The death of luxury has been overly heralded and grossly simplified. Some see the idea as provocative. Some see a certain karmic justice in the idea. And still others use a down turn in the economy as an indicator that the luxury world is superfluous and fluffy: that when in a financial pinch, the average luxury consumer will abandon his or her extravagant ways in favour of a solid rational purchasing habit.

All of which is nonsense because nothing in this category is quite that cut and dry. Luxury is not dead. The word has been mutilated by lazy marketers. It has been over played and has definitely lost its original punch. If you take the strict dictionary definition of luxury as meaning the ‘refinement of living’ rather than a necessity, then luxury has crept into almost all product offerings these days. The issue then becomes that luxury is omni-present and therefore losing its greater than the average quality. Luxury has gone mainstream. Lost are the days when you could simply label something luxury, price it above all else, and call it a day. Today most true luxury brands don’t even mention the word luxury, but do a great job at describing all the ways their brand is better than the standard. It is that detailed explanation that is required to make the brand exude specialness. The word luxury has subsequently been relegated to the likes of air-freshening brands found in mass super markets and uninspired hotels. The idea of expressing a brand through refined detail is very much alive. In fact, competitive über-luxury brands one-up each other in that way all the time. Looking for an edge that both legitimises and seduces.


The high-end watch business is a great place to see this attention to detail articulated. There’s a well defined gender divide that creates two distinct approaches. In its simplest form it can described as such; Women want a watch that looks great from a brand that says something about who they are and what stage in their life they are at. Men, on the other hand, have slightly different criteria and view the category in an antithetic light. Men like the brute mechanics of a watch. Most serious watch men pay little attention to anything that is run by quartz. The brands that bring that level of mechanical sophistication are not necessarily the same as for the women. Men still want their watch to telegraph a definition of who they are, but that male peer group acceptance is crucial. A woman’s watch, as you creep up the price ladder, becomes more and more a piece of jewelry. A man’s watch becomes more and more a mechanical and engineering marvel. Both are by definition luxurious in nature. Necessity is not driving either thought process. After all they could both get a watch that tells the time for a fraction of the price. In the man’s case, his mechanical marvel will never actually be quite as precise as a cheap quartz watch, but getting to that level of precision is what he’ll yearn for in his Tourbillon. Haute horology can really go haute.

Whereas it is somewhat easier to understand how a woman’s watch can be increasingly bejeweled and become very pricey, understanding the extreme price heights of the man’s chronographical obsession is a study in near absurdity since simply converting to a quartz movement would render the quest useless. It is an area where the line between extravagance and eccentricity blurs. Both genders head to a luxury summit that actually almost removes the telling the time part from the watch. If you cover a woman’s watch in so many diamonds, the trick becomes how can you tastefully place the hands of the watch on the face and still have them read clearly. The man’s issue is that his watch is so complicated that it is delicate and very infrequently used. It will probably spend most of its life locked in a self-winding box that was custom made for it. The woman’s watch also nudges logic by being so bejeweled that it becomes very expensive and therefore very rarely worn. Brands like Harry Winston and François Paul Journe know what drives men and women and are expert at detailing their timepiece production for maximum marketing effectiveness. They have mastered the art of story telling and seduction.

For most people luxury watch shopping is a game of balance and choice. Choosing to spend more on a new watch versus a new bag or car for example. Even the impulse mid-high-end purchase comes with a wikipedia-style brand understanding to it. My Panerai watch had that quality for me. When they first emerged onto the greater watch market ten years ago Panerai looked simple and macho. Not many bells and whistles, simply big and bold. I bought one almost immediately, fell in love with it and the subsequently researched the hell out of the brand so I could wax lyrical with my buddies. The slideshow of bullet point facts available from higher end watch brands are fantastic and are designed to push all the right buttons. That too is luxury marketing in the details. I even fell for the Rolex Explorer 1 and its climb up Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary. Although I’ve often wondered: what was Tenzig Norag wearing?

I wish there was another universally understood word to replace the word luxury, but that too, would probably be over-used quickly. So use the word luxury sparingly, but express a brand’s fabulousness with abundance and passion, and the meaning of luxury will come shinning through.