Or : Is It Still Luxury on Instagram ?

A few years ago, I wrote an article on this blog called “Is It Still Luxury on Amazon?” I wrote it at a time when I was living in New York, a fast-paced, “I want it all and I’d like it delivered” city if there ever was one. It was late 2014, so right around the time that drones were starting to step out of science-fiction and into reality; a time when the 24-hour Duane Reade was starting to sense the danger of being outpaced by Amazon Prime. Amazon had just announced a n expansion of their clothing retail department, leaning more towards luxury than high-street. And I remember wondering, back then, if high-end designer fashion on Amazon could ever truly compete with the brick-and-mortar experience. I was interning for a small couture designer and taken aback by the artistry in her work. I theorized that brand experience might only be a piece of the puzzle if the superior physical qualities of the garment itself were able take the baton.

The real question I was asking, of course, is what percent of the value of a luxury garment comes from the brand experience? The last time I looked at this topic, I felt that luxury could feasibly deliver its promise with what would essentially be a reduced or limited brand experience, so long as the product behind it lived up to existing brand standards.

In the end, designer fashion on Amazon never really did become a big thing. And as brands developed increasingly sophisticated digital experiences, luxury sales continued to reach records highs – at the very least, they took up more space in our fields of vision, bolstered by the explosion of Instagram and other visual medium. The sidewalk-as-runway was replaced by a powerful digital contact machine that turned the entire world into an endless, permanent runway, and the rest was history. So sweeping was the transformation that I wonder if the explosion of this medium won't soon eliminate that last essential core of luxury – the superior product.

Luxury has successful ridden several waves of hidden branding “dangers” – the agglomeration of the industry; the (racist affff) scandal that accompanied the collective realization that everyone had moved to East Asian production. Fast fashion, which threatened to offer a bottom-market deal that would deter on-the-fence middle class consumers from making the leap to luxury. Yet luxury remained steady through it all, undeterred and bolstered by the fact that despite great upsets in recent years, the sheer financial power of the industry allows it to retain a tight grip on the "top-down" sartorial model.

Largely, luxury has managed to hang on because it wields social power. Often, it’s the direct inheritor of all the exclusive patrimony to which it traces its roots. It swings and reinvents and resells the way only a global megalith could, wielding a two-headed axe of creative control (not without true, genuine talent behind it) and cultural dominance – if the brand stories behind so many modern luxury houses are so powerful, it’s because they weave into a known and desired narrative. Power, money, sex… no other market tier has managed to find such powerful symbols to sell to their consumers, and so luxury continues to have a job to do.

I want to be clear that I’m not referring to every single brand in a kabajillion dollar industry, but rather a specific subset of players - think a lot of the major LVMH houses. It’d be difficult to tie, say, Jacquemus into this narrative.

It’s essential to underline that most of these brand stories get their legitimacy from a superior product behind them – in a lot of cases a sort of myth, but in a lot of cases thanks to a true creative standout. At the root of it all is a product that sets itself above the those accessible to the average consumer in terms of quality, or design, or price – that’s the definition of luxury, à priori.

When I was interning for the designer- and I talk about this in the other article, so I won’t go crazy here – I went into it with what I’ll call fine shreds of a Not Like Other Girls attitude about designers and designer goods. I’d been raised to believe that a brand promised nothing, said nothing, was no more than an excuse to charge a higher price. And I remember getting my naïve little eyes opened right up, yessir. When you explore the craftsmanship behind a luxury garment, you get it – you think about all the intricate beading, the hours hand-stitching a gown, and you understand the meaning of a product Set Apart. And of course, there’s no denying that a luxury good might physically feel better, like a bespoke suit or a fine wool.

Interning for this designer taught me that in luxury, the purpose of the brand is (in theory) the promise to deliver that product. You’ve purchased XYZ brand, and that means you’ll get the softest sweater ever to grace your shoulders (or whatever.)  I suspect this is LVMH’s motivation with their Portes Ouvertes events, a series of visits to their ateliers, in which we are asked to believe that dress-forms are constructed and beading threaded side-by-side in the same pristine dove-gray carpeted hall. It’s a stage so well set that you start to trust its veracity; a slight-of-hand that successfully places craft and construction back in the forefront of the customer’s mind.

The basic premise though, is this: behind every story lies a physical product that sets itself apart in a superior way. Eventually, though, these stories are all producing something, selling something. Even if the object exists only to serve as a stand-in for some other desire - love, prestige, beauty - it’s nonetheless the key, a talisman essential to the conjuring.

Luxury on Instagram, then, is the ultimate simulacrum. If the traditional use-pathway of a luxury good involves a transition from object to symbol, then its path on Instagram creates an added step: object to symbol to symbol of symbol. On some level, part of the use-value of a luxury good has always been its visual nature; both for the aesthetic and for the projected symbolism. But on Instagram, the detail is lost - the delicacy of the beading, the buttery texture of quality cashmere. The act of self-definition that is inherent to dress - be it luxury or not - becomes both distorted and magnified, a funhouse mirror effect that puts the suggestion of luxury before its actual presence. In the process of capturing and sharing a photo, reality loses its relevance, it becomes made-to-measure.

Luxury on Instagram is luxury for the post-physical age, a luxury liberated from the earthly limitations of leather and wool and silk. The only things holding everyone back from lying - from complete self-invention - are the hawkish eyes of luxury and fashion aficionados who can spot a fake from a mile away. We’re not yet entirely liberated from the physical - there’s still the sense that at some point, you’ll have to be wearing that look in the real world - but even that is becoming less and less true. In other words, on Instagram, brand experience is no longer part of the value of a luxury garment - it is the value.

More generally, we’ve been seeing a decline in retail as millennials prefer to invest their money elsewhere - like concerts and travel. In other words, on experience. There was a time when you’d want concert tickets for your birthday, but you’d ask your parents to budget in the t-shirt as well. The material carried a certain weight, the value of proof. In a post-physical age, the consumer is liberated from that. An experience can be captured in photos, shared and repeated and endlessly useful. For the first time, the experience takes on the same use-value as the object in terms of self-definition - what was once ephemeral becomes tangible and permanent. On Instagram, a t-shirt and a concert are of equal utility.

Clothing remains important, if only as a symbolic good, a code for those in-the-know.  But the actual, physicality of the object becomes increasingly irrelevant. A decent concession could be made for the construction of the garment – better construction equals better aesthetic equals better optics. But in a world where everything’s being seen through a distance, does it really matter if there’s a quality product behind the brand promise?

In other words, in a post-physical world, the answer to the question “what percentage of the value of a luxury product is brand experience?” might well be…all of it. Of course, that’s not forgetting the visit to the store, the packaging, the scent of the soft paper that enshrouds your purchase – these are physical or sensory experiences that play an essential role in the perception and experience of the brand. And increasingly, retailers are relying on those details to differentiate their product and create added value in a world where quality (in terms of mass-consumer products particularly) has already begun to fall by the wayside in favor of a fast-fashion high-turnover model. Luxury brand models rely on the “brand universe” to sell a narrative adaptable to a rapidly changing market.

But none of these things concern, ultimately, the product; they’re setting the stage for a Product Experience. They’re made for being posted and described and shared, for participation in a universe rather than purchasing a product. In a post-physical world, image comes first. What value, then, in investing in construction and creation? The real investment is in those minute details that form a simulacrum of luxury.

Whatever those items used to symbolize for the consumer (wealth, sexiness, power) can be obtained in other ways, and represented better by other, immaterial means. Those narratives that give luxury its power today are all the more adaptable once liberated from the physical. This already the principle of branding today - a brand isn't an object, it's an idea; it's what allows a brand to adapt and reinvent itself in a changing market. So it's not that the product itself will ever fall completely to the wayside. But the physical details that make luxury what it is will lose some of their seductive power.

Who needs, say, a couture dress when you can pay for a Premium, Exclusive, Better, More Comfortable Experience? In an age where Louis Vuitton is no longer a product – no longer a trunk, or a bag – then those physical items become mere pieces of a larger Louis Vuitton Experience puzzle. Forget the lightly tethered associative relationship created by sponsorships – why not a LV concert, or cruise, or voyage? A business model that holds up a superior object as a core tenet seems less pertinent in a world that’s hardly concerned with objects at all.  

All of this is not to say that I think that luxury itself is going anywhere. The desire for something better, something above hasn’t and won’t go away. Just like that old axiom about marketing, technology doesn’t create needs, it responds to them. That need is clearly still present, perhaps even more so. In a world where self-differentiation is so powerful and accessible, it makes sense to need more powerful tools to do the job. But I do think that luxury is about to face its next great challenge – in the future, if you’re going to pay for something truly great, I don’t think it will necessarily be a physical product.

It’s an excellent, excellent tagline.

Interestingly, it’s also very inclusive, and in a way, patriotic. I think an argument to be made for the use of English in advertisements is that it makes them more accessible to an increasing population of non-native French speakers; it allows new arrivals and tourists and those born speaking French to participate in mass culture on an equal level.

It’s also one of the few examples of the French Girl ™ myth that doesn’t assume a white francaise de souche, as does the L’Oréal ad. (Aren’t you just shocked to know that French Girl Hair is brown, straight, and untextured?). It doesn’t define her as a wealthy Parisian. Nor does it find her in a beret and a marnière, poutily smoking a cigarette on a café terrasse. Or even drinking alcohol, for that matter. For Etam, being French is not limited to a particular look.

While the ads do overwhelmingly (maybe exclusively?) feature white women, there’s an implied linguistic inclusivity otherwise rarely present in similar advertising. It’s perhaps not a mistake that the only word in French is liberté, so effortlessly translated to speakers of other languages. What is truly French, in this ad, is a Republican ideal, and it’s available to everyone (free with purchase of Etam product).

This is relatively radical for France, a country recently in the news when its Ambassador to the US accused TV host Trevor Noah of racism for congratulating Africa on winning the World Cup. And while as an American I understand - and agree with - Noah’s sentiment, I think an important context key was missing to that debate.

In France, it’s still not a given that someone who’s not white, culturally Catholic, and français de souche is French. When Noah gave his reply - about how everyone who’s a “good immigrant” is French and everyone who’s not is just “an immigrant”  - he was 100% accurate. The Ambassador was saying something that many French still need to hear, which nonetheless seems intuitive to (most) Americans:  if you’re born here, or you uphold the values of liberté, egalité, fraternité, you’re French. End of story.

And, in a global cultural context in which French Girls ™ are thin, white Parisians, it seems welcomely progressive for a brand to declare that what gets you membership in that exclusive club isn’t your hair type, it’s participating in those values (via purchase). And that’s exactly why it’s such a great ad. Because embrace liberté and you, too, can be French.

But it’s interesting to me that this is the value that they chose, that for Etam, France in the eye of the Other equals liberty and, of course, sexual liberation. It’s funny because it also seems like a certain revindication of power. This is not necessarily the symbol French Girls ™ represent for the Internet (although this does very much exist); nor is the French Girl ™ here an object that exists as the counterfoil for American puritanism. Rather, it’s the French Girl ™ narrative written by and for French women, modeled in the image of their own mythologies.

It’s part of a trend, I think, in the reclaiming of the French Girl ™ by French women themselves. I’m thinking of in particular of the book How to be Parisian Wherever You Are, which I… do not like at all, largely because I think it’s simplistic, cliché, and dissuades women from wearing sweatpants in front of men, including their gym teachers (I KNOW.)

The book was an international success, playing on those clichés that make French Girls ™ such a seductive force for the Internet (French Girls ™ don’t cry in front of boys! French Girls ™ always wear matching lingerie! French Girls ™  skip work and spend their days wandering art galleries!). It toed, expertly, the line between “this is all total bullshit” and “...ok, I actually know a couple of girls like this.” Its all-French authors found those small grains of truth that lend credibility and staying power to the myth of French Girls ™ , and added a healthy dose of mystique and cliché for good measure.

Is reductive? Absolutely, but the takeaway is the prise en main of the French Girl ™  experience by those women who are supposed to embody it.

I’m not sure what the future of the French Girl mythology will be, and if it has staying power as an advertising tool in the French market. It certainly does seem inextricably tied to the Made in France brand that’s really taken over the market in the past few years, a sign of a sort of resurgence of national pride on a general level. And that pride itself is tied to geopolitics and soccer games and the zeitgeist.

In some sense, the lure of the French girl seems more powerful than ever. For all of its limitations and reductions, it seems to sit at a sweet spot for advertisers - a positive and potentially inclusive national identity in a globalized world. And although the French may not be as outwardly patriotic as Americans, identifying strongly with being French in general is not a new phenomenon, as limiting as that definition might sometimes be.

What we can hope, I think, is that French women (and advertisers) will continue their takeover of the French Girl ™ narrative. Let them continue to define being French in real-time terms, rather than based on a series of mistranslated clichés. It’s the best hope we’ve got to open up the definition of the word to define cool, badass French women as they are, in all the diversity they represent.

We might argue that the “New Experience Economy” is fueled not so much by generating emotion for consumers, but rather on its promise of digital souvenirs, non-physical objects whose primary use-value is as a brick in the construction and expression of a platform-specific social self. These digital souvenirs are as useful to us as t-shirts once were, perhaps moreso: they allow us to create publicly-accessible tableaux of ourselves over time. 

The uniting factor, however, is the uncanny sense that each of these experiences has been designed to create the perfect social media simulacra: not real experience, not real emotion, but expertly orchestrated to give the impression of it on the Internet. 

If I can get into the “theory” behind this for like thirty seconds, I’ve been really engaged with Russel Belk’s model of “self-extension” these past couple months (we just use what we’re working with over here). Here, though, it’s actually pretty relevant. Essentially, we’d argue that the human psyche distinguishes between “that which is of me” and “that which is not of me” through a sort of orbital structure - like the sun at the center of the solar system, those objects that fall closer in our orbit, as a function of our intimate engagement with them, become increasingly pertinent to the perception and communication of identity as expressed through consumption. This is why the loss of a treasured family heirloom can feel like the loss of a a part of ourselves: in some ways, that’s very much the case. The self “extends” through a network of semiotically communicative objects that form our conception, and expression, of “that which is of me.” 

So then in like the mid-2000’s this dude called Ahuvia expanded on this concept to explain why specific objects get integrated into the closer circles of our identitary orbits: both because they relate to specific aspects of our identities (which may serve a reinforcing mechanism, “I am a guitarist and thus my guitar is a part of myself”), and because these items enable us to concretize these different identities over time through their material presence (“That is my first guitar, that is who I was when I began”). So the important takeaway here is that for Ahuvia, objects aren’t just useful for constructing single, fixed identities: they both recount and reinforce broader, continuous identity narratives over time. 

This is important to the whole “experience economy” deal on two axes: first, because I appreciate that it gives me a socio-scientifically grounded excuse for being so into souvenirs in the first place. The reason Brian is so into t-shirts is because these items allow him to make tangible certain otherwise-invisible aspects of his identity: where he’s been, where he’s going, and to keep these memories as “part of himself” overtime. And with time, as certain objects - certain memories - become more important to him, the closer they approach to the center of that identitary orbit. 

The second reason I’m telling you all this is because it allows us to understand how and why digital objects can replace these traditionally physical manifestations: social media, specifically, has become such an essential - I would even say central - manifestation of the “social self”, in the sense that our identities as expressed in the public sphere are now largely digital productions. I think it’s kind of easy to “shit on” Instagram and “taking pictures for the gram” and whatever, but that would be ignoring the fundamental social power of these platforms. When we talk about the “postmodern self” native to digital platforms, we make reference to the fact that identity, having never been fixed, is now dissimulated and reimboded in different ways through all of these digital spaces: our “Instagram selves” are ourselves, in a certain way. 

And so these digital objects, these social photographs, they find a very intimate spot right in the center ellipses of these identitary narratives; indeed they are the identitary narratives, a primary tool through which we communicate ourselves to the world. There is no opt-out button: presence on these platforms is necessarily communicative, the absence of discourse as powerful as its presence. 

And that’s why I find it so telling that companies have been so handily able to not only offer experiential products that allow consumers to take advantage of the increased curatorial semiotic power which they now possess, but indeed to so expertly adapt these products to the “language of the Internet”. Coming back to the idea of these digital simulacra, the practice of the Instagram self (done typing quotes for this now) has lead to the development of a set of cultures and behaviors native to the platform: the photos that we post there are necessarily adapted to communicate in the most efficient manner possible. 

In that sense, the “experience” being sold by AirBnb or whatever is perfectly constructed to give you the tools you need to add little blocks of “authenticity” or whatever to your lil’ digital idenitary quilt. And I think that’s a good thing: I’m not really in the business of making judgement calls on like social media or whatever because I think we’re social beings and we’re adapting, as best we can, to a new world that gives us this insane amount of communicative power but relatively little history and guidance for understanding it. 

Which is why, then, I actually think it’s all sort of sweet, this idea of capturing fleeting, ephemeral moments of lived experience: isn’t that what purchasing was always sort of about, anyways? And I find that it’s less direct, more symbolic: put down the souvenir t-shirt, capture the sun through the trees or the genuine laugh or whatever and freeze it in time (as you do with photography). Post it and concretize it and let it be a part of a public you, until you decide to delete it from your feed and from yourself. Of course, that’s an idealized view of the whole thing. “Doing it for the ‘gram” is real, communicating in that native IG language is real. And if I need to post a cocktail in front of a pool to tell y’all how cool and trendy my summer experience has been, I’m ready to do that for you.