In the first episode of the final season of HBO series succession, about the Roy family based on the Murdochs, the heel-licking nephew Cousin Greg turns up on Father Familias Logan Roy Brian Cox’s birthday with a young blonde, described by others as ‘Bridget Randomfuck’. The main sin of Randomfuck? She has an unforgivably lavish Burberry bag. “What’s in there?” asks Tom Wambsgans, Greg’s quasi-mentor. “Flat shoes, for the subway? Her packed lunch? He’s monstrous. He’s gigantic. You can go camping with it. You can slide it across the floor after a bank robbery.”
Where this Tom tried to impress Logan in the first season by giving a very expensive Patek Philippe watch as a gift (and naming the brand name), he had now moved from the periphery to the core, where they know how it should be done. Screaming designer clothes, that’s for hoi polloi. The Roys wear clothes of an understated kind of chic, not very colorful and made of durable (and expensive) materials.
In addition to the critical success the series has garnered, succession also marked a shift in the world of things. The fashion term ‘quiet luxury’ (or ‘stealth wealth’) has become commonplace; over the past two months, the search term “stealth wealth meaning” has garnered a billion views on TikTok.
The first distinction between stealth wealth and regular luxury clothes is the handling of the brand or logo. Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Burberry – their appeal lies in their recognisability. With quiet luxury, there is no brand name on the garment.
Last week I wrote about The System of Objects (1968), in which sociologist Jean Baudrillard argues that clothes are important in the development of personal identity, social hierarchy and one’s position within it. Garments are means of communication, with their own value, their sign value. For the past twenty years, the general ideal of fashion (that aggregate of haute couture tendencies that are adopted by chain stores aiming for the largest possible audience) has been characterized by excess. The sign value of lavish clothing is fairly clear: the wearer lives in abundance. Quiet luxury does the opposite: due to the lack of logos and brands, the sign value is so specific that only the initiated can read it. The value is exclusive, almost hidden. Where the general Kendal Roy just sees wearing a brown cap, the insiders know that it is a cashmere cap from Loro Piana, worth $ 600. True wealth—natural, unchanging, self-evident wealth—shows itself through invisibility.
The most common ‘reason’ for this shift from ostentatious to subdued rests on a mixture of Marxism and Jungianism. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung coined the term “persona”—the social mask that serves as a link between society and the individual, the modeled self that you display to the world (and that extracts less socially valued elements of the self from the world). As for Marxism, as the leading culture writer Leandra Medine, known for her blog Man Repeller, recently argued, aesthetics tend to move inward during economic downturns. Fashion then becomes more subtle and subdued.
“Fashion has always been very finely tuned to social dynamics,” said Lorna Hall, director fashion intelligence at the leading US trend forecasting company WGSN recently against Business Insider. “If large segments of the population are struggling to pay the gas bill, displaying extreme wealth is tone deaf.” Hall added that during the 2008 financial crisis, fashion also became significantly more subdued.
If the general living conditions change, the desired persona changes. If the desired persona changes, we demand a different sign value from clothing. If the sign value changes, then the garment (the thing) changes. Last week I described how a piece of clothing is a unique thing because it is an expression of who you are or want to be. But a piece of clothing is also unique because it is always related to social relations. In short, in the world of things, there is hardly an object with more eloquence and significance than the garment.
The irony of the popularity of quiet luxury is, of course, that the hidden meaning has now been revealed, and will therefore be diluted. Nothing stands in the way of us walking into a chic restaurant with a decent white T-shirt (just iron it) with a look that says: you see that right, I am very quiet today.
A version of this article also appeared in the June 17, 2023 newspaper.