Luxury Briefing.

VEBLEN spoke of the “pecuniary canons of taste” by which he meant how we, or they, buy things to express personal values. The expression “conspicuous consumption” is his. Brilliant stuff, but suddenly old-fashioned when Uniqlo will sell you a shirt with Jil Sander cut and pleasingly high quality finish for £29.95. Unless you have your own Chinese trade embargo, I can see no reason for ever buying anything else.

I had a great-grandfather who was an East End costermonger on nodding terms with Pearly Kings and Queens. One grandfather was gassed in the Somme; another, after a stumble from minor grace, spent rather too long down a coal-mine. My own father acquired an RAF moustache, a camel hair coat and a Jaguar which was used to take me to bizarre lunches at a super-kitsch Wirral restaurant called The Rheingold where I ate Wiener Schnitzel with, if memory serves, fried bananas while he drank German wine. Don’t tell me about social mobility. I am sociology’s Fernando Alonso.

Put it this way : I have an evolutionary view of luxury. This indulgent pre-amble is by way of explaining the most interesting thing I have heard this year.  My daughter (who went Queensgate-Oxford-Sorbonne-UCL in demonstration of the Alonso Principle) tells me from her medical anthropology classes that recent research shows that surgeons who operate on the upper half of the body tend to come from the middle or upper-middle classes, while those who operate on the parts below the waist tend to come from the social group that watches television. This is, although I cannot quite decide how, related to that marketing truism that people feel most emotional attachment for products they put in their mouths. I will not continue, but there is an important theory waiting to escape here.

Ambling home down Duke of York’s Steps I bumped into a creature on a mountain bike who, with helmet removed, turned-out to be Emma Duncan, a distant friend who is now deputy editor of The Economist. We spontaneously fell into a rap about ‘selfishness’, agreeing that, for the past 25 years, we have been punitively taxed serfs to the state and slaves to our children. “Now,” Emma said, “I want to spend the next 20 years in tightly focused self-indulgence. Bent henceforth on guiltless pleasure, I want to erect a temple of hedonism and live in it. To become a carcass utterly fatigued by selfish luxury by the time I hand myself over to the NHS.” I paraphrase a bit, but I think I’m getting a whiff of the zeitgeist here.

To return to the theme announced in the first paragraph, I scribbled the first draft of this while sitting in a new Maserati Granturismo S (Automatic). It is a wonderful car, but I wonder whether it is really as good as the new Jaguar XJ. Designer Giles Taylor spent an evening taking me around its sculpture and it really is an impressive sight: both subtle and imposing, an interesting achievement. The interior is a tiny bit Tokyo-by-night but, unless we pick nits, which we do not, superb. Does a car like this have a real purpose any more ? Probably not. And that, of course, is what makes it so pleasurable.

Closing thought : someone in America has discovered that when you earn over $60,000 a year you become unhappy.

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