture’.
48. Ziegler, Favored Flowers.
49. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to D’Arcy Osborne, 4 December
1924, cit. in Shawcross (ed.), Counting One’s Blessings, 131.
50. Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown, Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (London:
Harvill Press, 1987), 259.
51. Valentine Lawford, ‘Fashions in Living: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor in
Paris’, American Vogue, 143/7 (1 April 1964), 176–87, 190–4.
52. Ryan Linkof, ‘ “The Photographic Attack on His Royal Highness”: The Prince of
Wales, Wallis Simpson and the Prehistory of the Paparazzi’, Photography & Cul-
ture, 4/3 (2011), 277–92.
53. John Cornforth, ‘The Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s House in Paris’, Country
Life, 25 June 1987, pp. 120–5.
54. Hugo Vickers, ‘My Bathroom is my Castle’, German Architectural Digest (Septem-
ber 2008), 176–81; Peter McNeil, ‘The Duke of Windsor and the Creation of the
“Soft Look” ’, in Patricia Mears (ed.), Ivy Style: Radical Conformists (New York,
New Haven, and London: Yale University Press; Fashion Institute of Technology,
2012), 44–51.
Chapter 6. Between False Poverty and Old Opulence:

Luxury Society in the Twentieth Century
1. Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
164. See also other important works on glamour, a concept until recently left
312
notes
unexplored and unconnected to luxury: Joseph Rosa et al., Glamour: Fashion,

Design, Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Judith Brown,
Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2009); Carol Dyhouse, Glamour: History, Women, Femi-
nism (London: Zed Books, 2011); Virginia Postrel, The Power of Glamour: Longing
and the Art of Visual Persuasion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
2. Cit. in Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000), 14.
3. Kenneth E. Silver, ‘Flacon and Fragrance: The New Math of Chanel No. 5’, in Har-
old Koda and Andrew Bolton (eds), Chanel (New York: Metropolitan Museum of
Art with Yale University Press, 2005), 30–3.
4. Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste (1913; New York: Rizzoli, 2004), 17.
5. Paul Morand, L’Allure de Chanel (1976); The Allure of Chanel, trans. Euan Cam-
eron (London: Pushkin Collection, 2008), 43.
6. Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 47.
7. Morand, L’Allure de Chanel, 51.
8. Paul Iribe, Défense du luxe (Montrouge: Draeger Frères, 1932; repr. 1933); transla-
tion by the authors.
9. Rhonda K. Garelick, Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (New
York: Random House 2014), 235–6.
10. Encyclopédie des arts decoratifs et industriels modernes au xxème siecle, 12 vols
(Paris: Office Centrale d’Éditions et de Librairie, 1925), iii. 38; translation by the
authors.
11. Donica Belisle, Retail Nation, Department Stores and the Making of Modern
Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 130.
12. Peter McNeil, ‘Myths of Modernism: Japanese Architecture, Interior Design and
the West, c.1920–1940’, Journal of Design History, 5/4 (1992), 291.
13. Stefania Ricci, ‘Made in Italy: Ferragamo and Twentieth-Century Fashion’, in
Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds), Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers
(Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), 306–25.
14. Mo Amelia Teitelbaum, The Stylemakers: Minimalism and Classic-Modernism,
1915–45 (London: Philip Wilson, 2010).
15. Teitelbaum, Stylemakers, 134.
16. Peter McNeil, ‘ “Designing Women”: Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Decora-
tor, c.1890–1940’, Art History, 17/4 (1994), 631–57.
17. Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion (London: Cassell, 1954), 176.
18. Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 191–3.
19. Schulze, Philip Johnson, 204–5.
20. Schulze, Philip Johnson, 204.
313
notes
21. See Peter Dormer, ‘Mies, Modernism and the Moon . . . and Back Again’, in Peter
Dormer, The New Furniture. Trends & Traditions (London, Thames and Hudson,
1987), 8–22.
22. The curators of the comprehensive collection of the late Marlene Dietrich’s legacy
kindly read from these amusing typed records at a visit of the Costume Commit-
tee of the International Council of Museums, Berlin, 2005.
23. Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin, Mrs Kennedy and Me (New York: Gallery Books,
2012).
24. The Duchess of Devonshire’s brother-in-law and heir to the title married John
Fitzgerald Kennedy’s younger sister Kathleen. They both died in their twenties.
25. Charlotte Mosley (ed.), In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and
Patrick Leigh Fermor (London: John Murray, 2008), 98.
26. Verena Pawlowsky, ‘Luxury Item or Urgent Commercial Need? Occupational
Position and Automobile Ownership in 1930s Austria’, Journal of Transport His-
tory, 34/2 (2013), 189. The value of the Austrian case is that the printed vehicle
ownership records survive intact for all cars on the road in that period, and all
names and occupations can be tracked.
27. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother to Queen Elizabeth II, 7 July
1953, cit. in William Shawcross (ed.), Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters
of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (London: Macmillan, 2012), 471.
28. Cit. in Jeffrey L. Meikle, ‘Into the Fourth Kingdom: Representations of Plastic
Materials, 1920–1950’, Journal of Design History, 5/3 (1992), 180–1.
29. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. J. Cape (London: Grafton Books, 1972), 97–9.
30. Peter Wollen, ‘Plastics: The Magical and the Prosaic’, in Mark Francis and Mar-
gery King (eds), The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style’. Fashion (Boston: Andy Warhol
Museum, Boston, and Bulfinch Press, 1997), not paginated.
31. Meikle, ‘Into the Fourth Kingdom’, 174.
32. Amy Schellenbaum, ‘In 1955, the Fontainebleau Hotel was Irrepressibly Glamorous’
<http://curbed.com/archives/2014/09/19/in-1955-the-fontainebleau-hotel-was-
irrepressibly-glamorous.php > (accessed 19 March 2015).
33. Rebecca Arnold, ‘Looking American: Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s Fashion Photographs
of the 1930s and 1940s’, Fashion Theory, 6/1 (2002), 45–60.
34. A. M. Stuart, Empress of Fashion: A Life of Diana Vreeland (New York: HarperCol-
lins, 2012), 119.
35. Vogue’s Book of Houses, Gardens, People: Photographed by Horst, Text by Valentine
Lawford. Introduction by Diana Vreeland (London: Bodley Head, 1963; repr. every
year until 1968 by Condé Nast publications).
36. Cherie Burns, Searching for Beauty: The Life of Millicent Rogers, the American Heir-
ess who Taught the World about Style (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2011).
37. Cit in. Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins, The Power of Style: The Women who
Defined the Art of Living Well (London: Aurum Press, 1994), 70.
314
notes
38. Margaret Maynard, Out of Line (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001).

39. Marco Urizzi, ‘ “Jusqu’au bout du rêve”: Neo and Aulic Romanticism, in René
Gruau’s Art’, in Elisa Tosi Brandi (ed.), Gruau and Fashion-Illustrating the 20th
Century (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009), 126–45.
40. Anita Loos, ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional
Lady (1925; New York: Boni & Liveright, Inc., 1926), 35.
41. Loos, ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’, 41.
44. The expression ‘Here’s to the ladies who lunch —aren’t they the best’ was made
into a famous Broadway song by Stephen Sondheim for the musical Company
(1970). The song was belted out by the alcoholic and slightly depressive character
played by the late Elaine Stritch.
45. Truman Capote, Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. III. La Côte Basque
(1986; London: Penguin, 1993), 156–7.
46. Lee Radziwill, Happy Times (New York: Assouline, 2000), 100.
47. James Archer Abbott, Jansen (New York: Acanthus Press, 2006).
48. Debora Silverman, Selling Culture: Bloomingdale’s, Diana Vreeland, & the New
Aristocracy of Taste in Reagan’s America (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
49. Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: From Pompeii to Art Nou-
veau, trans. William Weaver (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964).
Chapter 7. Everything that Money Can Buy?

Understanding Contemporary Luxury
1. Alistair Foster, ‘Multi-Millionaire Russians in Battle of the Bar Bills’, Evening Stan-
dard, 13 October 2013, p. 5.
2. ‘Exile in Mayfair: Millionaire Yevgeny Chichvarkin’s New Life in London’, Guard-
ian, 27 December 2013. It is estimated that more than 150,000 Russians live in
London, attracted by the favourable tax conditions offered. Maria Eugenia Girón,
Inside Luxury: The Growth and Future of the Luxury Goods Industry: A View from
the Top (London: LID Publishing, 2010), 136.
3. £33 million is the cost of a Graff Diamond Hallucination ladies watch with 110-
carat gems around a small dial.
4. Zoe Williams, ‘A Burberry-Style Profits Warning Is Nothing to Envy’, Guardian,
13 September 2012, p. 34.
5. Helena Smith, ‘Ferrari Sales in Greece Slow to a Standstill’, Guardian, 20 August
2013, p. 23.
6. ‘Verifiche fiscali sulla griffe del lusso: “Milioni all’Estero” ’, Corriere della sera, 31
December 2012, p. 22.
315
notes
7. ‘Versace Mansion for Sale’, Guardian, 25 July 2013; Carol Driver, ‘Gianni Versace’s
Miami Mansion Reopens as Luxury Hotel’, Mail Online, 17 March 2014.
8. <http://www.lux-jet.com/> (accessed 2 November 2015).
9. Cit. in Mark Tungate, Luxury World: The Past, Present and Future of Luxury Brands
(London and Philadelphia: Kogan Page, 2009), 71.
10. Gilles Laferté, ‘The Folklorization of French Framing: Marketing Luxury Wine in
the Interwar Years’, French Historical Studies, 34/4 (2011), 682, 699.
11. Mike Featherstone, ‘The Rich and the Super-Rich: Mobility, Consumption and
Luxury Lifestyles’, in Nita Mathur (ed.), Consumer Culture, Modernity and Iden-
tity (New Delhi: Sage, 2014), 3–5.
12. Scott DeCarlo, ‘The Price of the Good Life’, Forbes, 192/5, 7 October 2013.
13. Melissa Hoffmann, ‘Old Money, New Money’, Adweek, 55/15, 14 April 2014.
14. Guy Trebay, ‘When Cartier Was Just for the Likes of Liz’, New York Times, 26 April
2009, p. ST8.
15. Jean-Claude Dumas and Marc de Ferrière le Vayer, ‘Les Métamorphoses du luxe
vues d’Europe’, Entreprises et histoires, 46 (2007), 10–11. ‘Masstige’ is a combina-
tion of the words ‘mass’ and ‘prestige’ and is described as ‘prestige for the masses’.
16. Anghuman Ghosh and Sanjeev Varshney, ‘Luxury Goods Consumption: A Con-
ceptual Framework Based on Literature Review’, South Asian Journal of Manage-
ment, 20/2 (2013), 147.
17. Rebecca Robins and Manfredi Ricca, Meta-Luxury: Brands and the Culture of
Excellence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Alessandro Quintavalle, ‘Über
Luxury: For Billionaires’, in Jonas Hoffmann and Ivan Coste-Manière (eds),
Global Luxury Trends: Innovative Strategies for Emerging Markets (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 51–76. See also Tungate, Luxury World.
18. Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre (London: Penguin, 2008).
19. Thomas, Deluxe. See also Yves Michaud, Le Nouveau Luxe: Experiences, arrogance,
authenticité (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2013), 11
20. Dumas and de Ferrière le Vayer, ‘Les Métamorphoses’, 10–11.
21. Chris Soren, ‘Living beyond our Means’, Maclean’s, 127/12, 31 March 2014.
22. ‘That and $30 Gets You a Cuppa Joe’, Newsweek Global, 162/17, 5 February 2014.
23. Patrizia Calefato, Luxury: Fashion, Style and Excess (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 12.
24. James B. Twitchell, Living it Up: Our Love Affair with Luxury (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), 61–5.
25. Brommer et al., ‘Le Luxe aujourd’hui’, 182.
26. Marcello Matté, ‘Articolo di lusso’, Settimana, 19 January 2014, p. 3.
27. Michaud, Le Nouveau Luxe, 16–20.
28. Jane Bainbridge, ‘Discreet Luxury’, Marketing, 1 October 2013.
29. Andrea Doyle, ‘Choose your Luxury’, Incentive, 188/3 (May–June 2014).
30. Doyle, ‘Choose your Luxury’.
31. Arunima Mishra, ‘Genies on Call’, Business Today, 1 September 2013, pp. 91–4.
316
notes
32. Kate Summerscale, The Queen of Whale Cay: The Extraordinary Story of ‘Joe’
Carstairs, the Fastest Woman on Water (New York: Penguin, 1999).
33. Robin Wainwright, Sheila: The Australian Ingenue who Bewitched British Society
(Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2014).
34. ‘Africa: The New Mecca for Luxury Brands’, African Business (October 2013).
35. Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoisies of Northern France in
the 19th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
36. Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Luxury’, Luxury, 1/1 (2014), 19–20.
37. Calefato, Luxury, 81.
38. Andrew Cook, ‘The Expatriate Real Estate Complex: Creative Destruction and
the Production of Luxury in Post-Socialist Prague’, International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research, 34/3 (2010), 611–28.
39. Carolyn Cartier, ‘Class, Consumption and the Economic Restructuring of Con-
sumer Space’, in Minglu Chen and David S. G. Goodman (eds), Middle Class
China: Identity and Behaviour (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013), 38.
40. ‘One Hyde Park’ website < http://www.onehydepark.com/#/index (accessed
10 November 2014).
41. ‘Amenities in the Sky’, New York Times, 18 May 2013.
42. Cit. in Pierre Xiao Lu, Elite China: Luxury Consumer Behavior in China (Singa-
pore: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 69.
43. Ghosh and Varshney, ‘Luxury Goods Consumption’, 147.
44. ‘Luxury in India at $6 Billion and Growing’, Women’s Wear Daily, 205/69, 5 April
2013.
45. ‘Luxe Spending to Grow to $1.2 Trillion’, Women’s Wear Daily, 207/19, 9 January
2014.
46. R. Chadha and P. Husband, The Cult of the Luxury Brand: Inside Asia’s Love Affair
with Luxury (London: Nicholas Brealey International, 2006), p. x.
47. Girón, Inside Luxury, 99.
48. Girón, Inside Luxury, 102.
49. ‘Africa: The New Mecca for Luxury Brands’, 19.
50. Cartier, ‘Class, Consumption and the Economic Restructuring’, 37.
51. Cit. in ‘Luxury Lures China’s Young Wealth’, CCTV.com <http://english.cntv.cn/
program/bizasia/20101008/102949.shtml> (accessed 25 August 2014).
52. See, e.g., Jacqueline Tsai, La Chine et le luxe (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), 199–221.
53. Y. Hemantha, ‘Research Note: Status of Luxury Branding in India’, IUP Journal of
Management, 10/4 (2013), 67.
54. Shaun Breslin, ‘Power and Production: Rethinking China’s Global Economic
Role’, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), 751.
55. ‘Rolls Royce Defies Downturn’, The Times (2011).
56. ‘Giada: Così la Cina entra nel salotto del lusso’, Corriere della sera, 9 September
2013, p. 10.
317
notes
57. Jonas Hoffmann and Betina Hoffmann, ‘Paths for the Emergence of Global
Chinese Luxury Brands’, in Hoffmann and Coste-Manière (eds), Global Luxury
Trends, 25–36.
58. ‘Chinese Brands Tap Lucrative Luxury Market’, CCTV.com <http://english.cntv.
cn/program/bizasia/20101008/102418.shtml> (accessed 25 August 2014).
59. ‘Luxury in India at $6 Billion and Growing’, Women’s Wear Daily, 205/69, 5 April
2013.
60. Shweta Pamj and Manu Kaushik, ‘Money Can Buy You Luxe’, Business Today,
1 September 2013, p. 33.
61. Pamj and Kaushik, ‘Money Can Buy You Luxe’, 31–3.
62. Y. Hemantha, ‘Research Note: Status of Luxury Branding in India’, IUP Journal of
Management, 10/4 (2013), 69.
63. ‘Luxury Goods in India: Maharajah’s in the Shopping Mall’, The Economist, 2 June
2007, p. 76–7.
64. Manu Kaushik, ‘Oui for Louis’, Business Today, 1 September 2013, p. 40.
65. Pamj and Kaushik, ‘Money Can Buy You Luxe’, 38.
66. Bainbridge, ‘Discreet Luxury’; Maria Eurgena Giròn, Inside Luxury, 133.
67. Claudio Diniz, Glyn Atwal, and Douglas Bryson, ‘Understanding the Brazilian
Luxury Consumer’, in Glyn Atwal and Douglas Bryson (eds), Luxury Brands in
Emerging Markets (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 9–11. See also Jonas Hoffmann,
‘Luxi Brasil and Osklen’s New Luxury’, in Hoffmann and Coste-Manière (eds),
Global Luxury Trends, 37–50.
68. Stephanie Findley, ‘Nouveau-Riche and Loving It’, Canadian Business, 86/11–12,
15 July 2013.
69. ‘Africa: The New Mecca for Luxury Brands’, 14–19.
70. Findley, ‘Nouveau-Riche’.
Chapter 8. Luxury Capitalism: The Magic World of the Luxury Brands

2. Tuna N. Amobi, ‘Apparel, Accessories & Luxury Goods’, Standard & Poor’s Indus-
try Investment Reviews, 1 August 2014.
3. Olga Louisa Kastner, When Luxury Meets Art: Forms of Collaboration between
Luxury Brands and the Arts (New York: Springer Gabler 2014), 73.
4. In 2014, for instance, the makers of Kelly bags and silk scarves warned that
their operating profits were down because of negative exchange rates. ‘Hermès
Sounds the Alarm over Currency Concerns’, Women’s Wear Daily, 208/14, 21
July 2014.
318
notes
5. Yves Michaud, Le Nouveau Luxe: Experiences, arrogance, authenticité (Paris:

Éditions Stock, 2013), 46.
6. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2012).
7. Maria Eugenia Giròn, Inside Luxury: The Growth and Future of the Luxury Goods
Industry: A View from the Top (London: LID Publishing, 2010), 157–8.
8. ‘Company Profile: LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA’, MarketLine, 21
November 2013, pp. 1–3.
9. ‘Company Profile: LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA’, 3–5.
10. Giròn, Inside Luxury, 71.
11. ‘Company Profile: LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA’, 6.
12. Manu Kaushik, ‘Oui for Louis’, Business Today, 1 September 2013, 42.
13. Eugénie Briot and Christel de Lassus, ‘La Figure de l’entrepreneur fondateur dans
le récit de marque et la construction de la personnalité de la marque de luxe’, Man-
agement International, 17/3 (2013), 51–2.
14. François-Henri Pinault, ‘How I Did It’, Harvard Business Review (March 2014),
42–5.
17. Michaud, Le Nouveau Luxe, 71.
18. For an overview of the birth of the luxury conglomerates, see Alain Chatriot,
‘La Construction récente des groups de luxe français: Mythes, discours et pra-
tiques’, Entreprise et histoire, 46 (2007), 143–56.
19. Pinault, ‘How I Did It’, 46.
20. Pinault, ‘How I Did It’, 46.
21. Liselot Hudders, Mario Pandelaere, and Patrick Vyncke, ‘Consumer Meaning
Making: The Meaning of Luxury Brands in a Democratised Luxury World’, Inter-
national Journal of Market Research, 55/3 (2013), 393.
22. ‘Gli orologi de nuovi artigiani (con stampanti 3D)’, Corriere della sera, 21 Decem-
ber 2013, p. 44.
23. Silvia Bellezza and Anat Keinan, ‘Brand Tourists: How Non-Core Users Enhance
the Brand Image by Eliciting Pride’, Journal of Consumer Research, 41 (2014),
397.
24. James B. Twitchell, Living it Up: Our Love Affair with Luxury (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), 126–8. <http://www.comitecolbert.com/les_maisons.html>
(accessed 2 November 2015).
25. <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comit%C3%A9_Colbert> (accessed 2 November
2015).
26. For a list of all companies belonging to the Comité Colbert, see Briot and de
Lassus, ‘La Figure de l’entrepreneur fondateur’, 60–2.
319
notes
27. <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comit%C3%A9_Colbert> (accessed 2 November

2015).
28. Fondazione Altagamma, ‘Studi e ricerche’ <http://www.altagamma.it/sezione2.
php?Id=64&Lingua=ita> (accessed 2 November 2015).
29. Court of Justice of the European Union, 23 April 2009, case C-59/08. We thank
Alberto Musso of the University of Bologna for the information provided con-
cerning the legislative framework on trademarks. See also Alberto Musso,
‘Domain names e marchi in Internet nell’evoluzione giurisprudenziale’, in Diritto
e nuove tecnologie (Bologna: Gedit, 2007), 45–68, and Vito Mangini and Alberto
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dell’Unione europea sullo studio delle discipline giuridiche nel cinquantesimo della
firma del Trattato di Roma (Naples: Editoriale Scientifica, 2008), 283–90.
30. ‘Trademark Parody Gives Louis Vuitton Something to Chew on’, Journal of the
Academy of Marketing Science, 36 (2008), 435–6.
31. This was not the case until the 1990s, when the European Court of Justice estab-
lished that trademark owners had a say about the distribution of their products
only if they showed that violation ‘seriously damages the trade mark reputation’
(Court of Justice of European Union, 4 November 1997, case C-337/95).
32. Michel Chevalier and Pierre Lu, Luxury China: Market Opportunities and Poten-
tial (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 178.
33. US Department of Homeland Security, ‘Intellectual Property Rights Seizures
Statistics Fiscal Year 2013’ <http://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/documents/
2013%20.IPR%20Stats.pdf> (accessed 2 November 2015).
34. European Commission, ‘Report on EU Customs Enforcement of Intellectual
Property Rights: Results at the EU Border 2013’ <http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_
customs/resources/documents/customs/customs_controls/counterfeit_piracy/
statistics/2014_ipr_statistics_en.pdf> (accessed 2 November 2015).
35. Pierre Xiao Lu, Elite China: Luxury Consumer Behavior in China (Singapore: John
Wiley & Sons, 2008), 130.
36. Paul-Gérard Pasols, Louis Vuitton: The Birth of Modern Luxury (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 2012), 367.
37. Matteo Persivale, ‘Il segreto degli sguardi (con stile)’, Corriere della sera, 21
December 2014, p. 45.
38. Rachel Cooke, ‘Miuccia Prada: I hate the idea of being a collector. I really hate it’
<http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/may/17/miuccia-prada-i-hate-the-idea-
of-being-a-collector?utm_source=Subscribers&utm_campaign=71ec61aea9-
&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d2191372b3-71ec61aea9-417371553>
(accessed 2 November 2015).
39. Kastner, When Luxury Meets Art, 80–2.
40. Kastner, When Luxury Meets Art, 92.
320
notes
41. Kastner, When Luxury Meets Art, 83.

42. ‘L’“audace” Vaccarello per la digitale Versus’, Corriere della sera, 21 December
2013, p. 45.
43. Edmund White, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (London:
Bloomsbury, 2001), 18.
44. ‘Cambridge Beats Exeter for Title as UK’s Ultimate “Clone Town” ’, Independent,
15 September 2010.
45. Mike Featherstone, ‘The Rich and the Super-Rich: Mobility, Consumption and
Luxury Lifestyles’, in Nita Mathur (ed.), Consumer Culture, Modernity and Iden-
tity (New Delhi: Sage, 2014), 24.
46. ‘Altagamma Retail Evolution 2014’, 2 <http://www.brand-news.it/wp-content/
uploads/downloads/2015/01/Altagamma-Retail-Presentation-January-2015-LS.
pdf> (accessed 2 November 2015).
48. ‘Altagamma Retail Evolution 2014’, 2.
49. ‘Luxe Spending to Grow to $1.2 Trillion’, Women’s Wear Daily, 207/19, 9 January
2014.
50. Jean Claude Brommer et al., ‘Le Luxe aujourd’hui’, Entreprises et histoire, 46
(2007), 184.
51. Pasols, Louis Vuitton, 308–10.
53. Featherstone, ‘The Rich and the Super-Rich’, 29.
54. Giròn, Inside Luxury, 125–6.
55. Heathrow, ‘Heathrow Airport Shops A–Z’ <http://www.heathrow.com/shops-
and-restaurants/shops-a-z> (accessed 2 November 2015).
56. ‘Foreign Travel for the Masses’, China Confidential—FT, 16 January 2014, point
3.6.
57. ‘Foreign Travel for the Masses’, China Confidential—FT, 16 January 2014, point 3.
58. ‘Foreign Travel for the Masses’, China Confidential—FT, 16 January 2014, point
3.6.
59. Euromonitor International, ‘Luxury Goods in Australia’ <http://www.euromonitor.
com/luxury-goods-in-australia/report> (accessed 2 November 2015).
60. Mark Tungate, Luxury World: The Past, Present and Future of Luxury Brands
(London and Philadelphia: Kogan Page, 2009), 135–7.
61. Briot and de Lassus, ‘La Figure de l’entrepreneur’, 52, 55.
62. Stephanie Geiger-Oneto, Betsy D. Gelb, Doug Walker, and James D. Hess,
‘ “Buying Status” by Choosing or Rejecting Luxury Brands and their Counter-
feits’, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 41 (2013), 359.
63. Tungate, Luxury World, 136–7. See Tim Philips, Knock Off: The True Story of the
World’s Fastest Growing Crime (London: Kogan Page, 2005).
64. Geiger-Oneto et al., ‘ “Buying Status” ’, 359.
321
notes
65. Rasa Stankeviciute, ‘Occupation Fashion Blogging: Relation between Blogs and
Luxury Fashion Brands’, in Jonas Hoffmann and Ivan Coste-Manière (eds), Global
Luxury Trends: Innovative Strategies for Emerging Markets (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013), 78.
66. Christoph Fuchs, Emanuela Prandelli, Martin Schreider, and Darren W. Dahl,
‘All That is Users Might not be Gold: How Labeling Products as User Designed
Backfires in the Context of Luxury Fashion Brands’, Journal of Marketing,
77 (2013), 76.
67. We are grateful to the company Henry Poole for hosting the Luxury Network in
its premises in July 2013.
68. We thank Giovanna Furlanetto of Furla for this information.
69. Tungate, Luxury World, 156–7.
70. Jess Cartner-Morley, ‘Burberry Brings a Touch of London to Shanghai’, Guardian,
3 May 2014, p. 9.
71. Steven Morris, ‘Male Voice and a Jazz Band Play Burberry out of the Rhondda’,
Guardian, 31 March 2007, p. 9; Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Squaring up to Burberry’,
Observer Magazine, 25 March 2007, pp. 35–9.
72. Tungate, Luxury World, 27–8.
73. Qing Wang, ‘Understanding Chinese’, Core, 1 (2013), 14–15.
74. ‘New Bentley Made in Slovakia?’, Guardian, 20 March 2013, p. 32.
75. Anghuman Ghosh and Sanjeev Varshney, ‘Luxury Goods Consumption: A Con-
ceptual Framework Based on Literature Review’, South Asian Journal of Manage-
ment, 20/2 (2013), 147.
76. For a critical overview, see Steven Poole, ‘Give me the Real Thing’, New Statesman,
1–7 March 2013, pp. 24–8.
77. Gilles Auguste and Michel Gutsatz, Luxury Talent Management: Leading and
Managing a Luxury Brand (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4–5.
78. ‘Schiap, la giacca zodiaco vale più di 130 mila euro’, Corriere della sera, 21 Decem-
ber 2013, p. 47.
79. For the analysis of seven of the most prominent ‘luxury dynasties’ (Cartier, Cha-
nel, Ferragamo, Gucci, Hèrmes, Louis Vuitton, and Rolls-Royce), see Yann Ker-
lau, Les Dynasties du luxe (Paris: Perrin, 2010). Notice that Kerlau includes Chanel
as one of the first fashion houses that continued after the death of its founder.
80. Briot and de Lassus, ‘La Figure de l’entrepreneur’, 52, 55.
81. Auguste and Gutsatz, Luxury Talent Management, 3–4, 7. See also Jean-Pierre
Blay, ‘La Maison Hermès, du dernier siècle du cheval à l’ère de l’automobile’,
Histoire Urbaine, 12 (2005), 69–88.
82. Auguste and Gutsatz, Luxury Talent Management, 3–4, 7.
83. ‘Africa: The New Mecca for Luxury Brands’, African Business (October 2013).
84. Cit. in Trebay, ‘When Cartier Was Just for the Likes of Liz’, p. ST8.
85. Pasols, Louis Vuitton, 120–2.
322
notes
86. Auguste and Gutsatz, Luxury Talent Management, 4–5.

87. Cit. in Guy Trebay, ‘When Cartier Was Just for the Likes of Liz’, p. ST8.
Conclusion. Luxury: Towards a Richer History

1. J. B. Priestly, English Journey (London: Heinemann/Gollancz, 1934), 402.
2. Gilles Lipovetsky, Il tempo del lusso (Palermo: Sellerio, 2007), 16.
4. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 2014)
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331
PICTURE CREDITS
Figure 1.1. Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, Inv no 9.45.81. © Abegg-Stiftung,

CH-3132 Riggisberg, 2002; (photo: Christoph von Viràg)
Figure 1.2. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. © The Art Archive / DeA Picture Library
Figure 1.3. © The Trustees of the British Museum 1872, 0604.583
Figure 1.4. © The Trustees of the British Museum, Prints & Drawings Department
1936, 0717.2
Figure 1.5. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Prints & Drawings 1851, 0901.1045
Figure 1.6. © Victoria and Albert Museum, C.124:35-1979
Figure 1.7. © Trustees of the British Museum, Prints & Drawings, 1944, 1014.24
Figure 1.8. © Trustees of the British Museum, Prints & Drawings, 1917, 1208.2890
Figure 2.1. Abegg-Stiftung, CH-3132 Riggisberg, Inv no 232. © Abegg-Stiftung,
CH-3132 Riggisberg, 2000; (photo: Christoph von Viràg)
Figure 2.2. Royal Collection Trust, Windsor Castle. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth
II, 2015/Bridgeman Images
Figure 2.3. © Wallace Collection, London, UK/Bridgeman Images
Figure 2.4. Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, UK/Bridgeman Images
Figure 2.5. © Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, inv. no. 1825-23. Photo:
Yves Siza
Figure 2.6. British Museum, Prints and Drawings 1881, 0611.309
Figure 2.7. Collection Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. National Trust Inventory Num-
ber 1127744. © National Trust/Robert Thrift
Figure 2.8. British Museum, Prints and Drawings 1917, 1208.70.336
Figure 2.9. Victoria and Albert Museum, T.371-1977
Figure 2.10. Victoria and Albert Museum, Dr W.L. Hildburgh Bequest M.425-1956
Figure 3.1. Victoria and Albert Museum, IM.113-1921, bequeathed by Lady Wantage
Figure 3.2. Engraving © The Trustees of the British Museum, 1859, 0806.307
Figure 3.3. British Museum, WB.125
Figure 3.4. Victoria and Albert Museum, bequeathed by Claude D. Rotch,
M.308:1,2-1962
Figure 3.5. Victoria and Albert Museum, 412:1, 2-1882
Figure 3.6. Victoria and Albert Museum, bequeathed by Lionel A. Crichton P.2-1939
Figure 3.7. © The Trustees of the British Museum, 1853, 1210.654
Figure 3.8. Author’s Collection
Figure 4.1. Country Life Picture Library
Figure 4.2. Victoria and Albert Museum, 1736 to E-1869
Figure 4.3. © British Museum, 1889, 0724.69
332
picture credits

Figure 4.6. Photograph courtesy Wikimedia commons
Figure 4.7. Museum of the City of New York/New York, NY/USA. The Museum of
the City of New York Art Resource, NY Image Reference: ART497195
Figure 5.1. Miss Evans and friends, Montreal, QC, 1887 Wm. Notman & Son,
Il-82850, McCord Museum, Montreal
Figure 5.4. Courtesy of the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Mer-
chandising, Los Angeles, CA; photo Brian Sanderson
Figure 5.5. Photograph Miss Fraser, Montreal, QC, 1897 Wm. Notman & Son,
Il-119956, McCord Museum, Montreal.
Figure 5.6. FIDM Museum Library Inc., Museum Purchase 2011.5.20. Courtesy of
the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising,
Los Angeles, CA; photo Brian Sanderson
Figure 5.7. FIDM Museum Library Inc., Museum Purchase 2013.5.80. Courtesy of
(a and b) the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising,
Los Angeles, CA; photo Brian Sanderson
Figure 5.8. FIDM Museum Library Inc., Gift of Mona Lee Nesseth 2013.975.2AB.
Courtesy of the FIDM Museum at the Fashion Institute of Design & Mer-
chandising, Los Angeles, CA; photo Brian Sanderson
Figure 5.9. Byron Company (New York), photographer, 1903, Museum of the City of
New York/New York, NY/USA. The Museum of the City of New York/Art
Resource, NY Image Reference: MNY1680
Figure 5.10. Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS
Figure 5.11. Courtesy Country Life Picture Library
Figure 5.12. Courtesy Country Life Picture Library
Figure 6.1. bpk / Kunstbibliothek, SMB / Dietmar Katz
Figure 6.2. Image and information courtesy Maureen Amelia Teitelbaum, London
Figure 6.3. Courtesy Sotheby’s/ArtDigital Studio
Figure 6.4. Gift of Dr and Mrs Irwin R. Berman, 1976 (1976.414.3a-ggg). The Metro-
politan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. Image Reference: ART
no. 425308
Figure 6.5. FIDM Museum Library Inc., Gift of Mona Lee Nesseth, FIDM Museum
Library Inc. 2013.975.2AB; photo: Brian Sanderson
Figure 6.6. Author’s collection
Figure 6.7. Author’s collection
Figure 6.8. bpk / Kunstbibliothek, SMB / Dietmar Katz
Figure 6.9. Photograph by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc. Acetate negative, 30 March
1955. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington,
DC. 20540 USA Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress)
LC-G613-T-67025 (interpositive)
Figure 6.10. Author’s Collection
333
picture credits
Figure 6.11. International Centre for Photography

Figure 6.12. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Collection of Mrs Paul Mel-
lon. Photo: Katherine Wetzel © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Figure 7.1. Photo: Ed Uthman, MD. Euthman 23:54, 24 November 2006
Figure 8.1. Photographer: Alexander Su
Figure 8.2. Wikimedia Commons
Figure 8.3. Author’s photograph
334
INDEX
Aachen 26 Andrews Clark, William 145

Aalto, Alvar 200 Anjou, René of 51
Abegg, Margaret 14 Anne of Denmark (Queen of
Abegg, Werner 14 England) 67
Abegg-Stiftung 14, 49 Ansbach 125
Adam, Robert 30, 33, 102, 118 Ansonia Hotel 143–4
Adamson, Glenn 7 antiques 8, 7, 11, 27, 29, 32–7, 56, 80,
adoption (of children) 25 112, 118, 127, 130, 133, 140, 147,
advertising vii, 9, 103, 229, 234, 239, 190, 194, 216, 219–20, 223, 230,
254, 258, 261–2, 265, 273, 280, 241, 272
283, 285 anti-Semitism 133, 187–8
Agnelli, Marella 219–20 AOC 229
air-conditioning 203, 216 Aoki, Jun 276
airlines 172, 200–1, 222–3, 228 apartments 1, 34, 95, 120, 121–23,
Akbar (Mughal Emperor) 84, 87 131–2, 142, 145–56
Alcock, Sir Rutherford 112 Apollo (Magazine) 194
Alessi (brand) 261 Appelation d’Origine Contrôlée 229,
Alexander I (Tsar of Russia) 38 282
Alexander McQueen (brand) 256 Apperson Hearst, Phoebe 166
Alexandra (Queen of England) 172–3 Apple (brand) 234–5
Alfonso V (King of Aragon) 28 Apsley House 38–9
Alison, Archibald 34 architecture 30, 37, 38, 41, 64, 74, 116,
Allen, Mrs Charles Jr (Mildred) 218 135, 147, 187, 215, 275–6, 285
Altagamma (association) 261 Aristophanes (playwright) 16
Altuzarra (company) 256 Aristotle 70
Amazon (company) 264 Armani (brand) 249–50, 270,
Ambani, Mukesh 115 272, 276–7
Ambras Castle (residence) 88–90 Armani Café 273
American Civil War 131, 138 Arnault, Bernard 255–6
Ancient Greece 6, 7, 15, 16–18 Arnolfini, Giovanni 51
Ancient Rome 6, 7, 15–27, 29, 30, 35–7, Art Deco 153, 159, 186, 188–9, 196–7,
44–5, 47, 81, 99, 240 215, 224, 273
Ando, Tadao 267, 276–7 Exposition 188
335
index
art-fashion 267–70 Baume & Mercier (brand) 257

Arts and Crafts 24, 137–8 Beale, James 137–8
Arundel, Thomas Earl of 29 Beaton, Cecil 193–4
Arundel Castle (residence) 132–3 Beauvais (tapestries) 128, 135–6, 260;
Asprey (brand) 150 see also tapestries
Assouly, Olivier 7, 100 Beckford, William 40, 41–4, 220
Aston Hall (residence) 64 Belon, Pierre 92
Astor, Brooke (Roberta) 190, 220 Bentley (brand) 284
Astor, Caroline 132 Bérard, Christian (‘Bébé’) 193
Athens 35 Berg, Maxine 7
Atkinson, Rowan 50 Berkeley Castle (residence) 40
auctions 12, 44, 129–31, 145, 180, Bernardino da Siena (preacher) 54
215–16, 239, 286, 287, 310 Bernier, François 82
Augustus (Roman Emperor) 22 Berry, Christopher 7
Aurangzeb (Mughal Emperor 82–3 Berry, Duke of 51
Australia 114, 132, 138, 170, 203, 208, Bess of Hardwick 65
244, 279 Billings, C. K. G. 142
automobiles, see cars billionaires 3, 13, 38, 114, 141, 182, 224,
Avenches (Aventicum) 21 242, 267; see also millionaires
aviary 133, 186 and plutocrats
Birkin handbag 279
Babylonia 13 Blanchot, Léon-Alexandre 189
Baccarat (company) 260 Blenheim Palace (residence) 117, 118, 139
Backlund, Sandra 268 blogging 280–1
Bacon, Francis 213 BOAC (company) 202
Bailey, Chris 283 Boeing (company) 200–1
Bain & Company (consultancy) 247 Bogucka, Maria 69
Baldick, Robert 113 Bologna 272
Balenciaga (brand) 256, 286 Bolsover Castle (residence) 64
Ballet Russes 160, 186 Bonaparte, Joséphine 38
balls 31, 46, 108, 139, 145, 161–2, Bonaparte, Napoleon 37–9, 131
173–4, 239 books (collections of) 13, 17, 55, 111,
Bangkok 189, 245, 252, 256 170, 220, 272; see also collecting
Barney’s (department stores) 276 Booth Luce, Clare 138
Barthes, Roland 204 Bottega Veneta (brand) 256, 268
Bastide, Jean-François de 123 Boucher, François 123
Bataille, Georges 4 Boucheron (brand) 169, 256
Bath House (residence) 141 boudoirs 105, 108, 121, 124, 147,
bathrooms 120, 123, 129, 130, 132, 138, 151, 156
143, 145, 153, 155–6, 157, 178, Boulle (furniture) 76, 102, 116
180, 194, 228 Boulle, André Charles 76
336
index
Boussac Group 254, 255 Carstairs, Marion Barbara ‘Joe’ 238

Braund, David 17 Cartier (brand) 115, 169, 178, 254,
Brazil 245, 250–1, 276 256–7, 270, 280, 286–8
Breslin, Shaun 248 Cassell, Sir Ernest 133
BRIC Countries 251 Casson, Sir Hugh 199
Brioni (brand) 256 Castarède, Jean 7
Britain see United Kingdom Castellane, Diane Comtesse de 218
British Museum, London 35 Castellane, Paul Ernest Boniface
Brown, Eleanor 193 de 139–40, 218
Buckler, John 42 Castiglione, Baldassare 68–9
Bulgari (brand) 256, 286, 287 Castiglione, Giuseppe 87
Burberry (brand) 270, 278–9, Castiglione, Sabba da 88
283–4, 286 Cato the Elder (Roman Censor) 24
Burckhardt, Jacob 70 central heating 9, 200–1, 212
Burghley House (residence) 64 ceramics, see porcelain
Burgundy 50 Cernuschi Museum, Paris (Musée
Burke, Peter 69 Cernuschi) 111
Burton, Richard 287 chain stores 270
Busbecq, Ogier Ghislain de 92 chairs 35, 40, 90, 105, 116, 124, 127–8,
Byzantium 27 135, 137, 180, 186, 199–200, 205,
219, 232
cabinetmakers 76, 121, 125, 127–8, 130 Chambers, William 118
Caesar (Roman Emperor) 21 Champagne 161, 187, 207, 210, 214,
Café Society 175–6, 242, 291 219, 225, 251, 268, 271, 282,
Calefato, Patrizia 234 292–3
Canada 112, 152, 189, 232 Champmol Monastery 48
candles 61, 75, 97, 102, 127 Champs Elysées 273
Candy Brothers (Christian and Nicky Chanel (brand) 245, 256, 262, 276, 286
Candy) 194 Chanel, Coco (Gabrielle) 1–2, 9, 95, 115,
Capote, Truman 162, 213, 215 161, 165, 183–7
Car Shoe (brand) 257 Charles, Prince of Wales 215–16, 283
Carlo Emanuele (King of Savoy) 29 Charles I (King of England) 67
Carlton House (residence) 129 Charles V (Emperor) 61, 85
carpets 17, 51, 65–7, 76, 81, 88, 91, 126, Charles X (King of France) 131
129, 133, 140, 145, 178, 186, 188, Charleston (residence) 160
195, 200, 208, 220, 260 Chartres, Duke of 107–8
Aubusson 188 Chase, Edna 207
savonnerie 260 Chatsworth (residence) 129
cars (automobiles) 1, 38, 114–15, 188–9, Chelsea Hotel 143
201–3, 226–7, 231–2, 239, 246, Chichvarkin, Yevgeny
249, 251, 266, 284, 291 Alexandrovich 225–6
337
index
chicken, see food, chicken Cologne 21

Chicken cup 79–80 colours 17, 47, 63, 81–2, 102, 109, 113,
China 46, 51–2, 66, 79–81, 90–1, 93, 95, 124–6, 149, 159, 164, 185–6,
111, 113–15, 132, 141, 151, 240, 206, 219
245–51, 264, 275, 283–4 Comité Colbert (association) 259–61
Chinese wallpaper 217 COMTE (company) 176, 191
Chinoiserie 8, 76, 80, 105–6, 124–5 commodes 75–6
Chippendale, Thomas 105 Concorde 215; see also airlines
Chivas Regal (brand) 225 connoisseurship, see collecting
Chloé (brand) 257 conspicuous consumption 6, 7
chocolate 9, 77, 105, 108, 171, 209, 229, 252 consumers 244–51
Chopard (brand) 266 Brazilian 250–1
Christ 28–9, 48 Chinese 244–9
Christie’s (Auction House) 145, 195, 218 Indian 249–50
Christofle (company) 196, 279 Russian 251
Christopher Kane (brand) 256 Cooper, Diana 172
Churchill, Lady Randolph copies 36, 76, 100, 105, 130, 147, 176,
(Jeanette) 139 188, 209; see also fakes
Church’s (brand) 257 Coppola, Sophia 241
Cicero (Roman orator) 17, 19–20 copyright 280
Cinecittà 37 Corcoran Gallery, Washington 146
cinema 200, 209, 232 corsage 169, 173
Circulo Fortuny 261 cosmetic surgery 243, 251
Clapton, Eric 287 cosmetics 9, 158, 170, 185, 199, 255, 280
Clark, Huguette M. 145–8 costume design 198
Clark, Kenneth 169 counterfeiting 258, 260, 264–5, 279–80
Clayton House (residence) 106 counterfeits 280
Cleopatra 27 Country Life 178–80
clocks 15, 56, 77, 100, 106, 115, 126, 130, courtesans 18, 164
138, 147, 213, 238, 286–7 courts 56–78
cloth, see textiles and linen couture, see haute couture
clothing, see dress and liturgical Cragside (residence) 140
vestments Crawford, Joan 193
Coach (brand) 281 Crébillon fils (company) 108
Cocteau, Jean 193 credit 267
coffee 32, 77, 105, 108–9, 120, 121, 124, crocodile 37, 181, 213, 265
200, 233–4, 270 Cromwell, Thomas 56
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 71–2, 260 crowns 2, 29, 53, 74, 85, 131
Coleridge, Lady 133 Crozat Family (du Châtel) 121–2
collecting 15, 27, 126, 131 crystal, rock 13, 14, 48, 126
Collins, Joan 217 cuisine 17–20; see also luxury food
338
index
Cukor, George 193 Dietrich, Marlene 196–8

Curie, Marie 287 Diggity Dog (brand) 263
DiMaggio, Joe 287
Daguerre, Dominique 126 dinner service 217, 219, 223; see also
Dahl-Wolfe, Louise 207 porcelain
Damiani (brand) 258 Dior (brand) 115, 178, 255, 270–1, 276,
Dark Ages, the 50–1 277, 279, 286, 293
David Jones (department store) 170 Dior, Christian 164, 254
de Bachaumont, Louis Petit 120 Discovery Channel 237
De Beers (company) 255 Dixon, Francis 101
de Beistegui, Comte (Don Carlos or Dodge, Anna Thomson 156, 195, 205
Charles) 175 Dolce & Gabbana 281
de Castellane, Boniface 139, 140 Dollar Princesses 132, 138, 139,
de la Renta, Oscar 220 164, 291
de la Tour, George 214 Dom Pérignon (brand) 225, 268
de l’Ecluse, Charles 93 Donohue, Jimmie 197
de’ Medici, Cosimo 27, 68 Dorchester Hotel 151
de’ Medici, Lorenzo Il Magnifico 27–8 Downton Abbey (TV series) 138
de Montesquiou-Fézénsac, Comte Dracula 90
Robert de 159 Drake, Francis 40
de Narp, Frédéric 287 Draper, Dorothy 205
de Sainte-Foy, Radix 120 dress 23, 46–63, 67
de Vries, Jan 7, 99–100 Dresser, Christopher 112
de Wolfe, Elsie (Lady Mendl) 150, drugs (illegal) 170, 214–15, 223
152–3, 157, 160–2, 185, 193 Drury Lane Theatre 44
Decies, Elizabeth Lady (Elizabeth du Barry, Madame 108
Wharton Drexel) 212 du Cerceau, Jacques Androuet 64–5
Défense du Luxe (book) 186–8 du Châtel, Mme 121; see also Crozat
Delachaume, M. (Chef) 150 family
Delevingne, Cara 283 Dubai 273–5
Della Valle (brand) 270 Duby, Georges 50
Denon, Vivant 39 Duchy of Cornwall (brand) 170
Desportes, Alexandre-François 76 Dudley, Robert (Earl of Leicester) 58–9
Desprez, Louis Jean 31 Dumas, Axel 286
Destailleur, Gabriel-Hippolyte 133–4 Dunhill (company) 257
Devonshire, Deborah Cavendish, Dupas, Jean Theodore 196–7
Duchess of 200–1 Duty Free 278–9
diamonds 38–9, 61, 82, 84, 85, 87, 115, stores 276, 278
131, 141, 159, 166, 210–12, 221–2, Duveen, Joseph 156
231, 234, 248–9, 255, 286; see also Dwellings, see luxury, dwellings
jewellery Dynasty (TV series) 217
339
index
Eames, Charles 127, 205 Fabergé (brand) 151, 173, 221

Eames, Ray 127 fakes see copies
East India Companies 94–5 fans 60, 115, 152, 166, 168, 174, 184, 209
Easton, David 220 Farnese cup 27–8
Eaton’s (department store) 189 Farnsworth, Edith 195
Ebay 264, 279 fashion 6, 23, 50–69, 94, 97, 100–1, 102,
Ebénistes, see cabinetmakers 116, 128, 159–61, 164, 175–8,
Edward VII (King of England) 133–5, 150 182–8, 193, 196, 207–9, 213, 216,
Edward VIII (King of England) 153–6; 227–9, 234, 247–51, 254–70,
see also Windsor, Duke of 281–8, 290
Edwardians, the 75, 114, 150–3, 162, blogging 281
195–6, 214, 224, 232, 236, 283 journals 103, 161, 168, 176, 207–8,
effeminacy 16 215, 242, 251, 281
Egypt 15, 37–9, 47 Faubourg Saint-Honoré 119
Einstein, Albert 287 Fauchon (brand) 170
Eleanor (Princess of Portugal) 28 feasts 21–2, 46, 68
electricity 95, 102, 132–3, 138, 140–1, feathers 65, 149, 152, 161, 164, 178, 181,
143, 145, 153, 162, 200, 205 184, 209
elevators 115, 120, 142 Feeney, Chuck 278
Elgin, Lord 35, 37 Fellig, Arthur, see Weegee
Elgin Marbles 35 Feltrinelli (publisher) 268
Elizabeth, Queen (the Queen Mother Fendi (brand) 276
from 1952) 156–7, 169, 172–3, Fénelon, François 106
175, 203 Ferdinand I (Emperor) 61
Elizabeth I (Queen of England) 58–67 Ferdinand I (King of Spain) 92
Elizabeth II (Queen of England) 5, 195 Ferdinand II (Archduke) 88–90
Elkins, Frances 193 Ferragamo (brand) 250, 261, 272
Enery Museum 111 Ferragamo, Salvatore 190–1
England see United Kingdom Ferrari (company) 114, 227, 256
Eric Kayser (company) 241 Ferré (brand) 261
Ermenegildo Zegna (brand) 246, Field of the Cloth of Gold 56, 137
251, 261 Fifth Avenue, New York 142, 145–6,
eroticism 5, 123–4 234–5
Esher Place (residence) 40 financiers 2, 119, 123, 220, 255
Estée Lauder 286 flats see apartments
Etihad Airways 201 Florian Café 233
Etruria (factory) 34 flowers 2, 4, 70, 82, 92, 94, 121, 125, 127,
Eugénie (Comtesse de Teba, Empress of 145, 150–2, 157, 166, 172–5,
France) 131, 164 186–7, 205, 211–12, 219,
Evora 88 221–2, 237
exhibitions 131 Fontainebleau (residence) 34
340
index
Fontainebleau Hotel 205–6 Gambetta, Léon 166

Fonthill Abbey (residence) 40, 41–4 Garbo, Greta 182, 219, 220
food gardens 30–1, 71, 87–8, 92, 94, 106, 121,
fruit 17, 51, 72, 173 123–5, 127, 140, 172–3, 182, 186,
chicken 21, 150, 171 193, 208, 220
ginger 61, 97–8 Garrick, David 105
footmen, see servants Gateways Canyons (company) 237
Forbes, Malcolm 224 Gautier, Théophile 184–5
Forbes 400 index 230 Gehry, Frank 267, 269
Ford, Tom 114 gems, see jewellery and pearls
Four Seasons Hotels 157 Geneva 115
Fractional Sailing (company) 228 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (film) 210–11
Fragonard (company) 237 gentrification 254, 270–3
François I (King of France) 135 George IV (King of England) 129
France 11, 23, 34, 39, 46, 50, 53, 56, 60, Germany 89, 102, 187, 261, 265,
64, 69, 71–4, 87, 96, 102, 106, 275, 279
112–13, 118–32, 135–41, 162, Getty, John Paul 195
166, 175, 185–6, 188, 193, 207, Giacometti, Alberto 193
214, 226, 229, 237, 240, 251, Giacometti, Diego 193
254–60, 265, 272, 273–84 Giada (brand) 248
Frank, Jean-Michel 161, 175–6, 183, 190 ‘Gilded Age’ (USA) 131
Franklin, Benjamin 101 Gillray, James 32
Frederick II (Emperor) 27–8 ginger, see food, ginger
Frederick II (King of Denmark) 68 Givenchy (brand) 260
Frédérick Malle (brand) 260 glamour 141, 168, 183, 199, 216
French Revolution 128, 129 Glass House (residence) 194
French Riviera 173, 175, 210, 237, 272 Gloag, John 204
Frette (brand) 272 Gobelins (royal manufacture) 73, 128,
fruit see food, fruit 260; see also tapestries
Fry, Roger 160 Goelet, May (later Duchess of Roxbur-
fur 51, 53–4, 61, 145, 158, 181 ghe) 139
Furla (brand) 282 Goldman Sachs (investment bank) 247
furniture (and furnishings) 8, 18, 22, 34, goldsmiths 8, 48, 61, 85, 93
40, 64–6, 121, 122, 123, 124, 126, Goldthwaite, Richard 7
127, 129, 130, 132, 141, 145, 147; Goncourt, Edmond de 109–11, 166
see also boulle and ebénistes gothic (style) 40–1, 45, 47, 118–19
Gould, Anna 139
Gainsborough, Thomas 156 Graber, Ted 217
Gallé, Emile 113 Grand Tour 8, 29–37
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Gray, Martin 228
Milan 271 Great Depression 145, 169
341
index
Greece see Ancient Greece Heller, Sarah-Grace 53

Greenbier Hotel 176–77, 180, 205 Hendricks, John 237
Greville, Dame Margaret 150–1, 157, Henri III (King of France) 60
169, 310 n. 7 Henry II (King of Denmark) 26
Grimani, Giovanni 28 Henry VIII (King of England) 40, 55–8
Gucci (brand) 245, 250, 256, 258, 272 Herat 27
guéridon (furniture form) 75 Herculaneum 8, 30–3, 36, 44
Guerlain, Jean-Jacques 260 Herend (brand) 260
Guerra, Giuseppe 36 Hermès (brand) 256, 260, 268, 286
Guggenheim Museum, New York 268 Orange Box 287
guilds 119, 127–8 Hermippus (ancient playwright) 16–17
Guimet Museum 111, 112 Herzog & de Meuron (architects) 277
Gundle, Stephen 183 Hirshon, Dorothy H. (Mrs William S.
Paley) 219
Hadley, Albert 190, 220 Hitchcock, Alfred 209
Haines, Billy (Charles William) 217 Holbein, Hans 56–7
hairdressing 24, 33, 112, 151, 157, 161, Hollywood 209–10, 213, 222, 224, 241
199, 207, 209, 223, 239 Hong Kong 40, 79, 189, 234, 237, 245,
Hakluyt, Richard 90 247, 272, 275, 278
Hall of Mirrors (Versailles) 71–2 Horace (Roman orator) 18
Hall, Michael 133, 137 horses 48, 53, 56, 120
Hamilton, Emma 33 Horst, Horst P. 215, 242
Hamilton, Sir William 33, 35 hôtel de Soubise (residence) 119
handbags 37, 166, 181, 205, 257, 264, hotels 112, 115, 135, 141, 143, 150–2, 157,
273, 280–1, 284 162, 172, 176, 178, 180, 189, 200,
Hardwick Hall (residence) 65–6 205, 215, 226–7, 230–1, 237–8,
Harper’s Bazaar 207–8 241–2, 245, 249–50, 254–6, 260,
Harriman, Pamela (Pamela 276, 280
Churchill) 219 Houghton Hall (residence) 30
Harrods (department store) 170, Hubert, Philip 142
238, 272 Hublot (brand) 255
haute couture 164, 178, 232, 282 Hugo Boss Prize 268
Hayward, Maria 57–8 Huizinga, Johan 50–1, 67–8
Hazlitt, William 43–4 Hume, David 99
healthcare 79, 171; see also medicine Hungerford, Dame Agnes 66–7
health insurance 171 Hutton, E. F., see Merriweather Post,
Heathrow Airport 278 Marjorie
heating, see central heating hyacinths 93
heiresses 39, 139, 142–3, 149, 208, 218, Hyde, James Hazen 162
220, 222, 238 Hyde Park, London 119, 149, 242
Heitz-Boyer, Madame 164–5 Hyundai 232
342
index
India 8, 20, 40, 61, 66, 80–1, 84, 88, Johnson, Philip C. 194
90–2, 94–5, 101, 103, 105, 115, Jolie, Angelina 267
139, 150, 161, 175, 238, 245, Jones, Inigo 29
248–50, 275, 276 Judd, Donald 190
Innocent II (Pope) 48 Juvenal (poet) 15, 22
Innsbruck 88–90
Instagram 226 Kahn, Otto 142
insurance, see health insurance Keith, Slim 213
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) 264–5 Kelly, Grace 209, 287
interior decoration 9, 33, 101, 116–48, Kempner, Nan 190
150–4, 161, 190, 194, 213–15, Kennedy Onassis, Jacqueline 182, 200,
217–22 213, 214, 219
Internet 9, 264–5, 277, 279–80 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald. 201
investment 64, 100, 140, 227–8, 248 Kew Gardens 106
Iribe, Paul 168, 186 Klein, Naomi 10, 284
Isidore of Seville (Archbishop) 81 Klimt, Gustav 159
Island of Cos 25 Knowle (residence) 76, 151
Istanbul 85 Koh-i-Nur (diamond) 84
Italy 29–31, 52, 54, 68–9, 70, 91, 227, Koolhas, Rem 267–8, 277
234, 261, 265, 275, 279, 282, 287 Korea, South 232, 275, 278, 283
Kovesi, Catherine 54
Jacob Dreicer (company) 166 Kublai Kahn 51
Jahangir (Mughal Emperor) 84
James, Charles 208 L. Alavoine and Company 156
James I (King of England) 67 La Armonia (residence) 193
Jamnitzer, Wenzel 61–2 lace 102, 164–6, 185
Jansen (company) 178–80, 214, 218 Lacoste (brand) 265
Japan 52, 80–1, 87, 90, 95–6, 105, lacquer 76, 88, 95–7, 100, 103, 105, 107,
111–13, 126, 159, 189, 220, 112, 121, 124,126, 147, 186,
244–5, 255, 267, 275–6, 278 213, 220
japanning (technique) 103, 106; Lacroix (company) 164, 255
see also lacquer Ladurée (company) 240–1
japonaiserie (and Japonisme) 8, Lagerfeld, Karl 218
111–12, 160 Lalique (company) 196
Jermyn Street 156 Lalique, René 113–14
jet planes 200, 220, 231 Lan, Yang 248
jet-set 214, 291 land 20, 139–40, 142, 148, 183
jewellery 8, 23–4, 48–50, 54, 57–61, 131; Lannes, Bruno 247
see also pearls Lansdowne House 34
Jewish integration 132 Lanvin, Jeanne 161
Johnson, Paul 171 Lapidus, Morris 205–6
343
index
Laura Ashley (brand) 159, 216 Louis style 137

Laurenz Baumer 260 Louis IV (King of France) 47
lavatories 132, 138 Louis XIV (King of France) 8, 46, 71–6
Lawford, Valentine 242 Louis XV (King of France) 108, 121–3
Le Bon Marché (department store) 112 Louis XVI (King of France) 38
Le Brun, Charles 71–3 Louis XVIII (King of France) 38
Le Corbusier (architect) 186 Louis Vuitton 7, 245, 247, 250, 254, 256,
le goût Ritz (Ritz hotel taste) 141, 143, 258, 262–4, 267, 269, 270–1,
150, 205, 210, 214, 260 273, 276, 280, 284, 286–7
Leiden 93 Louis Vuitton Foundation 267, 269
Leighton House (residence) 80 Loutherbourg, Jacques Philippe de 44
leisure class, the 239 Louvre (royal residence) 71
Leiter, Mary (Baroness Curzon of Louvre Museum, Paris 131, 260
Kedleston) 139 Low Countries 50–1
Lelong, Lucien 158 Lowe Lambert, Rachel P. ‘Bunny’ 183;
Les Concierges (company) 238 see also Mellon, Rachel
Les Copains (brand) 261 Luton Hoo (residence) 141
Liberty’s of London (department luwak coffee 233; see also coffee
store) 160 LuxJet (company) 228
libraries 220 Luxor 39
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous luxuria (latin) 6, 17
(TV programme) 216, 226 luxury:
Limousine service 189, 238 brands 1, 3, 170, 229, 231–2, 234,
linen 143, 157 236–8, 247, 252–88
household 48, 50–2, 94, 101, 143, debate 99–103
157, 203, 221–2, 272, 280 dwellings 116–48, 241–3
Lipovetsky, Gilles 290 ephemeral 44, 70
liquor 225–7, 231, 240, 249, 255, 278 food 150; see also food
liturgical vestments 46, 49–50 French 119, 127, 129, 130, 131,
Livy (Roman orator) 19 132, 143
Lloyd Wright, Frank 189 spas 141, 231, 237
Loewy, Raymond 205 travel agents 196, 238
logos 236–7, 262–3, 265, 281, 287, 293 types 230–2
London 8, 29, 90 Metaluxury 9, 231
Longleat House (residence) 64 populuxuries 35, 97–100, 232
Loos, Anita 209–11 masstige 231
Lorillard, Pierre 141 technoluxury 234
Lorimer, Sir Robert 153 überluxury 231
Loro Piana (brand) 255–6 luxury goods:
Los Angeles 256, 274 conglomerates 253, 255, 257, 286,
Lothair Cross 26 288, 291
344
index
distribution 263–4 Matisse, Henri 194

masstige 231 Maugham, Syrie 193
luxus (Latin) 6, 17 Max Mara (brand) 248
LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Maximilian II (Emperor) 61
Vuitton) 255–6, 260 Maxwell, Elsa 176
Mazarin, Jules Raymond (Cardinal) 96
Mackinstosh, Charles Rennie 159 Mazarin Chest 96
‘Made in Italy’ 282 McDonalds (company) 271
magnificence 55–8, 67 medicine 171, 222
Mainbocher (designer) 178 Megret de Sérilly (family) 122
Maindron, Ernest 110 Meikle, Jeffrey 204
Maki-e 95 Meissen porcelain 102–3, 127
Maki Oh (brand) 251 Mellon, Mrs Paul ‘Bunny’ (Rachel
Mandeville, Bernard 99 Lambert) 39, 183, 214, 219,
Mandler, Peter 129 220–2, 231
Manius Vulso 19 Mendl, Lady, see de Wolfe, Elsie
Manuel I (King of Portugal) 88 Menkes, Suzy 281
manufactures royales, see royal Mentmore (residence) 130
manufactures menus plaisirs 31, 46
marble 125, 136 Mercedes-Benz (company) 251
Marble House (residence) 137 Merriweather Post, Marjorie 131–2,
marchand-mercier 44, 126, 127 143–6, 152, 222–3, 242
Margaret, Princess (Countess of Messel, Oliver 194
Snowdon) 203–4, 219 Metaluxury 9, 231
Maria Amalia (Queen of Two Sicilies) 31 metalwork 23, 48, 61, 76, 84, 87–8, 133,
Marie Antoinette (Queen of France) 34, 138, 178, 215, 221, 248
108, 124, 131, 137 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
Marino, Peter 276 York 214
marketing 103, 201, 234, 237–8, 246, Mewès and Davis (architects) 150
248, 253, 258, 267, 273, 280, MGM Studios 209
284–5 Michaud, Yves 4, 236
Marlborough House (residence) 172 Michelangelo (painter) 12
Marquetry 124, 125; see also boulle Michelin Guide 240
Martin brothers 103 Milan 27, 94, 163, 248, 252, 267, 271,
Mary (Princess of England) 156 277, 279
Mary (Queen of England) 151, 179 Millbanke, Lady Sheila 238
Mary I (Queen of England) 287 Miller, Robert W. 278
Masquerades (eighteenth- millinery 164–5, 272
century) 107–8 millionaires 131, 141, 156–7, 178, 182,
masques (Renaissance) 63 197, 214, 225, 230, 249; see also
masstige 231 billionaires and plutocrats
345
index
mink 158; see also fur Nice 161, 173, 237, 272

mirror glass 46, 71–2, 74, 76, 87, 100, Nicols, Beverly 151
105, 123, 124, 135, 147, 153, 158, Nicolson, Sir Harold 94
160–1, 178, 191, 196, 205, 217 nightclubs 175, 214, 278
Mitford, Diana 152, 158 no logo 236–7
Miu Miu (brand) 257 Noble, Sir Andrew 153
Moët et Chandon (brand) 255 Nortman, William 152
Molière (playwright) 107
Mongiardino, Renzo 213 Oeben, Jean-François 130
Monroe, Marilyn 209–10 Old England (brand) 257
Mont Blanc (brand) 257, 260 Opéra de Paris 260
Monte Carlo, see French Riviera Orangerie Museum, Paris 111
Montpellier 52 orchids 162, 172–3, 210–12
Morand, Paul 185 ‘Orient’, the 19, 25, 38, 41, 79–115,
Morris, William 111 133, 183
Mosley, Diana, see Mitford, Diana Orientalism 105–14, 183
Moss, Kate 283 ormolu 121, 125, 126, 131, 145
Mountbatten, Edwina 152 Otto III (Emperor) 26
Mughal Empire 82, 84, 87, 249
Museé des Arts décoratifs, Paris 131 pages, see servants
Museé d’Orsay, Paris 15 Palais Royal, Paris 127
Museum of Modern Art, New York 195 Paley, William S. 219
museums 15, 22–3, 26, 29, 35–6, 92, 96, Paris 8, 15, 119–23, 127, 128, 133
105, 115, 164, 166, 195, 198, 214, Paris Universal Exposition 111
222, 252, 267–70, 272, 293 Parish, Mrs Henry III 214
music 67, 120, 147, 200, 208, 222–3, Park Avenue, New York 142, 220, 242
241, 268, 315 Parthenon 35
Muthesisus, Hermann 153 parties 140
Mytens, Daniel 67 passementerie 128
Patek Philippe (brand) 115, 238–9,
Nadir Shah (Persian Emperor) 84 286–7
Nakamura, Junpei 189 patent 287
Namban screens 95 patina 12
Naples 28, 30 Patiño, Mrs Antenor 218–19
Napoleon see Bonaparte, Napoleon Paul II (Pope) 27–8
Napoleon III (Emperor of France) 164 Peacock Throne 83–4
Nast, Condé (Montrose) 168, 207 Pearls 2, 23, 25, 48, 50, 57–8, 61, 81–2,
Nef (ship-like vessel) 75 84–6, 90, 97, 166, 169, 185, 210,
Nelson, Horatio 33 216, 249, 287
New York 142–4 Pedrocchi Café 233
Newport 137 Pencz, Georg 62
346
index
Peninsula Hotel Group 189, 237, 280 Pompeii 8, 30–3, 36, 45

perfume 13–14, 18–19, 25, 114, 115, 126, Pontano, Giovanni 55
150, 159, 178, 185–6, 229, 232–5, Ponti, Giò 205
237, 255, 260, 264, 276–8 populuxuries 35, 97–100, 232
Perrot, Philippe 7 porcelain 2, 12, 34, 35, 38–9, 64, 66, 74,
Petrie, Carol 220 77, 79–81, 87–8, 91–5, 97, 100–3,
Petrie, Milton 220 105, 107, 109, 111–12, 113, 123–7,
pets (animals) 88, 114, 140, 151, 159 188, 220, 223, 260
Pevsner, Ernst 141 porphyry 47
Philip (Duke of Edinburgh) 195, 201 Porsche (company) 227, 284
Philip IV (King of Spain) 39 Porter, David 106
Philippe III (King of France) 53 Posanella a Boscoreale 22
Philips, Tim 279 PPR (Pinault-Printemps-Redouté) 256
Phones (analogue) 150, 205, 207 Prada (brand) 170, 234, 236, 245, 256–9,
mobile (cellular) 234, 246, 284 263, 267–8, 271–3, 277–9, 286–7
Piaget (brand) 257 Prada, Miuccia 267–8
Picasso, Pablo 186, 193, 194 Prada Foundation 267
Pickford, Mary 287 Prada Group 257
Pierre Cardin (brand) 258 Pradasphere 170, 272
pietra dura (inlaid stone) 125 Praz, Mario 218
Pinault, François-Henri 256–7, 267 Priestley, J. B. 289
Pineau, Nicolas 135–6 Prince of Wales (later King Edward
Piranesi, Francesco 31 VII) 132, 134, 150
Pitt, Brad 267 privacy 120, 146
Pius IX (Pope) 287 prostitutes 116, 210
Place des Vosges 119 Proust, Marcel 159
Place Vendôme 119, 121 Pullman Orient Express 260
plastic 181, 199, 204–6, 216, 252, 293 Pussy Riot (protest group) 250
Plato (philosopher) 18
Plaza Hotel 162–3 Qeelin (brand) 256
Pliny the Elder (Roman orator) 15, Qianlong (Emperor of China) 87
17–18, 19 Quincy, Quattremère de 38
plumbing, see bathrooms Quintilian (ancient rhetorician) 18
plutocrats 44, 115, 139–40, 149, 156,
161, 220, 227; see also Radziwill, Lee (née Caroline Lee
billionaires Bouvier) 163, 213
Poiret, Paul 161–2, 186 Ralph Lauren (brand) 159
Polesden Lacey (residence) 150 Rapin, Henri 189
Polo, Marco 51–2, 81–2 Ravenscroft, George 100
Pompadour, Madame de 108, 120, Reagan, Nancy 216–17
126–7 Reagan, Ronald 216–17
347
index
Red Sea 23 Rudolf II (Emperor) 61

Redstone (company) 248 Ruhlmann, Jacques-Emile 188, 189
regions 229, 292 Ruskin, John 111
relics 28–9, 48 Russia 141, 225–6, 250–1
Renaissance 26, 27, 133–4, 135, 136, 137, Russian Revolution 132
272, 285, 290
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 111, 135–6, 166, 220 Sackville-West, Lady Victoria 151, 159
restaurants 169, 197, 200, 213, 223, 231, Sackville-West, Vita 94
239–40, 244, 262, 270, 278, 289 Said, Edward 109
retailing 115, 193, 225–50, 262–4, 271–3, Saint Anthony 28–9
275–6 Saint Augustine 48
online 231, 268, 273, 280 Saint Gregory the Great 48
Reynolds, Joshua 156 Saint Vitalis 49–50
Richemond Group 256 Saint-Denis, Abbey 47
Riedel (brand) 286 Saint-Gobain (royal manufacture) 74
Riesener, Jean-Henri 130 Salter, Guy 279
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 96 sanitarium 200
Ritz, César 141 Saumarez Smith, Charles 40
Ritz Hotels 141, 143, 150, 209–10, 214, 260 Saville Row 281
Roche, Serge 193 Savonnerie (royal manufacture 135;
Rockefeller, Blanchette 194–5 see also carpets, savonnerie
Rockefeller, Nelson 194 Scandinavian Airline System 172
rococo 120, 126 Schiaparelli (brand) 286, 221
Rolex (brand) 256, 286 Schiaparelli, Elsa 17, 161, 178, 193
Rolls Royce (brand) 138, 248–9 Schlumberger, Jean 221–2
Romans, see Ancient Rome Schön, Mila 163
Rome 30, 36 Schulman, Sarah 254
Rondinone, Ugo 277 Scott, Jonathan 29
Rose Terrace (residence) 156 Scott Brown, Denise 206
Rose, Helen 209 Sea-Dog Table, the 64–6
Rosebery, Lady Eva 130 Sergio Rossi (brand) 256
roses 4, 124, 162, 172–3, 175; see also servants 22–3, 60, 95, 100, 118, 133,
flowers 150–1, 178, 207
Rothschild, Baron Anselm von 89 Sèvres (porcelain) 38–9, 123, 126–7, 188;
Rothschild, Baron Edmond de 22 see also porcelain
Rothschild, Ferdinand de 134–5 Sèvres (royal manufacture) 74, 260
Rothschild, Mayer Amschel de 129–30 sex 4, 108, 184, 223
Rousseau de la Rottière, Jean- Seyfield, Amanda 243
Simeon 122 Shaftsbury, Earl of 106
Royal Manufactures 71–4 Shah Abbas (ruler of Persia) 87
Rubinstein, Helena 138 Shah Abbas II (ruler of Persia) 87
348
index
Shah Jahan (Mughal Emperor) 83, 84 Suger (Abbot) 47

Shanghai 265, 279, 283 Süleyman The Magnificent (Ottoman
Sheraton, Thomas 34 Emperor) 85–6
Sichel, Philippe 112 Sulla (Roman general) 19
silk 51–2, 82, 94, 106, 159 sumptuary laws 6, 7, 20–1, 23–4, 52–4
silver 22; see also metalwork sweated labour 284
Silverman, Debra 217–18 Sweden 226, 266, 279
Simpson, Wallis 176–81; see also swimming pool 143, 227
Windsor, Duchess of Switzerland (and Swiss) 14, 21, 25, 70,
Singapore 189, 234, 275, 278 93, 141, 223, 279
Sluter, Claus 48 Syon House (residence) 34
Smith, Adam 38, 99
Snow, Carmel 207 TAG Heuer (brand) 255
socialites 132, 150, 213, 218, 220 Taiwan 278
sociology 6, 7 Talbot, George 65
Solca, Luca 276 tapestries 64, 67, 73, 76, 106, 128,
Sophocles (poet) 29 137, 151
Sotheby’s 39, 79, 192, 221 Beauvais 128, 135–6, 260
Southey, Robert 37 Gobelins 73–4, 128, 260
Sowind (brand) 256 Tati, Jacques 205
Spanish Armada 64 tattoos 156
spas 141, 231, 237 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 83–4
splendour 17, 46–7, 55–6, 58–67, 78 taxation 24, 132, 139, 227, 266
spices 19, 21–2, 81, 90 Taylor, Elizabeth 224, 287
spirits, see liquor tea 101
spolia 26 technoluxury 234
sports 56, 68, 170, 184, 203, 239, 264–5 telephones, see phones
sportswear, see sports Terence Conrad (brand) 159
SS Canberra 199 terroir, see regions
SS Normandie 196–7 Terry, Emilio 161, 193
St Regis Hotel 176 Terry, Quinlan 216
stained-glass 47 textiles 19, 46–63, 67; see also linen
Standen (residence) 137 Thai International Airways 172
Stella McCartney (brand) 256 Thailand (and former Siam) 87, 172, 278
still-life paintings 12, 97–8 The Breakers (residence) 137
Strand, London 29 The Church (Christian) 46–77, 85, 121
Strawberry Hill (residence) 40 Thomas, Dana 7, 232, 284, 290
‘Strawberry Hill Gothic’ 40–1 Tiberius 22, 25
Studio 54, 214 Tiffany & Co. (brand) 131, 139, 221, 256,
Stuyvesant, Rutherford 142 278, 286
Süe, Louis 196 Blue Box 287
349
index
Timberlake, Justin 243 Vaccarello, Anthony 268

time 12, 13 Van Cleef & Arpels (brand) 158, 257
timepieces, see clocks van der Meulen, Steven 58–9
Titanic, The 139 van der Rohe, Mies 195
Tivoli 30 Van der Velde, Henry 160
Tokyo 189, 245 van Eyck, Jan 51
Tolstoy, Leo 287 van Roestraten, Pieter 97
tourism 8, 29, 33, 36, 44, 132, 213, 247, Vanderbilt, Consuelo 137, 138–9, 172
252, 265, 271–2, 278–9 Vanderbilt, Gertrude 142
Toussaint, Jeanne 288 Vanderbilts (family) 131, 137, 142
townhouses 118, 132, 140, 142, 143 vanitas (Latin) 6
toys (luxuries) 43 Veblen, Thorstein 7, 239
trade cards 103–4 velvet 9, 52, 58, 67, 87, 181, 197,
Trademarks 261–2, 282 215, 219
trading companies 90–2, 95 Venice (and Venetian) 27–8, 36, 51, 58,
transport: 70, 81, 85, 100, 205
air, see airlines Ventura (jeweller) 185
boat 133–4 Venturi, Robert 206
car/automobile 138, 201, 203, 232 Vermeer, Johannes 214
liners 196–9 vernis Martin 103
public 135 Versace (brand) 261, 269, 286
train 133, 173, 175, 178, 204 Versace, Gianni 228
yacht 195, 210, 220, 226–8, 231, 266 Versailles 8, 71–7
travel agencies 196, 238, Vertu (brand) 234
Trebay, Guy 230 Vesuvius 30
trimmings, see passementerie vice 17
Trumbauer, Horace 156 Victoria (Queen of England) 64, 287
Trump, Donald 242 Victoria and Albert Museum 96, 105,
trunks, travelling 127 164, 293
tulips 92–3, 172 Victorian style 44, 133, 160, 171, 193,
Tully, Alice 218 215, 236
Turquerie 8, 107–8 villas 7, 8, 118, 137, 140
Tutankhamun 37 Virgin Mary 28, 58
Twain, Mark 131 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 221–2
Twitchell, James B. 234 Vogue (Magazine) 168, 176, 206–7,
215, 281
überluxury 231 von Archenholz, Johann Wilhelm 118
United Kingdom 29, 33, 35, 98, 112, 118, von Siebold, Philipp Franz 111
140–1, 154, 170–1, 199, 224, 261, Vreeland, Diana (Mrs T. Reed Vree-
270, 275, 278, 282–3 land) 176, 207–8, 214, 242
United States of America 141, 143, 148 Vuitton, Georges 287
350
index
Waddesdon Manor (residence) Wilde, Oscar 112–13, 159

131–7 Williams, Zoe 226
Wallace Collection, London 130 Wilson, Charles 170
Wallace, Sir Richard 130 Windsor, Duchess of (Wallis Warfield
Walpole, Horace 30, 40–4 Simpson) 176–81, 218, 286
Walpole, Sir Robert 30 Windsor, Duke of 153–6, 176–81
Walpole British Luxury 261 Wine 3, 12, 20, 22, 75, 157, 170, 187, 216,
Wang, Qing 284 225–6, 228, 229–31, 236, 239–40,
Waldorf Astoria Hotel 178 243, 249, 255, 260, 282
Warhol, Andy 214–15, 287 Wintour, Anna 207, 281
Warner, Charles Dudley 131 Wollaton Hall (residence) 64
Washington Kavanaugh, Mrs Wolsey, Thomas (Cardinal) 40
George 212 woods, wooden inlay 124, 125
Waugh, Evelyn 224 World Exhibitions 112
Webb, Philip 137–8 World Luxury Brand Directory
Wedgwood, Josiah 34 (WLBD) 255
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) 212–13 World War I 139
Welch, Evelyn 7 World Wide Web 280–1
Wellington, Duke of 38 Worth, Charles Frederick 160, 164
Wernher, Sir Julius 141 Wrightsman, Jayne 214, 218
West, Mae 209 Würzburg 125
Westminster, Loelia 176 Wyatt, James 42
Wharton, Edith 153
Whistler, James Abbot McNeill 113 yuppies 230
Whistler, Rex 194 Yves Delorme (brand) 279
White, Edmund 270 Yves Saint Laurent (brand) 114, 214,
Whitehall 56 232, 245–6, 256, 286
Whitney, Mrs John Hay (Betsey
Cushing) 219 Zhao, Yihzeng 248
Wiener Werkstätte 159–60 Zuellig, Stephen 79
351

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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 03/07/16, SPi

praise for luxury: a rich history

To our friends, our great luxury in life

Preface and Acknowledgements

preface and acknowledgements

Catherine Kovesi, Peter McNeil, Luca Molà, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli,

preface and acknowledgements

Kostümbibliothek Berlin; Martin Kamer, Zug; Maurizio Marinelli; Caro-

Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction. Luxury: A Rich History and a History of Riches 1

1.1. Rock Crystal amphoriskos14

3.4. The Howzer cup93

6.2. Jean-Michel Frank dressing table, c.1931–32191

WHAT IS YOUR LUXURY?

and aspirations of people of different means and social conditions across

So far we have skirted around the definition of luxury by asking what is

chauffeured in a Bentley, wears custom-made dresses, and gives parties for

concern. Accumulation of wealth, the creation of splendid artefacts, and

Luxury, Antiquity, and the

LUXURY AND TIME

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

THE ROMANS OF THE DECADENCE

The Romans of the Decadence (Musée d’Orsay, 1847) is a monumental

Now tell me, Muses, dwellers on Olympus:

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

The simplicity of past times versus the sophistication (and corruption) of

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

in less-than-flattering prose. He not only freed himself but became rich

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

were possibly using real gold implements for religious ceremonies. It is

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

LUXURY AND THE REDISCOVERY OF CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

Roman society). The rich elites of Europe prided themselves on re-estab-

It was then acquired by King Alfonso V of Aragon, who resided in Naples

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

LUXURY AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GRAND TOUR

built a couple of centuries earlier in classical style as summer retreats for

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

Fig. 1.5. ‘A Cognocenti contemplating ye Beauties of ye Antique’. Hand-coloured etching

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

MAKING GOOD USE OF ANTIQUITY

redecoration at home. Syon House (1761–2) and Lansdowne House (1765)

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

The very great variety in our manufactures, in objects either of elegance or

AT WHATEVER COST: REVIVALS

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

the originals. In fact they generally preferred the ‘improved’ versions of

philosopher and economist Adam Smith had admired Egyptian innova-

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

Kong collector and renamed ‘Zoe’. However, most objects—including

MEN, LUXURY, AND EXTRAVAGANCE

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

Horace (Horatio) William Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–97), was a

about surface, not substance. Designed by architect James Wyatt, Fonthill

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

buttons. Hazlitt played the arbiter of ‘good’ luxury, in opposition to pure

luxury, antiquity, and the antique

Luxury, the Church, and the

luxury, the church, and the court

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction. Luxury: A Rich History and a History of Riches 1

1.1. Rock Crystal amphoriskos14

3.4. The Howzer cup93

6.2. Jean-Michel Frank dressing table, c.1931–32191