Sun, Jul 07, 2002 page12

• Recessions come and go, consumption is forever

  With the Enrons collapsing, it may seem an odd moment to champion luxury. But one author argues there's something refreshing in the material world

  • By Patricia Cohen / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  "I can stand here and look at this for hours," said James Twitchell as he parked himself in front of the bottled water section in City Market, just past the jars of US$66-per-kilogram teas and behind the 2.5m display of imported olive oils.

  Twitchell, an English professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, specializes in the Romantic poets, but his real obsession is shopping. Given the choice of reading literary theorists like Foucault or gazing at shelves stacked with artfully shaped bottles of water piled up like Gatsby's beautifully tailored shirts, he would quickly choose the latter. "There is more that I can sustain myself with at the water aisle than in all of modern criticism," he said.

  

  Despite tough times, James Twitchell, a scholar of shopping, defends luxury purchases such as this pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes.

  PHOTO: NY

  In a series of books, the latest of which is Living It Up: Our Love Affair with Luxury, Twitchell has detailed the consumption habits of Americans with all the scholarly delight of a field anthropologist who has discovered the secret courting rituals of a remote tribe. He is exquisitely attuned to the subtle gradations of status conferred by the labels on what we wear, eat, drink, drive and freeze our ice cubes in.

  

  Despite tough times, James Twitchell, a scholar of shopping, defends luxury purchases such as this Fendi bag.

  And he is not alone. Whether prompted by the spendathon in the 1990s, or people's endless fascination not only with shopping, but with reading about their shopping, a new title by an academic or journalist on the subject appears practically every week. Burlington, Verrmont, where Twitchell grew up and where he now spends summers, was singled out by David Brooks in his wickedly funny Bobos in Paradise as a model "Latte Town," a city that has perfectly reconciled the mercenary instincts of the bourgeoise with the artistic spirit of the bohemians to create an upscale consumer culture.

  What distinguishes Twitchell's study of excessive consumerism, though, is that he applauds it. To him, Evian and Pellegrino, Vermont Pure and Dasani are evidence of what could be called his trickledown theory of luxury: that the defining characteristic of today's society is the average person's embrace of unnecessary consumption, superficial indulgence, wretched excess and endless status-seeking. Oh, earthly paradise!

  Once defined by exclusiveness, luxury is now available -- whether in the form of limited-edition coffee at Starbucks or Michael Graves tea kettles at Target -- to all. And that, Twitchell maintains, is a good thing.

  Sure, he argues in his book, buying essentially useless luxury items "is one-dimensional, shallow, ahistorical, without memory and expendable. But it is also strangely democratic and unifying. If what you want is peace on earth, a unifying system that transcends religious, cultural and caste differences, well, whoops, here it is. The Global Village is not the City on the Hill, not quite the Emerald City, and certainly not quite what millennial utopians had in mind, but it is closer to equitable distribution of rank than what other systems have provided."

  That is, to say the least, a minority report. For centuries, philosophers, artists and clerics railed against luxury. Ecclesiastical courts forbade most people from eating chocolate, drinking coffee or wearing colors like Prussian blue and royal purple, "luxuria" that signaled living above one's God-ordered place.

  It may seem an odd moment to champion luxury. The spectacular boom of the 1990s now looks as if it was partly built on spectacular sleight of hand, with Enron, Global Crossing, Adelphia and WorldCom all recently admitting that billions in reported profits were nonexistent. The moment seems ripe for a chastened culture to repent its indulgences. Reassessing the get-and-spend ethic, not defending consumerism, might well be the defining current of the next few years.

  The problem with Twitchell's view, said Robert Frank, author of Luxury Fever, is that our sense of what we need to live comfortably keeps spiraling upward. It is not that luxury spending isn't good for particular individuals, but that it is bad for society overall. "It's like when everybody stands up for a better view, you don't see better than before," Frank said from his home in Ithaca, New York. "There's a lot of waste in luxury spending. Instead of building safer roads or providing better health care, we are spending that money on bigger diamonds and faster cars."

  Twitchell is unpersuaded, however. Walking down Church Street, Burlington's busy pedestrian mall, he pointed out the transformation that the consumer culture has wrought in his hometown.

  "Church Street once serviced needs, now it services desires," Twitchell said. The optician's shop is gone, and so is Sears and JCPenney. He pointed out the Ann Taylor store, where the Masonic temple used to be. A chic French children's store sits in the old bank.

  "There is something refreshing about the material world that downtown Burlington opened up." Compared to the traditional ways of marking status -- race, parentage, accent, private schools -- one's purchases are a preferable way of telling who's up and who's down, he said.

  On that point, Twitchell is not alone. Gary Cross, a historian at Pennsylvania State University, said that consumer culture in one sense is "democracy's highest achievement, giving meaning and dignity to people when workplace participation, ethnic solidarity and even representative democracy have failed."

  Still, as Cross argued in 2000 in An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America, "most of us, no matter our politics, are repulsed by the absolute identity of society with the market and individual choice with shopping."

  True enough, Twitchell readily conceded. But he maintains the critics are missing the essential characteristic of luxury spending. "Luxury has very little to do with money or things," he said. "Luxury is a story we tell about things," and it's ultimately the story we are after. That is, our purchases are imbued with elaborate narratives about the life we want to live.

  Critics of consumption will say they are making a moral argument, Twitchell said, but "often what is condemned as luxury is really just a matter of taste."

  To Twitchell, as long as human beings crave sensation, they will desire material goods and luxurious ones at that, Wall Street scandals notwithstanding. "If this year it's Enron and WorldCom, then another year it was Long-Term Capital Management," he said.

  Recessions may come and go, but consumption is eternal. The ad slogan is right: Diamonds are forever.
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Eurovision Song Contest triggers surge in betting interest

  • 2

    Barcelona crowned champions

  • 3

    Napoli close in on title despite Parma stalemate

  • 4

    Sinner cruises past Ruud, Gauff battles into final

  • 5

    Entertainers questioned amid military service furor