Richard Baker, CEO and founder of the marketing firm Premium Knowledge Group, recites a lyrical account of how wealth, luxury and the dynasties that created them have evolved into the industry we know today.
CONSUMERS
A Brief History of the Language of Luxury
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Credit: This is the featured image credit
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Richard Baker, CEO and founder of the marketing firm Premium Knowledge Group, recites a lyrical account of how wealth, luxury and the dynasties that created them have evolved into the industry we know today.
Richard Baker, CEO and founder of the marketing firm Premium Knowledge Group, recites a lyrical account of how wealth, luxury and the dynasties that created them have evolved into the industry we know today.
From the beginning wealth has been a sign of power.
At first power came from control of nearby territory
And the signs of wealth and power were special things from the nearby territories
Horses in Arabia
Silk in China
Pearls in Micronesia
Salt in Salzburg
Silver in South America
And each territory that was a kingdom
had its own signs and symbols,
its own code of
wealth called Luxury.
With time, new wealth and power came from trading between the territories.
And banking to support trading
And the navies to protect trading.
And the new signs of wealth were the luxuries
that came from far away places.
And these luxuries were added to the old.
Silk and spices in Europe
Woven fabrics in Africa
Thoroughbred horses in Asia
And luxury became a common code of wealth
across various territories.
In the industrial era new wealth and power came from manufacturing.
And providing energy to factories
or distributing things in cities.
And the new signs of wealth, the new luxuries,
were powerful things that moved.
And these symbols were added to the code.
Steam powered yachts
Private railroad cars
Planes
Automobiles
Over the centuries all these forms of wealth and
power and their concomitant luxuries had
developed slowly.
And the people who had them came to
be known as aristocracy and then old money.
And they stuck together
Transmitting the accumulated code,
the signs of wealth and power,
to their children, especially the boy.
Keeping it from their employees and the hoi polloi
(Carnegie was the exception that proves the rule.
He gave his fortune and information
away a library at a time to the last dime.)
The signs in the code included:
driving (or being driven in) the right cars,
having the right number of homes in the right places,
with the right art on display
wearing the right clothes and right accessories,
vacationing in the right places,
traveling in the right way,
dining in the right places,
reading the right writers,
listening to the right people,
going to the right events,
having the right kind of wedding,
going to the right schools
supporting the right charities
and doing all these things in just the right combination.
In the 21th century new wealth and power came from information.
From knowing, creating, manipulating, processing, storing, and
distributing information.
And from applying information to all the historic forms of wealth and power.
And the new sign of wealth and power:
the new luxury was knowing.
Knowing about health, beauty,
Knowing what to know,
Knowing whom to know,
Knowing who knew,
Knowing how to know
Knowing the people who were well-known
Even knowing how to remain unknown,
un-Google-able
And the people who knew were known as new money.
They came from ordinary, un-monied families.
They quickly grew in number
Outnumbering the old money
They were too many, all at once, to fit in with the old money.
And their parents didn’t know the code.
Making it hard to learn the old money code.
But they had to communicate.
And since they were too many to be all the
same and had different information new codes developed
different from the old money code and different from each other.
Six codes developed, six ways of $igning.
Each included certain ciphers
(symbolic products, services and experiences)
chosen from the innumerable possibilities
according to the strategies they represented.
About how needs are met and benefits
selected. in an increasingly global economy.
Each code was communicated in a signature amplitude and frequency
Over different combinations of channels
Using different levels of redundancy
and different rates of obsolescence.
Each code varied from a norm, a state of equilibrium.
Each a different pitch (like the modem tones that send a fax).
Or waves of pixels that inform your computer screen.
Each made sense and was clearly under
stood if both sender and receiver
had a similar algorithm,
Otherwise the code was merely gibberish.
One could rave about the latest fashion trend the
other would perceive only an enigma
unless they shared a common rosetta stone.
