Thesis: Luxury is a Phobia
This is the working thesis of a new ongoing research project.
Luxury can be read as a system that not only produces an agreeable and comfortable environment, but also serves as a tool to buffer, filter, and control exposure to the outside world. It is thereby a reflection of a felt insecurity. Taste and luxurious connotations fulfil the function of signalling that a person has arrived, or was never part of an insecure world to begin with. Individuals mobilise taste to position themselves and to defend this position. In Western capitalist societies social (and economical) positions remain precarious even if on top of the chain, they need to be defended at all times.
What struck me was that, when I was feeling unwell (having contracted, in the most classical manner, a stomach bug while travelling as a European in Mexico), all I wanted was to find a hotel in Oaxaca and order a club sandwich. This club sandwich will always be the same, no matter where in the world. The furniture and the perfume used in the air conditioning will be the same anywhere in the world, given the hotel is of the same category and has been refurbished around the same time. Many luxury locations cite locality, site specificity, and local culture, but, similar to gentrification—which plays out almost identically worldwide when you look at a white-painted, raw-wood-clad coffee store—this happens within agreed parameters.
In the trickle-down nature of the neoliberal world, this logic is not confined to elite environments. It extends to more widely accessible forms of consumption, from high-end hotels to budget cruise holidays, airport lounges, and other managed experiences. While these settings differ dramatically in price and prestige, they increasingly reproduce the same techniques of standardisation, buffering, and controlled exposure. What they all aspire to, though, is always luxury, even if the consumer is not able to spend that much. Globally, the lowest-priced cruise through the Caribbean is still a somewhat privileged experience in any case. Luxury is therefore less a discrete category than a set of organisational logics that have become widely distributed across contemporary tourism and consumer culture.
In that sense, luxury can be understood as a specific form of non-place, extending the framework developed by Marc Augé. While non-places are typically described as sites of transit and anonymity—airports, motorways, shopping malls—luxury environments such as hotels, resorts, cruise ships, and managed interiors are the end goal of Western aspiration.
I chose the drastic pun Phobia because luxury clients are a) afraid to be in the wrong place, they have to be up to date. This links to my experience working in the fashion industry and experiencing it as an environment where people are terrified at all times of wearing the wrong thing in the wrong place. In Abu Dhabi international hotel chains almost only share the weather with the locality, while a 4star plus Hotel in Mexico or Sri Lanka will shield the Western / northern traveller from the local cuisine. Luxury is a response to anxiety about uncontrolled exposure.