Luxury Briefing.

Summer evenings, my father would take out his splendid Jaguar (two-tone blue, grey leather chairs, picnic trays in the back of the front seats, these last a source of absolute wonder to me as a child). My mother would get made-up and perfumed and off we would go… for a drive. This was a purely discretionary activity. There was no precise destination nor any calculated functional purpose, other than pleasure in the drive itself.

Maybe we would stop at a country pub. There must have been louts in those days, but there was almost certainly no lager, so louts were of a different variety. Subdued and morose, perhaps. Certainly, there was no intrusive noise. I would eat some crisps which were sold in a wax-papered bag with a blue twist of salt for DIY artery-hardening. My favourite tipple was Schweppes tonic water, then possessing a strange blueish cast it has long since lost. I would have with me a horror comic, a Biggles book or, latterly, an anthology of Zen poems. (I was an advanced 10-year-old.) So: silence, comfort, exclusivity, access to an intellectual diversion and consumption of small portions of deliciousness in privileged surroundings. All these associated with a journey and well-dressed people. That specification of luxury has not, in general terms, changed.

I was reminded of this when I visited the interesting Marks & Spencer exhibition of its archive now on long-term display at Leeds University. Along with the scary floral-pattern turquoise nylon knickers and a freezer pack of Cantonese Style Chicken, there was a loop of antique television ads playing on an old telly styled like a walnut veneered Würlitzer. It showed immaculately coiffured and beautifully dressed women elegantly sauntering across the apron to board a British European Airways Vickers Viscount. They were probably going to enjoy an experience as delightful as mine in the Jaguar.

I wonder if any of the reactionary, Mesolithic dunderheads who run today’s airport and airline businesses have been bright enough to make any connection between their atrocious financial figures and the debased environments and service which they offer the public. I have just read that British Airports Authority has entered into an exclusive deal for W H Smith to run all its bookshops. In a sense this is a perfect marriage since the world’s worst airport company is now inextricably spliced with the world’s worst chain of bookstores to make an ugly anti-social monopoly. But how, 60 years after a revolution in education, is it possible for something so offensively stupid to happen? As if a visit to an airport is not already distressing enough, there is now no prospect of intelligent relief.
WH Smith deals with some of the most attractive things in the world: books, magazines, music, pens, paper, sandwiches. And it deals with them in cruelly ugly surroundings and cringe-makingly philistine style. Instead of delight, W H Smith offers only nastiness.

Ponder just a moment to think how wonderful it could be. And when you are on the plane, ask yourself why are these hatchet-faced women in the galleys dressed in faintly aggressive, military-style uniforms? What sort of hobbled, needy, low-church vista of authority is satisfied by these preposterous costumes? Who wrote the rule that staff on aircraft have to look like bad-tempered policewomen? I would prefer elegance and charm and I bet you would too. Has no one running an airline visited Rick Owens on South Audley Street and seen weirdly fresh dress sense that makes you smile? Has no one seen the gloriously smart inventive clothes Alber Elbaz designs for Lanvin? Or, back to the Vickers Viscount, the clever re-issues of 1950s and 1960s classics by Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga? The answer is no they have not, because they are very dull people. My conception of luxury may have an historic basis, but it promises a better future than Walsh and O’Leary.

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