The Nouveau Austerity

San Francisco winery owner Urannia Ristow canceled her lavish Christmas party after Sept. 11, but don’t cry for Nob Hill. “I’m seeing a lot of little holiday dinners,” she confided last week.

Nor is the pall around the diamond display at Tiffany & Co. in Union Square lately the sole measure of America’s trauma; the sterling-silver jewelry department there has been bustling.

Meanwhile, even in the midst of America’s recessionary despondence, Gloria Litz, a Woodland Hills travel agent, has been besieged by callers who’ve decided at the last minute that it’s Aspen or bust. In New York, publishers of event calendars say the holidays will be lower key but as full of engagements as ever. And at a recent Beverly Hills trunk show, the hit was a black wool peacoat that tapped into the zeitgeist--at $1,600 a pop.

Unemployment may be at a six-year high and the Age of Ostentation may be beyond over, but indulgence hasn’t entirely gone away. Even as recession and terrorism have drained Americans’ confidence levels and checkbooks, that hardy perennial conspicuous consumption has evolved to suit the occasion. “What we’re seeing,” said Robbie Blinkoff, a Baltimore-based cultural anthropologist and market researcher, “is a sort of changed definition of luxury.”

Call it Conspicuous Austerity. Broadly speaking, researchers say, the haves are still splurging--they’ve just downshifted to the familiar, the understated and the safe. Blinkoff, whose Context-Based Research Group has been tracking consumer attitudes since the attacks, says a number of basic American assumptions were undermined after Sept. 11, from broad civil liberties to low-risk travel, leaving U.S. society with “a new value filter” that has emphasized--permanently, he thinks--”meaning and family and security and community.”

It’s a 180-degree shift from last year’s Prada bowling bags and extreme tourism. Cozy home items, for example, are selling now in a way that cannot be said for that dot-com status symbol of yore, the Herman Miller Aeron office chair.

Those who can afford to are still remodeling their houses or buying vacation homes. Author Judith Krantz, who is renovating her Beverly Hills home, said her construction supervisor “has never been busier.” But she added that she and her husband of 47 years have decided not to exchange gifts with each other this year, and she has opted out of her usual holiday ritual, in which, she joked, “I find something I desperately need at Van Cleef and lead my husband there. For me not to think about jewelry is unusual, but it just seems utterly unimportant this year.”

Meanwhile, to the extent that high fashion is selling, it’s old-hippie chic--the Yves Saint Laurent peasant blouse, the unassuming silver teardrop Tiffany earring. Wealth--flaunted in the New Money Nineties--has retreated to insularity. Private holiday gatherings have turned intimate or, if they’ve been planned too far in advance to be scaled back, are being downplayed.

An exception in San Francisco was Dede Wilsey’s annual, first-week-of-December Christmas party, but the private affair for 375 has a 20-year tradition as the opening event on the social circuit for the holidays. Wilsey, who is board president of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, said she “didn’t even think” of canceling. Her bash, she noted, is such an institution that her Pacific Heights home has a square marked on the floor where, until his death in 1996, Transamerica Corp. chairman Jim Harvey stood year after year chatting with philanthropic and corporate leaders.

“Yes, there certainly is a recession, and we’re certainly fighting in Afghanistan,” Wilsey said, “but I think that carrying on as normally and joyfully as possible is how we win.”

Carrying on normally, however, just hasn’t felt right to others. Michael Bloomberg, the mayor-elect of New York, canceled his annual holiday blowout. Merry Miller, a Manhattan harpist who also runs a music agency, says that of 23 corporate events she booked last year, only four have rebooked. Last-minute calls from hosts of private parties, however, have been burgeoning, she says, as “people who would have held dinner at a restaurant for 40 people with a jazz band last year are having cocktails in their apartment this year.”

Elisabeth Familian, whose Los Angeles and New York Masterplanners publish the year’s upcoming social events on both coasts, says that the number of events hasn’t declined, even though “some of the opulence has been scaled back.” Lou Stratten, who entertains and reads stories at upscale children’s parties around Los Angeles, says that pre-Sept. 11, she was often one birthday diversion among many at the same party. At a fete for a year-old baby in August, for instance, “there was also a carousel, a moon bouncer, a choo-choo train, a horse, a woman dressed up as Snow White.”

“The parties I’ve been doing since Sept. 11 have been less elaborate and more intimate,” she said. “They’re more down to earth.”

Ristow, the wife of a cosmetic surgeon and owner of the Ristow Estate winery, agrees that “everyone has toned down the big parties, just out of the understanding of the number of people who’ve lost jobs and loved ones.”

Even the Hollywood hard core have turned down the hype. “We had caviar and ahi sashimi and dinner for 300 and dancing until 3:30, and Benicio Del Toro and Leonardo DiCaprio and Oliver Stone and, well, it was my best party ever,” said a Brentwood real estate magnate who dished for half an hour about the invitation-only Dec. 8 shindig--but only on the condition he remain unnamed.

Conspicuous consumption--a term coined 102 years and many crises ago by the American social critic Thorstein Veblen--involves style and substance. Everyone consumes. The question is, how noticeable do we want our spending to be? Like so many other social indicators, what and how Americans buy is being watched differently, post-Sept. 11, for what it says about the social fabric.

Carl Steidtmann, chief economist at Deloitte Research, says that the luxury sector--jewelry, furs, designer clothing, expensive cars and boats, etc.--boomed in the 1990s as bonuses and stock options boosted legions of upper-middle-class Americans into the high-income brackets. With the recession, that “aspirational customer” has faded from traditional high-end markets, leaving the sector once again to its usual old-money customers.

“But the rich are still rich, and they’re still spending,” says Steidtmann. “There’s just a reduced ostentatiousness that comes, especially in New York, from the desire to pull together. One of the things luxury goods do is to differentiate people, and the rich don’t want to be as differentiated right now.”

Blinkoff agrees. “People were having existential dilemmas over whether to have a latte or just make do with a small coffee” in the first days after the attacks, he said. As time has passed, “people have gotten past that, but they’re still into their new values, and this Christmas shopping season has been their first chance to match their spending to who they are now. It varies from person to person, but whatever makes those new values come to life is the new [expression of] luxury.”

For example, 45% of respondents to a survey by Deloitte & Touche with BIGresearch said they plan to spend more time than they have in the past with their families this holiday. Fifty-six percent said they had sprung recently for cell phones, bottled water or stockpiles of extra batteries. Seventy-three percent said they plan to spend at least as much or more this year on home improvement as they did last year. Sixty-two percent had the same plans for home furnishings.

Two-thirds of holiday shoppers said they would be paying with cash or checks--not scary credit cards--for this year’s Christmas presents. And discount outlets ranked, even by upper-income households, as the first or second shopping choice for nine out 12 categories of gifts.

It is in this spirit that people such as Debra Ballard say they are forgoing Christmas extravaganzas in favor of family vacations that cost almost as much.

“Last Christmas it was DVDs for everybody,” Ballard, a mother of two, said, sorting through gag gifts at a Bay Area Target--a store where she had “not shopped in ages” but to which she had found herself drawn the other day.

“This year, we’re going to Tahoe. We just wanted it more to be about family and connecting--just being together as opposed to material things.”

She’s not the only one.

“I don’t know whether the slowdown has been financial or emotional, but it seems to be letting up,” said Gloria Litz, an agent with Calig World Travel in Woodland Hills. “In the last 10 days, a lot of people have decided they want to go skiing immediately.” Callers, she says, have besieged her with requests for ski resort accommodations and nonstop tickets to Aspen at $980 apiece.

At Neiman Marcus in San Francisco, last season’s strappy Manolo Blahnik stilettos were languishing at $505 a pair--marked down from $755--on the sale rack last week, while a pair of shoppers pestered the clerk with requests for the latest Tod’s loafers, at a not-that-much-cheaper full price of $350 a pair. At the San Francisco Wine Trading Co., no fewer than eight bottles of the rare cult wine Screaming Eagle were being sold on consignment for $1,495 to $1,795 each--not because the wealthy owners were down on their luck, said proprietor Gary Marcaletti, but because “they decided they aren’t into hoarding it anymore.”

Then there’s Libbie Lane’s suddenly popular peacoat.

Before Sept. 11, Lane, whose custom clothing is popular with the well-heeled Westside crowd, said she had been thinking of creating something that expressed the social activism she remembered from her ‘60s childhood. “I was feeling that people cared about changing the world again, and I remembered how that desire used to be telegraphed by what we wore,” says the Beverly Hills-based designer. After the attacks, her free-floating notion took form.

A peace sign is embroidered on the upper arm of the jacket, just where an armband might be. Along the hem, the words “PEACE, LIFE, COME TOGETHER” are embroidered in charcoal silk thread. Strips of leather laced into the sleeves trail below the wrists.

The $1,600 jacket is casual and tailored, with a rich hippie edge. As soon as Lane started wearing her prototype, 15 of her private clients begged for peacoats of their own. Some women called their friends, saying, “You have to call Libbie and get one of these jackets.” Laurie David, wife of television writer-producer Larry David and a volunteer for environmental causes, asked to have “RECYCLE, REUSE, RENEW, PROTECT” embroidered on hers. The jacket is now available at the Tracey Ross boutique in Hollywood.

“The women who were buying it said they loved that it was a special piece, but it was subtle”--and didn’t look “obviously expensive,” Lane said.

But not all businesspeople welcome an age in which less is the new more. “It’s terrible,” said Miller, the Manhattan harpist, with a sigh as she shushed her boyfriend, who was warbling “Silver Bells” in the background.

“Yeah, ting-a-ling, hear ‘em ring, but that’s not my cash register ringing,” she said.