For Yuppies, Quality Is Now the Answer for Status Seekers
The generation that rejected materialism in the ‘60s is now doing what it swore it never would: desperately seeking status symbols.
As their incomes increase, the upwardly mobile are clamoring for the rewards of the rich--which they no longer consider square, but solid.
But the difference between the new symbols of status and the old is not as much a matter of keeping up with the Joneses as it is keeping up with an endless pursuit of quality.
The idea is that a well-made product--the finest calf attache case or the consummate pair of loafers--makes the day run smoother and contributes to the owner’s quality of life.
If Consumer Reports rated Italian leather goods, these status seekers would probably subscribe.
Martha Mosko, 28, a group director at Esquire magazine in New York, explains why she bought herself a $100 silk Hermes scarf in a seashell motif to match her Blackgama mink coat:
“I really wanted to own a Hermes scarf. It’s that timelessness. That sense of quiet beauty. It’s something I’ll have forever. “
Reflecting further, Mosko adds: “The transient times are over. People my age--the 25-to-40-year-olds--used to go from job to job, from relationship to relationship. Now a settling aspect is occurring. There are a lot of marriages, people are having babies, buying homes, making long-term career commitments. I think that’s reflected in dress. Again, my coat will be stunning forever.”
Increasingly, purveyors of luxury are noticing a renaissance in tried-and-true, high-ticket items that were popular back in the days when materialism wasn’t a dirty word.
“Suddenly this year we’ve sold far more scarfs and bags than last year,” says Francine Bardo of Hermes, the venerable French leather-goods and clothing company known for catering to the needs of the super-rich.
The Rodeo Drive Hermes shop is selling an average of 300 silk scarfs a month, a 35% increase over last year, says Bardo, who also expects an increase in this year’s sales of Kelly bags (so named because Grace Kelly bought the saddlebag style in every color available for her trousseau) and H bags (a structured purse with a gold-plated “H” clasp favored by Jacqueline Kennedy in her White House days).
But the store’s usual customer--”a very chic lady of a certain stature in society”--isn’t the only one buying the famous handbags ($1,200 and up) and twill scarfs available in thousands of patterns, many of a horsy theme.
Now 16-year-old girls want the scarfs “for that little touch,” Bardo says, and working women with money to spend seem to want “a little more tenue “ -- or a certain kind of chic.
Gucci, the Italian leather-goods concern, is selling each month--at the Beverly Hills shop alone--300 pairs of the soft, round-toed leather men’s shoes with a golden horse bit across the instep. It’s known by aficionados by style number only--No. 175--which also happens to be its price in dollars.
In its heyday during the late ‘50s and ‘60s, when it cost $32 in the New York Gucci store, the “175” was worn by every stylish man from the Duke of Windsor to Cary Grant. Now it’s selling to young men who drive BMWs and who like the shoe for the same reason they like their driving machines, the store’s managing director Luigi Leonardi says.
“They want a shoe that will be comfortable, will last and represents the most instant status you could possibly have without being too obvious,” Leonardi says.
UCLA associate professor of sociology William Roy, a specialist in American society, believes that yesterday’s status symbols are considered today’s “creature comforts” by those who buy them.
“People who rejected status in the ‘60s are now saying with a clear conscious, ‘I’m not buying this item for the status. I’m buying it because it’s a good value. It’s high quality. It makes my life more comfortable, and incidentally it might have some status,’ but they don’t flaunt that aspect,” he says.
Roy adds that luxury items that flaunt themselves with obvious labels on the outside are rejected by the new breed of status seekers, partly in reaction to what he calls the “exhibitionism” of status labels that were popular five years ago.
An Hermes scarf and “H” bag don’t have labels on the outside and are only instantly recognizable to others “in the know.”
Dan Freeman, a 33-year-old management consultant for a downtown firm, recently rewarded himself with a Gucci attache case “without the Gs”--meaning without the obvious Gucci logo.
“It’s very understated,” he stresses. “I’m willing to pay for quality, but I’m not shouting that I’m rich. The statement it makes is that I care for quality merchandise.”
Typical of her generation’s attitude toward understatement is Lisa Birnbach, 28, of “The Official Preppy Handbook” fame, who says she wouldn’t dream of carrying French-made Louis Vuitton luggage with its repeating “LV” signature motif, even though she acknowledges that it rates high performance-wise.
“I personally wouldn’t carry it unless my name were Lisa Vuitton,” Birnbach sniffs.
Birnbach, however, says many of her contemporaries are now buying into the “safe and respectable look”--wearing conservative clothing from head to toe and the accessories that go with it. And she admits that she too is tempted to trade in her preppy madras for something more upscale, even though she believes that “choosing an Hermes bag or Chanel pumps is the same to me as deciding not to be a playwright and going into investments. It’s respectable and dependable and it’s less imaginative.”
Whatever it is, it’s not limited to the United States. Paris designer Jean Paul Gaultier did his own spoof on the safe and respectable look last March when he opened his fashion show with models wearing raincoats and scarfs tied around their heads and talked about his fascination with the look of “nouvelle bourgeoisie. “
Visitors to Paris are now marveling at how many of the women there, usually on the cutting edge of the newest fashion trends, are now dressing in “classics.”
“I saw a young lady in pigtails buying a pair of silk Hermes pumps,” recounts photographer Matthew Rolston, who has just returned from Paris. “Women are wearing men’s Hermes clothes, and Hermes scarfs are very hot among the 16th-Arrondissement types--the Yuppies of Paris. The young people are definitely interested in quality and not trends.”
Those in the fashion industry who are on the lookout for new trends are not exactly pleased with the current state of affairs.
“I see the Harvard Business School mentality--status fashion--permeating the streets, and it’s bad for creativity and it’s bad for the industry,” Beverly Hills retailer Charles Gallay says.
“Gaultier should be creating fashion,” he says. “Designers shouldn’t be responding to old idioms. The lifeblood of our industry is newness.”
“It’s not status if it’s retrospective--that’s my statement on the subject,” retailer Herb Fink of Theodore says. “If Sears sells more washing machines, does that mean it’s a status washing machine?”
The only true status today, Fink insists, comes from wearing certain fresh labels, which he also happens to sell, like French designer Claude Montana.
“He’s Mr. Wonderful now. He is status,” Fink says.
Nevertheless, a lot of people are now taking pleasure in owning “good things,” which have maintained their cachet by ignoring the changes in fashion.
Birnbach says: “When you didn’t have a good meeting or make that deal, you can open your briefcase and experience a sense of quiet power and taste radiating back at you in the form of your leather goods.”
