Aesthetics vs. Quality: What is Luxury?

Last week I was in Carrara, we had decided to buy a couple of marble slabs to use as tabletops for our terraces.

The trip there was complicated, the traffic intense (as is often the case in Italy in August), and we were soon delayed. I had planned to write a newsletter about how fun and easy it is to buy marble on site, but after a couple of hours in the car, that idea started to fade.

Finally, we arrived in Carrara and began the short drive up towards Colonnata. It’s along this road that many small, independent stonemasons have set up shop, and this is where you should go if you want to buy marble.

Many places here sell religious motifs, statues and busts of Biblical figures, but there are also plenty of beautiful bowls, trays, and mortars for those less religiously inclined.

Almost at the top of the road, we found an old stonemason, deep in concentration as he worked the stone. His shop was closed, but he agreed to help us anyway. We bought two slabs of marble, cut from the local quarry, and a bowl that he had made, also made from white Carrara marble.

He turned the bowl over and over, his pride in the craftsmanship evident as he explained how difficult it is to make a bowl on a pedestal out of one single piece of marble. He asked us to be careful, before carefully wrapping it in bubble wrap and slowly handing it to me, observing my moments as I delicately secured it in the car.

The whole time we were in his workshop, trucks would continually pass by, loaded with enormous cubes of white marble that they were hauling down from the mountain. The roads were covered with white marble dust: It looked like snow, a slightly surreal experience in August in Italy.

Since we had been driving for a long time, I was tired, and instead of heading home, we decided to stop in Forte dei Marmi for a swim and late lunch.

Forte dei Marmi is one of Italy's most fashionable beach resorts, once a small sleepy fishing village on the Tuscan coast, with the sea on one side and the Apuan Alps on the other, making a stay here an incredibly scenic experience.

The first time I was here, I was also struck by the small-scale elegance of the town. Here you can find all the world's luxury brands with shops in long rows: Prada, Brunello Cucinello and Moncler, but the shops are adapted to the aesthetics of the fishing town. Everything is presented in a way that feels relaxed and informal, far from the large flagship stores of Paris and London.

We had lunch at Caffé Principe, a key Forte dei Marmi gathering place since 1950 when they first opened. Its interiors have been even more refined since acquired by the Prada Group a few years ago.

Over the years, I’ve probably been hundreds of similar establishments around the world, where attractive, well-dressed waitresses serve expensive lemon juice, while the screens of laptops and smart phone illuminate the faces of the guests, as they sit reclined (in silence) in exclusive armchairs.

So why did I feel so bothered this time?

Opposite Caffé Principe is Gucci’s store, an air-conditioned space where exclusive garments hang in sparse rows. I looked at the store from across the street, as well as the others whose logos dominate the centre of Forte dei Marmi, and I thought about recent revelations about the state of luxury fashion.

Earlier this year, Loro Piana’s sweatshops had made headlines, and before that, it had been discovered that Dior’s expensive tote bags are in fact mass-produced in China.

“Made in Italy” had been exposed as a hoax, a simple marketing ploy. These luxury brand names, and the logos with which they are associated, were revealed to be symbols without meaning. But in Forte dei Marmi, these revelations don’t matter.

That’s why my small glass of juice cost 10 euros and the dry sandwich that I also ordered cost 12 euros. I paid even though the food isn’t any good, because what I’m expected buying is the surface of things; the experience of being in an environment completely designed by Prada.

The reason I find this provoking is that because it depletes aesthetics of their value, it turns beauty into a backdrop. The stonemason’s studio outside Carrara had been dusty and dirty, we carried the stone slabs across a busy road, and we had to hurry to avoid getting in the way of the trucks.

But there was something beautiful in his close relationship with the material, and this kind of relationship was lacking in Forte dei Marmi, a place that seems to be mostly about luxury tourism, or more to the point, about selling the fantasy of luxury.

I’m not the only one who is reacting to the shallowness of contemporary luxury fashion. The newspapers report on drops in sales and plummeting stock prices. It’s as if customers have finally stopped believing in the stories about logotypes with magical properties.

For much of the 20th century, the fashion industry developed through innovations introduced in Paris. Early on, Paul Poiret recognized the symbolic value of his brand and held lavish parties to add to the myth of his fashion house. He launched perfumes under the same name as he sold haute couture clothes, as did Lanvin and many others. And the consumers couldn’t get enough.

A few decades later, Pierre Cardin placed his logo on mass-produced clothes and was thus excluded from the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture (but returned a few years later, then as the organization's leader). He realized that in licensing, he had found the way to profitability and therefore allowed for his name to be put on everything from cigarettes to canned fish.

During the 20th century, fashion was an industry intimately interconnected with matters of identity, status and group affiliation. People dressed to look better and to appear more successful; clothes were supposed to flatter the wearer.

That’s no longer the case, today status is created through lifestyle choices on a more general level, such as choice of travel destination, food and drink. What I saw in Forte dei Marmi is a remnant of the recent past, when two interlocked G:s (for Gucci) or C:s (for Chanel) was automatically considered a representation of something exclusive. Today they are just letters, nothing more.

Symbolism in dress is still important on certain occasions. At weddings, only the bride dresses in white, for example, while black is considered inappropriate. But in general, knowledge of the symbolism of colours and shapes has waned.

In her article “Post-modern Fashion as the End of Meaning”, fashion theorist Efrat Tseëlon applied the theories of Jean Baudrillard to the state of contemporary fashion. Baudrillard was inspired by semantics and believed that meaning arises through "a system of signs". A sign, as Ferdinand de Saussaure summarized, consists of a signifier and a signified: "The signifier is a container for the signified and the two unit in creating a sign and its meaning."

What distinguishes Baudrillard's semiotic analysis from previous thinkers is that he applied it to a postmodern reality. He believed that most signs today have played out their role. Almost no one is familiar with cultural history anymore. For most, colours are just colours and patterns are just patterns, hardly anyone knows what they mean, and so they can’t decode the hidden messages.

Today, wrote Tseëlon, we live in a postmodern era, where all styles exist simultaneously, and nothing really means anything, it’s a period characterized by simulation: "the order of simulation refers to the principle of the post-modern dress which is indifferent to any traditional social order, and is completely self-referential, we are now looking at 'fashion for its own sake'."

Today, fashion designers can find inspiration in random places – the Catholic crucifix, southern Italian peasant culture or other ethnic symbols, such as the keffiyeh – because the symbols have been reduced to pure aesthetics, to form without meaning. The question is not what a form means, but whether it’s attractive or not. And this question has no corollary but is only about a purely aesthetic assessment of a design.

As we left Forte dei Marmi behind us, driving back to our house in the Appennino Bolognese, I thought back to what brought us to the Tuscan coast in the first place, our quest for the white Carrara marble.

I thought of our encounter with the stonemason, and of how he held the bowl he had made from the stone taken from the mountain he lived on. In comparison, the offerings in the luxury shops didn’t feel luxurious at all, but quite the opposite.

The stonemason knew his craft and the source of his pride was evident. But in contemporary fashion, the fairytales they sell are no longer credible, the disconnect between product and price is just too big to ignore.

What he sold was true luxury, while what I saw in Forte dei Marmi was an echo of a time when an aspirational lifestyle made us believe, if only for a moment, that logotypes could hold any type of cultural or symbolic significance. But that perspective now appears hopelessly dated.