The Post-Luxury World: How Luxury Destroyed Beauty
Over the past few decades the beauty in our world has been taken away from us and sold back with a huge price tag as "luxury' for the elite few, which of course is not true beauty. But, this kind of luxury is now over as people are now rejecting 'meaning through consumerism' in favor of the truly valuable things like faith, family, and tradition.
Transcription:
This is Julia James Davis and welcome to the war on beauty.
I recently saw this tweet that I thought was so on point. It said, "Beauty has been stolen from the people and sold back to them under the concept of luxury."
I think that this is so true and important, especially now, because all of the beauty in our world has in fact been taken away from us and sold back at a huge price tag just for the elite few, which of course is not beauty.
And also too importantly, luxury now, which has been this substitute of true beauty in our world, it only serves to reinforce and reconfirm this material plane.
It points you back down towards yourself and towards worldly things rather than being something truly transcendent, pointing you higher towards God, towards the eternal, which is what true beauty does and used to do in the past before luxury came in and took its place.
The thing is, though, I really think that we are living in a post-luxury world.
The material luxury that we see everywhere now just doesn't signal luxury. And, very interestingly, the new luxury is what luxury used to be a long time ago in the past, which was intellectual knowledge and time.
But, first, let me quickly explain what is luxury and what is beauty, because I think the two have become very confused in recent times.
Luxury is defined as an inessential, desirable object that is expensive or difficult to obtain. That's pretty easy to understand and we kind of associate that with sports cars or hard to get bags like the Birkin bag.
But what's a little bit more difficult to define is beauty. Beauty, going off the Oxford dictionary definition, is a combination of qualities that pleases the aesthetic senses, or pleases the intellect, or moral sense.
But I think that there's been this new nuance in our contemporary world that has come attached to luxury, which is, luxury is ultimately the decisions that you make. It's making the choices that few people do, or the choices that few people are able to make. Picking the path less traveled.
So, where we're at now is, the things that once signified luxury, Chanel bags, expensive watches, have all lost their catch, and ultimately have become anti-luxury, anti-beauty, and ultimately have started to create disvalue in the world.
These luxury goods are mass-prodduced in factories with horrible conditions.
And they're also widely accessible to anyone and everyone now and have become so oversaturated in our world that it's actually a lot cooler and more of a status symbol to not have it than to have it.
And I think where all of this really started shifting was over the COVID pandemic because this is when people had more time and I think a little bit more money to start buying more things.
There was a huge shopping boom over the pandemic, and companies - especially luxury companies - really saw this as an opportunity to just start jacking their prices up.
Specifically in the case - I think this is a great case - Chanel.
Chanel started raising their prices for their classic flat bag. It was priced at $6,500 in 2020, but by 2024, the same black bag was raised to $11,850.
And as this happened though, it's not that the bag got better, or it's a different bag.
In fact, the bag got worse. The quality started plummeting and people started complaining.
And it was very clear that this was all a corporate cash grab.
And ultimately these companies were playing their customers for fools.
And also really importantly at the same time these luxury companies like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Dior, they really started ramping up their marketing and their production and their releasing of new styles, new collections, new accessories.
And they also started pushing them out via influencers. So all the influencers got all of these new bags almost every month, making these goods feel very undesirable and oversaturated.
And it was this mode and model of hyper consumption that was never before seen in the luxury space.
So all of that put together, the sheen of exclusivity around luxury has really started to wear off, and I think that it's really completely gone.
It's completely gone because brands started to be exposed, very very high-end brands for producing literally in sweat shops.
For example, Loro Piana, which is probably one of the highest luxury brands next to Hermes. They have jackets on their website listed for like $6,000 plus.
They recently got exposed for using sweat shop labor, illegal workshops that were using exploitative conditions.
And so, really, all of this together again, luxury no longer served its original purpose to signify status or any exclusivity or rarity.
So people, I think, are just over it.
We're really at the terminus, I think, of modern consumer culture that started post World War II, where one's social status was indicated by the goods that they bought or really, you know, defined by what car you have, what bag you're carrying, and so on.
And I think that the way that we really know it's over; is that we've reached this extreme peak with less expensive stuff that also, in a way, fall into the category of luxury.
I'm thinking the Lubu craze, the Stanley Cup craze, the Dubai Chocolate craze, the Road Lip Gloss craze, the Sunny Angel craze.
These consumption crazes are happening in such quick succession, and with such feverishness that I think they really indicate a zenith that only logically can be followed by a descent and a decline.
And we can see this literally in the numbers being posted by companies in their earnings.
The most recent earnings report from LVMH, which is a major luxury conglomerate. They own practically every luxury brand from Fendi to Louis Vuitton to Dior, Bulgari, Tiffany, Dom Perignon, Vuv, Cleico, and Sephora. They reported that their sales in their fashion and leather goods category was down 9% with a 22% decline in net profit.
And everyone's trying to figure out, okay, what is going on? Because this is a recent turnaround. These companies were making money hand over fist. And there's been really a lot of attention paid to, okay, what's happening in luxury?
And I think a great point was recently made on the business of fashion, which is a fashion newspaper. They said that luxury has become a simulacrum where luxury is now just a hollowed-out nothingness based on hype and fake value.
A bag or a toy pushed by an influencer this minute is out the next and replaced with something else.
But what I think is the most important in all of this, going back to what I said in the very beginning, is that luxury has not only ceased to be luxurious, but it's actually become a disvalue to the world and to people.
All of this consumer behavior that's gotten way out of control is actually perfectly summed up in a theory by French philosopher Denis Diderot. In 1769, he said that when one buys a new possession, it leads to a spiral of consumption. He said that every time you buy something new, you now have to buy more things to go with it or to keep up.
This is called the Diderot effect. And this has certainly happened because consumption has not only become a major distraction and quasi-addiction in our contemporary society, but it's actually plunged people into deep debt and depression.
In February 2025, credit card debt in the United States rose to an all-time high of 1.21 trillion, despite higher interest rates.
And alongside it, depression and anxiety have also hit record highs with 1 in eight people ages 12 and up being depressed in recent years according to the CDC, which is nearly double the rate from 2015.
And according to a Harvard report, over half of young adults, 58% have experienced little or no purpose or meaning in their lives in the previous month. A respondent in this Harvard report said, "I have no purpose or meaning in life. I go to work, do my mundane job, go home, prepare for the next day, scroll on my phone, and repeat."
And likely, when they're scrolling on their phone, they're just constantly being fed shopping ads and influencers pushing stuff, because social media has basically just turned into a marketplace with things like Tik Tok shop absolutely exploding in popularity.
It's really as these traditional sources of meaning in our lives, beauty, family, religion, they've all been - and even work -, they've all been increasingly rare.
These are things that people are no longer participating in, or getting meaning from, because these are all the things that have been under attack in our society.
They've just kind of gone away.
There's a hole in our hearts because naturally we yearn for those things. So, we have to replace that space with something else. And they've attempted to replace it with consumption and luxury.
But of course, that is never going to work.
As St. Augustine says, our hearts are restless until they rest in you, which is God.
And very interestingly, according to the same Harvard report, young adults belonging to a religion were more likely to report meaning or purpose in their lives, 47%, compared to 34% of atheists.
So where does this all leave us?
Because there still is luxury in the world. There always has been luxury. That's just always been a category of society. So we are going to have luxury, but I think that it's not going to be in the form of Rolexes and Lamborghinis and Louis Vuitton bags or Lubu anymore.
What I think the new luxury is going to be is knowledge, concentration, and making our own decisions all based on a firm foundation in morals, knowing oneself and in faith in God.
The reason that I think this is because if luxury is defined as an inessential thing or beauty is defined as something pleasing to the intellect or moral sense, then knowledge, intellect and thinking for oneself is now a luxury.
That is because knowledge itself has become an unnecessary thing.
In our world with social media and Google and increasingly AI, we no longer have to really learn anything. We don't actually have to sit down and put in that work, and we can rely on machines to do the heavy lifting and thinking for us.
So this, plus all the constant distractions that we're faced with, our brains have literally become atrophied, or brain rotted as they say, because our contemporary conditions have created a hyperconvenient online world where everything is just done.
You can get it in the push of a button. You don't have to read a book to find anything out. It's just all there and we have to put in very very little effort.
It's the decision to sit down, read and learn, and put in that mental focus and concentration that very few people want to do, and perhaps very few people are even able to do, with the way that social media has trained our brains.
I think that this is the true luxury now because if luxury is also signaling something about you, well, this concentration and commitment to something difficult like sitting down and reading a book, that shows how distanced you are from the mass culture of online consumption.
And I think that this is actually a great thing.
And the reason I think this is because anyone can do this. It doesn't matter if you have certain education credentials or you went to some good university. Any human being on the planet can do this: retrain their brain to focus for long periods and to gain this knowledge.
Our world has become... everything in the world has become so accessible. For the most part, all of us can read. We can buy all these books for pretty cheap on Amazon or at our local bookstore or get them on our Kindle. We have everything at our fingertips and you can do this.
Anyone can do this. Anyone can have this new luxury. So in that way we are returning to the definition of luxury from the old days, from the days of Diderot, where the mark of luxury was actually not things and stuff, but it was a person who was cultivated in the arts and music and literature and politics, and also a person who was reflective, trying to understand history, the present day, and the world around them, and trying to better oneself through knowledge and through faith.
And it's actually only in this way that we are going to reclaim beauty truly, because beauty is not something that comes from status symbols or fashion or anything like that. It comes from our connection with history, with tradition, and most importantly with faith and with God.
And so I think returning to those things, it's what's naturally going to condition people to create and appreciate more beauty.
So I actually think that again all of this is such a positive development because it's going to take all of us to become like this to shun this hyper-consumerist world, and turn especially towards God, towards faith, and towards learning to bring beauty back.
So I'm very excited about this, and I would love to know your thoughts on this.
I hope that you enjoyed this video, and I will see you in the next one. Thank you so much for watching.