When it’s desire rather than need that motivates you to shop, things can get complicated. There’s a simplicity to need. But myriad elements can come into play when it’s about desire.
For starters, there’s what you want and what you think you should want. To desire something is predicated on how your purchase will make you feel. And to feel a particular way is usually determined by how other people respond to you. Context is, if not all, then at least part of the equation.
And what a context 2020 has served up. Many people are grappling with financial hardship. Others aren’t. They have the same amount of money they have always had. Indeed, with certain opportunities to spend curtailed – no six-figure ski holiday or three-times-a-week Annabel’s supper habit – they might even have more money to spend.
However, what stuff do we actually desire when our lives are, for the moment, so curtailed? How many cocktail dresses does a girl need when she’s drinking her cocktails at home? I ask as someone who loves cocktail dresses even more than cocktails.
Then there’s the fact that stuff – unlike its experiential equivalent – mounts up. Most of us already have rather a lot. This year we have had the time to stop and think, and look at it. However big your house or houses, stuff holds you to account. And if it’s the wrong stuff – clothes you never wear – it can start to feel like a silent witness to an aspect of yourself of which you would rather not be reminded. To own too much can make you feel like an indulged little girl or boy. Or it can make you feel old before your time, burdened by the metaphorical weight of your possessions. Either way, the end result is guilt.
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Exceptions are indulgences that permanently lift the spirits. The Chanel jacket that’s as perfect now as it was when you bought it two decades ago, for instance. Unfortunately more common are the indulgences that lift your mood for a while, but, ultimately, lower it. We need to invest in the former and weed out the latter.
Another result of the 2020 re-evaluation has been a more urgent understanding of our impact on the planet. Even the hardiest fashion addict can’t not take stock, because none of us can afford to torch our planet. We need to find a way to make extravagance and abstemiousness, and luxuriousness and lightness, coexist, which means buying the very best we can afford, certainly, but also means wearing it a lot, ad infinitum.
Which is why in 2020 luxury has recalibrated. People are still shopping for clothes, but they are shopping differently. It’s all in the detail, in the comfort, even in the (whisper it) practicality. It’s about garb for home, or for not-far-from-home, pieces that are quietly spectacular rather than performatively so. It’s about fashion that makes you feel good in every sense. You feel good because it is so beautiful to wear: superlative fabrics, cuts that caress rather than constrict. You also feel good because these are clothes you are wearing over and again, rather than saving for a not-rainy – aka post-Covid – day. You are in it together and for the long run.
All of which explains why stealth-wealth brands such as Loro Piana have been doing good business this year. To spend serious money on clothes that serve you day in, day out is not, if you have the money in the first place, a guilt-making enterprise. To spend serious money on clothes that are of a serious quality, rather than more fly-by-night trends-led fare, ditto.
Take Loro Piana’s new “cashfur”, for example. It’s a cashmere that looks like shearling and, when combined with microfibre and some tech the brand calls the Storm System, it creates a teddy-like bomber that is, suffice it to say, my kind of cuddly toy.
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Is it expensive? Yes. £4,295 to be precise. Is it luxurious in the truest sense of the word? Yes. Much that is marketed as luxury is not good enough quality to be called so. That accusation can’t be levelled at Loro Piana. That’s why its products are selling.
We are in the market for a sartorial love affair, not a one-night stand. And that’s how it needs to stay. Whether that love affair is with a teddy-bear coat is up to you.
