I’m finding that one of the benefits of traveling to London temporarily is that I’m paying more attention to art exhibitions, and cultural events happening while I’m visiting. With that in mind and while I’ve been in London to meet with existing and potential new clients, I also reserved a couple of hours – luckily on a fine and sunny morning – to visit this exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum before it ends in about 10 days. It’s free and I recommend checking it out.
The exhibition, created in partnership with the UK Crafts Council, is an inquiry into the meaning of luxury through selected attributes. The curated craft and design pieces mean to illustrate and interrogate different aspects of luxury.
The first room, “Creating Luxury” featured two exhibits for several attributes, such as passion, exclusivity, innovation, etc. Some of these were pretty amazing pieces, with interesting choices of pieces to present contrast, such as an opulent yet described as very uncomfortable howdah (the chair sitting atop an elephant in India) under the term “pleasure”.
The second room, “A Space for Time” and The Future of Luxury” featured very interesting installations, projects, and design pieces questioning the place of luxury items: carbon based items shaped into diamonds which don’t have the same value as mined diamonds, a machine printing uniquely curated booklets of images randomly pulled from the Internet, a short film tracing the journey across the world and the people involved in crafting one unique luxury piece.
Ultimately, the exhibition invites visitors to consider what their own personal version of luxury is or might be.
I’m sitting in a coffee shop in London as I’m writing this, stricken by a certain duality: feeling privileged and lucky to manage my own time and location, while looking out the window at a continuously rainy and grey street which doesn’t look like anything luxurious at all. Being independent certainly carries benefits, however I’m not sure I’d call that luxury.
Unique and spectacularly crafted items have traditionally been the privilege of the very few, and to a large extent this hasn’t changed. That said, what seems to have changed is that the many are now very aware of what the few have. An entire industry of popular magazines or TV channels are dedicated to the topic.
In consequence, I believe other changes from the past have to do with the aspirations to own the same luxury items as the few, and perhaps growing resentment towards deepening inequalities.
I remember meeting a group of people in Kunming, China, a few years ago and talking with a female student. She visited the hostel where I was staying on a regular basis to practice her English. She was very excited to learn that I was French and grabbed my notebook to write all the luxury brands she could remember, asking me to tell her how to correctly pronounce Hermès and Louis Vuitton. It made me smile at the time, but I also wonder how long increasingly distributed and common items can retain their badge of luxury, or why we hold such as a fascination for a name and a bag or a scarf – even granting it an exceptional level of craft.
It also reminds me of Japanese movies about craftmanship, like this short about a traditional sword maker, or the documentary Jiro dreams of Sushi. They can likely easily fit within definitions of luxury, yet I wonder if the craftsmen think of their work as luxury, I doubt it actually.
The difference between the points above may well be the interest of celebrities and media. If some movie stars decided to start carrying traditional Japanese swords tomorrow, would there be sudden surge in their popularity? I think it is entirely possible, but then perhaps people are missing the opportunity to define luxury for themselves.
As for me, as much as enjoy stuff, I think my own version of luxury is pretty simple: idle time. Time is our most precious resource, so idly enjoying an hour or two of it sitting here and slowly writing this while I watch a busy street of London is the height of luxury.
On that last point, I highly recommend We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider that I am reading at the moment. You can listen to this great fifteen minute long excerpt called “Lazy: A Manifesto“.
