Better late than never

Really?

I can't even find the words to unravel/lambast this latest bit of luxury fatuity. The people at Montblanc - the Swiss luxury goods manufacturer - recently released a limited (thank god) edition pen that sells for something like $23,000. (FYI: India's per capita GNI is $950; 27% of the Indian population currently lives below the World Bank's poverty line).

As part of their sales pitch, Montblanc informs us:

"The design pays tribute to his life and achievements. The top of the cap and cone are inspired by the spindle which Gandhi used to spin cotton – one of the symbols of Indian independence. The colour white is a reference to truth and peace, while the Mandarin garnet represents the orange colour that is part of the Indian flag. The nib shows an image of Mahatma Gandhi, walking with a stick. In addition, the limitation of the Mahatma Gandhi Limited Edition 3000 is symbolic for the masses of people who followed him during his fight for independence."

Here's the detail from the pen which depicts Mahatma "walking with a stick" - apparently, him setting off on the Salt Satyagraha in July 1930 as a silent protest against unjust taxation policies of the British colonial rulers.


According to a Washington Post article, after receiving a fair amount of completely warranted criticism for this half-witted insult to the life and message of Gandhi, Montblanc are donating $145,000 to the Mahatma Gandhi Foundation. They'll move back into profit, I guess, after selling the sixth pen.

Rich baby, dead baby

Born in the USA? All this could be yours, baby:

Cameleon Special Collection Stroller by Bugaboo
Metallic silver tailored fabric set: sun canopy, seat inlay, and bassinet apron. Dark gray base seat fabric and bassinet fabric. Aluminum frame chassis with wheels, seat/bassinet frame, and carry handle. Infant-to-toddler travel system with adjustable/reversible/removable seat/bassinet; can face parent or face world. Bassinet and seat can be used independently. Special edition black microfleece blanket. Special edition cup holder. Mosquito net. Raincover. Underseat bag. All foam-filled tires. Two all-terrain wheels for city, beach, and woods. Available from Nieman Markus for only for $1,200.

Born in Africa? This could be you: dead by five. According to UNICEF 75% of the world’s under-5 deaths in 2008 occurred in only 18 countries. Africa and Asia combined represent 93% of all under-5 deaths (51% and 42%, respectively).

Perhaps if little Bugaboo babies are allowed to "face the world" often enough (rather than their unthinking parents), they might come to see how warped it is. And do something about it when they grow up.

The nonsense of luxury

There've been lots of snippets sitting on my desk(top) waiting to be posted through the summer - now's the moment.

Back in 2001, in a Guardian newspaper article reported Rem Koolhaas' collaboration with Prada to design a "flagship" store in the Guggenheim museum in New York. Koolhaas apparently offered this seemingly deep definition of luxury:

Luxury is stability.
Luxury is "waste".
Luxury is generous.
Luxury is intelligent.
Luxury is rough.
Luxury is attention.
Luxury is not "shopping".

I really don't think I know what this all means. I'm certainly unclear why "waste" and "shopping" are scare-quoted. Any thoughts? Is the House of Prada (and the likes) merely a House of Medici for the 21st century? Are there to be no spaces - physical or metaphysical - to be left non-commercial, non-capitalized, unsold? In this regard, I rather liked the journalist's comment

You can see both art and fashion as a form of alchemy. Fashion turns shirts sewn together for pennies in Indonesia into high-ticket, high fashion. Art makes the base metal of canvas, fibre- glass or dead shark meat into the raw material of the auction-room.

Now that I get. That, I, er ... buy.

If there world were a village of 100 ...

Source: Toby Ng Designs

Finally, I have a local branch of Tiffany's!

Economic downtown?

Global recession?

Credit crunch?

Not here in Seattle, it seems.

Not at my local shopping "mall" at least.

Under conspicuous (as in conspicuous consumption) wraps for several months now, a new branch of the high-end jewelery store Tiffany's has just opened at the already pretty frew-frew (spelling?) University Village down the road from the university where I work.

In the Seattle Times from last week, we read that Tiffany's chose the U Village as a site for their new store because of Seattle's "independent spirit and sophisticated sense of style." Now that's just plain sycophantic! But here's the best bit (also from the store manager): the store is apparently "designed to let people explore and play a little bit with their own style." I guess like the kind of exploring people evicted from their poorly-financed, poorly brokered homes must be doing right now, huh?


On a related matter, my colleague Christine Harold also drew my attention to this rather nice (disturbing?) blogged piece titled Design Scorecard: Who's Winning and Losing the Recession? I particularly liked these two observations:

The economy may come back, but the appetite for limited-edition gold-painted centerpieces and hand-molded clay dining chairs will not.

The lust for design porn didn't disappear; it just migrated to design blogs such as Apartment Therapy, Materialicious, and Remodelista where houses, rooms, and furnishings are shown in a more personable, less institutional tone than magazines.

Design porn. Love it!

Another allied enterprise

Thanks Alice Marwick for directing me
to Maybe You Shouldn't Buy That.

Slum chic

Fashion, as we have seen any number of times knows no bounds, shows no shame - see my previous iNeedle post Is this the most tasteless fashion shoot ever? And just when I thought the answer must surely be no, along comes America's Next Top Model's recent Carmen Miranda fashion shoot in a São Paulo favela - which, we are reliably informed by the deeply informed Mr Jay, “are neighborhoods that were originally built by the poor.” To which La Tyra herself later adds, they're “kind of like the hood”. Basically, what we're shown here is stylishly-lit snippets of grinding global poverty as a backdrop for the frivolous excesses of the rich world. Haute couture, low taste. (The clip is about eight minutes long but you get the picture within one.)

Curing the luxury sickness

I just came across this short piece by Tanya Gold reprinted in the Guardian Weekly's My Two Cents column - "How I was cured of a taste for luxury".

I will never stay in a luxury hotel again. It's been crawling up on me, this disgust with the world of self-flushing toilets, floors so shiny you can squeeze your spots in them, and tall, thin people wearing Ralph Lauren. (The clothes, not the person).

I am middle-class, and I was born in suburbia, so it was natural that I would embrace the deluxe lifestyle, as soon as I got credit. It's the inadequacy. I was too fat for fashion, so I used to wear Claridge's instead. I used to sit in the bar, sipping a Diet Coke, wondering if I would ever make it into Tatler. But so slowly that nausea set in.

Expensive hotels are designed for rich people to feel loved. You pay, and they wrap you in a bathrobe that says, "You are not a psychopath, and we care about you." But actually, if you look deeper, if you open your eyes from your soporific, luxurious slumber, you will realise that the people who are waiting on you hate your guts. With good reason.

The staff of these hotels are usually educated people from poor countries who spend all day waiting on people who are much stupider - and nastier - than them. As a result, they - entirely naturally - become bitter and are turned into status police. Their job is to assess if you belong there or not.

Aged 25, I sat down to dinner in a five-star hotel on Park Lane. The bread waiter came over. That was his title. Bread waiter. I asked for two rolls but he only threw one down. Then he went to the other side of the room, and stared at me, and when I had finished the roll, he came and threw another one in my face. This was hate with rolls. This was annihilation. Then the wine waiter came. "Did you enjoy your bread, madam?" he asked. They had actually discussed it.

This hate has followed me around the luxury hotels of Europe. In Paris, I asked for a skirt to be ironed. (The hotel was too posh to have ironing boards in cupboards. I had no choice. I was only following orders.) The maid came to return it. I answered the door in my bathrobe. She guessed I was in flagrante delicto - I looked purple and slightly angry - and she said, "Enjoy yourself, madam." She didn't mean it. She meant, "Kill yourself, madam." And then I realised. These people hate us. It was not a luxury hotel in Paris. It was more like North Korea. My stupid lover was spending €700 a night so we could stay in North Korea and be hated by maids with ironing boards.

Claridge's actually hires people to stand at the entrance and stare at you. It is a bit like the Mexican border. Go and out stare at them, and call it sport. If your clothes are cheap, and your expression is desperate, they are emboldened and they snarl. "Don't come in here," their eyes speak. "Get out, loser. We can smell that you are from Wimbledon. You stink of cheap Chinese takeaway and despair." If you are wearing Ralph Lauren and tax evade for fun, however, they bow until their noses touch the floor.

I just came back from a week in Dubai. Dubai is an enormous, glossy, heartless reinterpretation of Little Chef and it broke me. I stayed in a palace that felt like a live-action copy of Elle magazine. The man who carried my bags had a law degree. The beautiful waitresses had changed their given names to stripper names - Candy, Sandy, Mandy - because they were pronouncable by rich idiots. When two Filipino men came to clean my bath, I was ashamed. When they bowed I wanted to slap myself in the face.

And I remembered that the happiest I have been on holidays in recent years is when I stayed in a five-quid-a-night hostel in Jerusalem with a big hole in the wall covered by a rug. Because I actually went out and I saw Jerusalem. When you stay in a luxury hotel, the luxury is the destination. You are essentially visiting a bathroom. You don't see anything except the luxury. And the luxury is the same wherever you go. In this, five-star hotels are like McDonald's - everywhere the product is identical.

People don't go to deluxe hotels because they want to see the world. They go to them because they don't want to see the world. All they see are the smiling faces of their slaves and things that sort of resemble the pictures they drooled over in It's All Yours magazine. And they get a self-flushing toilet. (You don't even have to look at your own waste. You don't even have to look at your own soul.) Luxury holidays are not only morally indefensible and psychologically sick, they are boring. It isn't travel. It's narcissism with towels - and I think I have finally outgrown it.

Them and us - tourists and tourees