From the Desk Recommends... Considering Luxury

when life feels quite unluxurious.

While flipping through the March 2024 issue of Vogue one morning, I found myself drawn into the cover profile of Miuccia Prada. She is the designer behind the eponymous brand, as well as its more whimsical little sister, Miu Miu. When you google her, which I did to find out her birthday and thus her astrological star sign (Taurus), the word “billionaire” is used to describe her. Front and center. Her extreme wealth, of course, isn’t explicitly mentioned in the profile itself; here we’re focused on the woman, on the work, on the family and the nylon bag in the ’80s that changed everything. Strangely, or not, I found myself deeply relating to this woman who’s never known the hustle, never changed a keg (unless barkeeping is a secret passion of hers): We both live to work, it seems, rather than the other way around; we want beauty mixed with intellectual and political rigor; we don’t suffer fools. 

This is the work of a magazine profile, at least nowadays: Make the unrelatably rich or powerful or beautiful person relatable. Don’t let them see you eating a truffle fry. “Relatable” is a word I have trouble with, as it’s been positioned in our social media age as the goal of all content. What does it really mean? I don’t really relate to Prada any more than I might relate to any creative woman who takes herself seriously, but what is collapsing when I allow myself these gentle pangs of self-recognition in a person quite unlike me? Who and what am I giving power?

As the gaps between the Pradas and—here I’d like to use my own last name, but it certainly doesn’t provide the right contrast—Everymans of the world widen, widen, widen to unfathomable distances, we’re seeking both relatability and, apparently, the meaning of luxury as it becomes ever more out of reach—not even at aspirational costs, but absurd prices.

Two recent pieces have tried to untangle this. They are quite different, though both use the ever-increasing price of Chanel quilted flap bags to make their points. One, in the same Vogue, by Emilia Petrarca, titled “What Is It With the Price of Clothes?” noted these widening gaps and how smaller designers with sustainable ethos are taking up some of the mid-price space once occupied by the luxury houses. Ultimately, it doesn’t question constant consumption (that would be absurd in such a magazine) or what it means to desire these luxury goods. But in Spike, Joanna Walsh provides Marxist and gender analysis:

“A dress becomes really a dress only by being worn,” Karl Marx wrote in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). And, I’m sure Marx knew, it all depends on who’s doing the wearing. The drag worn by black and latinx queens in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 New York documentary, Paris Is Burning, is as much economic and cultural as gendered. It’s not about being just any girl but that girl, the girl at the intersection of financial and racial privilege.

I read about fashion and luxury because I enjoy these things, yes, but also because it’s a good tool for thinking about food. Food has also gone up in price—25% since 2020—as more and more people experience poverty—56% of people in New York City, in fact. (And yet… “The most Instagrammed restaurant dish in the city is a $19 serving of two boiled eggs.”)

What Petrarca’s piece in Vogue tells me is that the seams might be gently stressed by this reality. Who are you selling luxury to, or even the aspiration of it, under these conditions? What is its role in this precarious world? What Walsh’s piece tells me is that the question of how we desire the seemingly frivolous will always be a fruitful subject for self- and cultural interrogation. When do we come to the tipping point? “When fashion doesn’t serve social mobility where does luxury go?” When do we move from posting to organizing? What are the relationships between these acts? What role does taste play in our politics?

We can at least ask ourselves what food and recipes and restaurants mean under these conditions. Pierre Bourdieu, in Distinction, talks a lot about how styles of serving and behavior at mealtimes mark class. Food is the first desire and pleasure, and thus it makes sense that our subsequent desires and pleasures would fan out from how we perceive and relate to it.

In the United States, where convenience had come to stand in for taste when it came to food, through food becoming cool in this century, we’re constantly negotiating between the Puritanical underpinnings of the dominant society and what can be considered bourgeois exuberance around food (that is, the desire to see what the fuss is about when it comes to $19 eggs—I’m not immune!).

I’ve written before that rich or rich-adjacent people—those who know how to perform in the right ways—don’t really care about eating at restaurants where the food is any good. When we care about how food tastes, we’re always revealing ourselves to be a bit common, incapable of escaping our primary pleasure for the goal of—what? Exploiting others for personal gain? Tanning on yachts? Killing newspapers?

Whatever, baby—I’m from the south shore of Long Island, a town whose name elicits a breath of sadness when NYU undergrads from tony Oyster Bay inquire after it. I’ll never forget the time someone told me he was from Islip, and when I said I’m from Patchogue, he visibly relaxed and admitted he was actually from Brentwood. Local class politics in action. Anyway, I’m fine chasing a good bite. 

I’m spitballing today on ideas I want to think more about, especially around considering the role of restaurants as a luxury and what it means to cover them while fewer and fewer people can afford them—or rather, why I’ve chosen to no longer do so, which has been a decision in the works (practically and intellectually) since March 2020. I’ll tell you where I eat and perhaps suggest a dish, but the way food writing launders gentrification, displacement, and poor wages… that’s what I’ve been trying to divest from.

A photo from the morning I read this Vogue and made a nice sandwich.

These mini essays always end up like a chat over a martini—I love that about them. After the paywall, you’ll find my monthly recommended links, the February playlist, Desk Book Club notes, and a new set of books I’m giving away.