Everyone is talking about quiet luxury but there’s a problem
Unless you have spent the first five months of 2023 on retreat or continuing your Second World War service for Imperial Japan, you will know that one of the most significant trends in the fashion world has been “quiet luxury” or “stealth wealth”.
The concept is that the smartest of the smart are now dressing and accessorising in a way that oozes wealth but does so more discreetly than before, eschewing obvious branding, vulgar logos or slavish adoption of passing fads.
One of the icons of quiet luxury has been Gwyneth Paltrow. Her appearances in the 3rd District Court in Park City, Utah earlier this year, as she was sued unsuccessfully for damages by a man with whom she had collided on the ski slopes in 2019, saw her develop “courtcore”, outfits in which plutocratic defendants can impress but not overawe a jury and the media.
Her ever-present accessory during the process was a Portobello notebook by Smythson of Bond Street: a practical item, but bound in lapis-coloured crossgrain lambskin from a 136-year-old London stationer.
The Roy family of HBO’s Succession is another quiet luxury touchstone. The heir apparent, Jeremy Strong’s complicated, tortured Kendall, favours a plain black baseball cap, supremely utilitarian but north of £500 from Loro Piana of Milan, which celebrates its centenary next year.
Or one could look at the exquisitely chic Amal Clooney, everyone’s favourite barrister, stepping out for coffee in a simple but stunning knit dress by Stella McCartney. You can see the sort of brands which are key. Expensive, often venerable, sometimes celebrity-helmed, but producing garments and accessories that do not need the interlinked Gs of Gucci or Gianni Versace’s gorgon badge to indicate the wearer’s wealth, influence and style.
Quiet luxury uses brands like Lombard designer Max Mara and the legendary Bottega Veneta, maker of leather goods, shoes and accessories to speak through quality and style rather than brash logos. The point of quiet luxury is that it represents self-confidence and inner peace: the wearer is secure in his or her social status and has no need to squawk the brittle boasts of the aspirational or the newly arrived.
Deeper sartorial thinkers will note with a wry smile that this is simply the reinforcement of what elites have always done, preferring subtle superiority to the walking billboard. For a Briton, though, that is not quite true.
Quiet luxury brands may not have their origins scrawled across their products, but they rely on being identifiable and identified nonetheless. Dazzling enigmatically is no help to the manufacturer’s bottom line. The hoary phrase goes “If you know, you know”, but for that to make commercial sense you have to… know.
All quiet luxury does is turns down the volume. To link that to the traditional aristocratic approach to couture in the UK is failing to understand the complex texture of our still-lively but increasingly muddled class system.
I worked for a time in the House of Lords, and even now it houses genuine aristocrats under laboratory conditions. Genuine blue-bloods are not sporting flawless ensembles from great fashion houses; you will more likely find them in costly but aged and carefully maintained attire.
HM The King still sports a camel overcoat first worn by his father in 1956; we think it is by Kent, Haste & Lachter, but it’s not certain. The morning dress he wore for Prince Harry’s wedding was 34 years old.
Today’s “quiet luxury” is performatively discreet. The maker might not be obvious, but the watching public is supposed to find out the source in good time. Genuine aristocrats have a different philosophy: stylish, of course, and designed to flatter and impress, but by craftsmanship and technique.
So next time you spot Shiv Roy’s Tom Ford padlock jacket and feel a rush of insider nous, just remember that it might be a discreet $5,000 item, but you are still being played.