> It’s filled with useless and ugly “luxury” items that the Washington DC “elite”
> need to have to maintain their “status”.
You’re assuming that there is some significant proportion of the population that actually buys that stuff. I suspect that very few of those items will ever be sold. The magazine exists because a publisher has discovered that he can get the companies that make those things to advertise them because they believe that they can eventually sell more than a few of them. The magazine also exists because for some readers it’s consumer porn, full of things that they will never remotely be able to afford but enjoy dreaming about owning in their fantasies. Part of the reason that the items are so expensive is that the vast majority of their cost goes to advertising their existence. The few people who actually buy those items aren’t getting any better quality or design for their money, just the assurance that the things they’ve bought are so expensive that no one who isn’t as rich as they are would ever buy them.
Most of the crap you are talking about is purchased by the noveau riche-the people who were formerly blue-collar and have made it big. They still retain their fascination for expensive stuff (it is an ego trip and enables them to show off). Thorstein veblen described this behavior a century ago, in “THE THEORY of the LEISURE CLASS”. After a few generations of wealth, the ultra-rich lose interest in this stuff, and actually become quite cheap. Where I live (New England), we have the “Old Money”, who have been rich for 4-10 generations. These people drive old Chevies, eat mushy, tasteless food, and wear their grandfather’s suits. They also hunt for bargains-i’m told that the Keneedies actually buy used shit to save $.
Exactly. “Expensive” is entirely relative. And believe me, plenty of people here will scream bloody murder over the $170 handbag as well.
Everyone is free to spend their money however they like. Sure, they could feed a family of four for $17K, but you can feed a family of four in Africa for what you spend on coffee each week (just ask Sally Struthers!). Are you a bad person for buying the coffee instead?
Re: the purchasers of this sort of thing – there’s one born every minute.
Re: the producers and purveyors – I’m ambivalent. Part of me is put off by their unabashed fleecing of people with more money than sense. On the other hand, who deserves to be fleeced more than somebody with more money than sense? It (hopefully) educates the buyer and circulates more money around the economy.
Things like this only exist because smart people will stop at nothing to swindle stupid people out of money. There are a lot of stupid rich people out there, ergo there are a lot of insanely overpriced googaws designed to take their money away from them and give it to someone who at least has the brains to make a pair of athletic shoes.
I wonder if the companies really expect for there to be more than a handful of buyers for these items. My completely uneducated guess is that these items fit the same purpose as a concept car for the manufacturer.
They make a few of them, show them around, market them in some magazines as a way to generate buzz and interest in their lower priced lines. Don’t haute couture companies do something similar as a way to generate buzz for their ready to wear lines?
There’s also the fact that each designer label has many different levels of affordability. I have a Jones New York Sport leather jacket I got for $70 (granted, this was discounted). This is a lower end section of the overall Jones New York line. When I got this jacket, there was a very very similar style (almost identical) in a higher bracket of JNY, which was more around $500. The leather was better (mine has some slightly odd ‘patchiness’ pattern in some of the back pieces) and the lining was nicer, etc.
So sure, a magazine will show the HIGHEST END Jones New York leather jacket that retails for $2700, because people will see that, like it, and find the Sport version near them for a 10th of the price (or less) and get it that way, remembering that JNY had that cute jacket in the magazine and here it is!
And btw: just because something isn’t your style doesn’t make it intrinsically ugly, nor does it make a person who likes the style stupid.
You said the sneakers on page 48 were ugly, but I had no idea how ugly sneakers could be until I saw them. It took me a minute or two to realize that it was in fact a shoe I was looking at.
It’s got to be a joke of some sort, this magazine. If I saw someone with the $15K diamond iPod earbuds my first thought would be “that looks like the $1.99 earbud covers the shady-looking guy at the mall kiosk sells.” The sneakers look like they cost $8.88 at Payless. I mean, if I wanted to spend some cash at least I’d want to look good. It’s like the $500 T-shirts I see on sale at the Saks Fifth Avenue Outlet at the local Border Trap here. You could buy two of those and look disheveled, or buy a $1,000 tailored suit and look Bond-esque.
Here at the development office we work with wealthy people all the time. They don’t waste their money on stuff like this. Hey, that might be why they’re still wealthy.
I agree with this. Most old money types would never be caught with diamond earbuds. The tacky, flamboyant stuff appeals to the types who really, really want to show off that they’ve “made it”. I think it’s similar to the phenomenon you see in some poor neighborhoods where people who really can’t afford it will buy expensive clothes or pimp their car in an attempt to give others the idea they’re a big shot.
As for the magazine itself, I totally agree that most of that stuff looks hideous and I wouldn’t want it even if I could afford it. However,I don’t object to its existence. The beauty of America is that nobody gets to tell you what to do with the money you’ve earned.
The problem with this argument is that we can take a piece like the Pollock painting you linked to and analyze it with commonly agreed upon aesthetic points, like the elements of art and the principles of design. We can talk about non-representational art and its place in the context of art history and American culture. We can even look its fractal proportions and compare it to psychologically preferred landscapes. And whether a person likes or dislikes the composition, there is enough there that it can stand up to such an analysis.
Pollock’s paintings are valuable precisely because they are held in such high esteem by people with the knowledge and experience in aesthetics to make critical judgments.
It could be that the items in the magazine the OP linked to will withstand the test of critics and time, but I’ll wager that in less than five years, they will be irrelevant to everyone except the poor schmuck stuck with the bill.
Two points:
[ol]
[li]It might be ugly to you, but it’s clearly not ugly to others. Like I said before, the inherent worth of art is entirely subjective- I would never spend even a dollar on a Pollock or one of Warhol’s stupid soup cans (except, perhaps, as an investment- certainly not to increase the beauty of my home). Do I have a right to judge those who do like that sort of stuff? Sure, within reason. Is it reasonable for me to accept that because I don’t like it, it’s automatically hideous and useless? Not particularly.[/li]
[li]It seems to me that you’re accusing those who buy the wares of this magazine of being shallow and materialistic. Aren’t you doing the same thing by projecting your own feelings about these items on their purchases? As long as the person isn’t going in to debt to buy whatever it is, going bankrupt, and depending on the system (and you have absolutely no way of knowing this one way or the other), why should we be so shallow as to judge what they choose to be their art? Or what they choose to use to make themselves happy?[/ol][/li]
Never been to LA, eh? Go ahead and take a stroll around the Beverly Center, The Glendale Galleria, Fashion Island, Robertson, Rodeo, any “popular” concert, etc and tell me there aren’t a lot of people who buy these things. On any given day, you can see hundreds of girls teetering around in Loubputin’s ($500-$100- shoes), clutching their Versace bags, wearing their new Marc Jacobs aviators, and underneath it all, they’ll of course have on their La Perla underwear (NSFW, obviously). (And yes, your eyes do not deceive you, that’s a $150 thong).
I agree with you that the stuff is hideously ugly and unnecessary, but I can’t get worked up about the price, partly because I have no idea what the spending habits are of the people who buy that stuff and partly because I know the chances of me spending that much for an ugly purple handbag are slim to none, so at least I won’t be out 17 grand. Even if people who buy that crap are sleeping on a bed of hundreds, hopefully they worked hard or made smart decisions to get that much cash in the first place.
The thing about those magazines that bothers me the most is generally the way the models look. Particularly when they’re modeling wedding gowns. I know that having your mouth hanging open is supposed to be sexy, but it looks silly to me, especially when it’s accompanied by an extremely surly expression. I always wonder if they’re so pissed off because the cameraman is eating a burger.
Look, this magazine does NOT exist so filthy-rich people can look through it and decide what useless ultraexpensive crap they’re going to buy this week.
It exists so middle-class people can look through it and gawk at useless ultraexpensive crap filthy rich people sometimes buy. It’s consumer porn.
The other purpose of the magazine is to advertise designers. Not because people reading the magazine will buy the ultraexpensive stuff, but because they’ll go to the mall and buy cheaper (but still expensive) stuff by the same designer and feel like they’re getting a bargain.
A simple way to tell the real intended audience for a magazine is to take a look at the ads. There’s a reason Kraft Macaroni and Cheese advertises in Martha Stewart Living.
I’d imagine to most of those people living like that, our $29.99 Mossimo (Target brand) jeans or even our $14.99 Payless shoes would be unimaginably extravagant prices. Or the fact that I’ve spent $10 on a goat cheese log in the past week.
The people who can honestly afford the stuff in that catalog are about as better off than we are than we are better off than those living on less than $2/day. And those who are living on $2 a day are still better off than 880 million who live on less than $1 a day.
I just find it funny that you (generic you) can sneer at $17,000 handbag extravagances when 99.9% of the US’s expenditures are just as extravagant to most of the world.
I have to say I share the OP’s outrage, but OTOH, there is an appreciation for quality (that’s not a comment on the magazine in the OP, for some reason, I couldn’t look at it when I opened the link – might’ve been the firewall at work or something).
Pre-dot-com-boom, I worked in a bookstore, and liked looking at the Robb Report, especially the automotive classifieds. One month, there was a Ferrari; asking price was something like $1.9 million. I kept seeing the same ad for a couple of months, and the price went down each month, to finally about $1.7 million.
Another time, in the late 70s, I met a millionaire who owned a Rolls-Royce Carmargue, which at the time, was the most expensive production car in the world. He put 30,000 miles on it, decided that was too much, and bought a Lincoln to putter around in (which was still hefty coin at the time).
As long as the people buying this stuff are using their money (as opposed to say, taxpayer bailout money), I’ll say, “Nice work if you can get it.”
But being the conflicted and confused person I am, I also will never understand the obsession with conspicuous consumption this sort of lifestyle seems to require.
eh, well, sales tax in Chicago is now 10.25% for non-perishable goods, so personally I would be just tickled is a swarm of rich people came into town to buy up all the $800 shoes on Michigan Avenue. In fact, I would encourage them to book a hotel room and stay for dinner! All they’re doing is moving money around, I don’t really see it as being thrown away. At minimum the City of Chicago and a commissioned salesperson will benefit directly from their purchases. And while I personally find $800 shoes to be silly I also find them to be relatively harmless – they don’t guzzle gasoline, aren’t addictive, and won’t accidentally get anyone maimed or killed on the playground. So long as both parties agree to the price and pay the appropriate taxes then I don’t see any reason to get upset about the brand-name price markup.
But in the end I agree with **Caffeine.addict **et. al., these goods are mostly there to drum up interest for lower priced products. Case in point is those diamond earbuds, it seems they also make versions with Swarovski crystals and aluminum that are priced in the $20-$200 range. (link)
