The Attitude of Luxury

The Attitude of Luxury is a collection of essays on luxury and the fashion industry by columnist Wang Ersong, most of them drawn from his column of the same name in New Weekly, later revised and expanded into fifty pieces and published in a revised edition by Zhejiang University Press in 2014. The book does not explain how to use luxury goods or forecast trends; it presents another face of luxury: its reverence for craft, its respect for aesthetics, its practitioners largely perfectionists, its deep humanistic and historical sediment, and its role as an interpreter of identity and detail. The author starts from the history of luxury and extends into the social, humanistic and financial dimensions of fashion and the luxury business. He writes about Hou Hsiao-hsien's film on the craftsmen of the Qianlong era for the National Palace Museum in Taipei, about the old artisans who weave ribbons for haute couture, about Moroccan jewelry boxes and "buying the casket for the pearl," and about Hermès' willingness to give up, Louis Vuitton's logic of expansion, Porsche's share-price swings, and the luxury industry's situation after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Some fifty short essays string these seemingly far-flung threads together, mapping the causes and consequences of luxury with a broad vision and revealing the business logic and humanistic core behind it. The author's central attitude: anything that can be regarded as "luxury" usually carries a rich load; the opposite of luxury is not poverty but vulgarity.