Living It Up

329 Pages·2002·22.2 MB·English

by  James B. Twitchell

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L iving It Up
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Also by James B. Twitchell
The Living Dead:
The Vampire in Romantic Literature
Romantic Horizons:
Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770–1850
Dreadful Pleasures:
An Anatomy of Modern Horror
Forbidden Partners:
The Incest Taboo in Modern Culture
Preposterous Violence:
Fables of Aggression in Modern Culture
Carnival Culture:
The Trashing of Taste in America
Adcult USA:
The Triumph of Advertising in America
For Shame:
The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture
Lead Us Into Temptation:
The Triumph of American Materialism
Twenty Ads That Shook the World:
The Century’s Most Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All
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L I VING IT UP
Our Love Affair withL uxury
James B. Twitchell
C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s
N e w Yo r k
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Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2002 James B. Twitchell
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Twitchell, James B., 1943–
Living it up : our love affair with luxury / James B. Twitchell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–231–12496–1 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1. Affluent consumers—Psychology. 2. Luxuries—Marketing. I. Title.
HF5415.32 .T95 2001
306.3—dc21 2001025674
Columbia University Press books are printed on
permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Liz
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Contents
acknowledgments ix
introduction xi
1. Over the Top
Americans in the Lap of Luxury 1
2. The Social Construction of Luxury
A Taxonomy of Taste 41
3. Let’s Go Shopping
The Streets of Material Dreams 81
4. Where Opuluxe Is Made and Who Makes It
LVMH and Condé Nast 123
5. How Luxury Becomes Necessity
The Work of Advertising 153
6. From Shirts to Tulips
A Musing on Luxury 175
7. Viva Las Vegas!
A Strip of Luxury 215
8. Still Learning from Las Vegas
How Luxury Is Turning Religious 239
Conclusion
A (Mild) Defense of Luxury 269
selected bibliography 289
index 299
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Acknowledgments
This is not how I am supposed to be spending my time. I am supposed to
be writing books on subjects like the curative powers of art. And I would
be doing that had something not happened to me early in the 1990s. I was
teaching a survey of English literature to undergraduates. I was explaining
how knowing what people read in the past can be helpful in understanding
who we are now. For instance, I moaned, it’s almost impossible to make a
literary allusion to anyone younger than thirty. A generation ago, had I re-
cited what is arguably the best-known line in romanticism, “My heart leaps
up when I behold a ____ in the sky,” many educated people could have
filled the blank in with rainbow. What a shame, I said to the class, that we
have lost this once-shared culture.
A gangly kid in a baseball cap let loose from the back row, “My heart
leaps up when I behold golden arches in the sky.” The class roared in
shared appreciation. As I remember, he never said another word all semes-
ter. He didn’t need to.
Later, as I thought about it, Baseball Cap had a point. This generation
really does have a shared culture, dreadful as it may be, a culture far more
democratic and far more powerful than anything I ever experienced. It’s
not very deep and it’s not very long lasting, but it’s superpotent and in-
creasingly understood all over the world. You need no formal education to
participate; you’re inducted from day one. To be sure, the members of this
generation may have exchanged spirituality for materiality, landscape for
brandscape, Giotto for Gucci, but they really do have something never
seen before: a flashdance culture that makes no distinctions (other than a
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