On Quality and the Modern Confusion

One has observed, with the particular weariness of a man who once kept a household where every object earned its place, that your era has performed a conjuring trick of some audacity: two entirely separate ideas — quality and luxury — have been conflated, convincing a great number of otherwise sensible people that they are the same thing. They are not. The confusion is not accidental. The confusion is the product.

In the house where I was trained, and in every house I subsequently managed, the objects were good. The boots were good because they were made by a bootmaker who knew his trade and who kept the measurements of every gentleman he served on file, written in pencil on brown card, against the day they would be needed again. The writing desk was good because it was solid mahogany, properly joined, and had been in the family for three generations, during which time it had required nothing more than the occasional application of wax and the occasional repair of a drawer runner. The razors were good because they were steel, properly tempered, and kept sharp by a man (myself, as it happened) who understood that a blade which is maintained will outlast the hand that maintains it.

None of these things were understood as luxury. They were simply what competent people bought when they bought anything at all. The bootmaker was not a luxury brand; he was a bootmaker. The desk was not a statement; it was a desk. The idea of paying a premium for a name rather than for superior materials and workmanship would have struck every man I served as a category error of the first order, rather like paying extra for arithmetic which gives the correct answers.

Your era has reversed this entirely. I have walked through your shops, or rather I have been walked through them by my assistant, who regards the exercise as educational, and I have seen things which require a considerable effort of comprehension. I have seen a cotton shirt, of construction no better than adequate and of fabric no finer than ordinary, offered for sale at a price which, in my day, would have clothed a man for a year, and the only visible justification for this price was a name printed upon the label. Not woven into the cloth. Not reflected in the stitching, which was, I noted, machine-done and somewhat careless at the collar. Printed on a label. The name was the product. The shirt was merely the thing the name was attached to.

I find this not immoral, exactly, but unintelligible. You have paid ten times the material value of an object in order to carry an advertisement for the person who sold it to you. That is not refinement. That is a species of servility. You have paid for the privilege of becoming someone else's walking billboard, and you have done so under the impression that this constitutes taste. It does not constitute taste. It constitutes obedience to a kind of marketing which has understood, with admirable clarity and no conscience whatsoever, that vanity is a renewable resource.

The men I served would have recognised what is happening here, because they saw the beginnings of it. The conspicuous display of wealth was, even in my time, the mark of the newly arrived: people who had money but not yet the judgement to know what to do with it, and who therefore required their possessions to announce their position on their behalf. The established gentleman's wardrobe was often deliberately quiet. His country house might be magnificent, but it was inherited; his watch was his father's; his shoes were old and well-maintained. The entire structure of your modern luxury trade, which exists to make wealth visible, to ensure that strangers may calculate what you have spent, would have read to him as a confession of social insecurity. The people who need to show it are the people who have only just got it.

But here is the sharper point, and the one I find most troubling. What your era has lost is not the objects but the knowledge of what makes them good. The gentleman I served could assess a piece of cloth by its hand, a pair of boots by their welt, a piece of furniture by its joinery. He knew what good work looked like because he had lived with it, been taught to recognise it, and understood that the man who cannot judge quality for himself will be judged by someone who can. Your era has replaced this knowledge with price. If it costs more, the reasoning goes, it must be better. This is not reasoning. It is surrender.

The distinction I would draw is simple, and I would draw it sharply. Quality is the pursuit of things well made, durable, appropriate to their purpose and pleasing because they do what they are supposed to do and do it without fuss. That pursuit I endorse entirely. It respects craft, it rewards the maker, and it produces objects worth owning and maintaining.

Luxury, as your era practises it, is something else. It is a system of signalling dressed as taste. The object does not matter; what matters is what the object tells other people about your wealth, your position and your membership in a tribe of consumers. The object is a medium. The message is: I can afford this and you probably cannot. That is not taste. That is not even vanity, which at least has the dignity of being personal. It is performance, and the audience is strangers, and the product is the feeling of having bought something expensive, which is a feeling that lasts approximately as long as it takes for something more expensive to appear.

Buy well. Know what you are buying and why. Learn to recognise good cloth, good leather, good steel and good wood. Maintain what you own. Repair what can be repaired. And when a shop tells you that an object is worth ten times what reason suggests, ask yourself whether you are paying for the thing or for the name upon it, and whether, in the quiet of your own home where no one can see the label, you could tell the difference.

If you cannot tell the difference, you have your answer. And it was not the answer you were paying for.

Crale