The quiet luxury of food and fragrance 🥐🧴
We saw a huge fragrance boom in 2024. It was the year perfume become the accessible luxury of choice, in a classic example of the lipstick effect. Scent is so underrated as an evocative sense, but it makes sense that it would be the first thing you would reach for to indulge a daydream. To smell fragrance around you is to signal “I strive for more than my current circumstances, I want more from this life” — it’s longing and ambition. A lot of the content around perfume also ties into selling consumers the idea of “old money in a bottle” as a way to, if not fortify the worldbuilding of cosplaying as a rich person, then to be able to dabble in a relatively accessible way. (We’ll come back to this later.) When you can’t necessarily dress for the fantasy, scent keeps your dreams right under your nose and at the forefront of your mind.
As for food, one TikTok put it accurately when they said that necessities are now priced like luxuries (and luxuries are priced like necessities). If you think about it, food is the perfect vehicle for displaying wealth in the current economic climate: everyone has to eat. It’s one of the great unifiers of the human condition, which means it has the potential to be relatable to everyone. You can watch a food video and recreate it yourself — in that respect it’s perfect for content creation. Audiences love to see the process in motion, plus it gives them space to participate too. But the big difference is: your food will never taste like theirs. Aside from how the same meal can taste different every time, and will taste different by every hand, the wealth flaunting comes in subtle ways. They used the most elite ingredients; you used the Tesco Finest versions. And while there’s nothing wrong with Tesco, the subtle differences add up once the whole meal comes together. That’s how they’re able to maintain the hierarchy. Cooking is entirely what you make of it.
When it comes to quiet luxury, there are many reasons to criticise the trend but I think it brought some good into the mainstream discourse as well. I appreciated the attention to (natural) materials and construction, the little details you have to pay extra attention to with (ostensibly) simple designs, because any flaws are that much easier to spot. These are the details of craftsmanship lacking in modern wardrobes but that are so beautiful, and go a long way in determining making garments more sustainable. Coupled with this, I also liked how the idea of stealth wealth included not being trend focussed and keeping clothes in your wardrobe for a long time, even taking pride in the visible wear. It’s also led a lot of people to seek out alternative places to shop, which might seem inaccessible to a global audience on the surface, but boosts local small businesses. I’ve also never liked logomania for my personal style, so while I respect its storied history, I personally liked having more streamlined options.
How are these three topics related, I hear you ask.
They’re rooted in their reliance on the senses: in other words, the expansion of life offline. You can only describe perfume so much, it has to be smelt to be believed. Food can look delectable on screen, but that becomes meaningless if it doesn’t taste good. Conversely, quiet luxury clothes look utterly boring on a screen, the very opposite of Instagram clothes — the appeal is in feeling the heft of the fabrics, being able to see the details a camera won’t pick up. (In that respect, sound is the only sense that can be accurately shared over the internet.1)
It just seems so interesing to me that three of the most popular topics online in the last couple of years, having spawned whole online communities around them, can be seen as expressions of a yearning for local, in-person communities. It makes sense, given the un-ending number of articles about people yearning for community, on this platform alone.
Now it’s starting to bleed into other facets of daily life. Wearing an “eye”-catching (nose-catching?) perfume is an invitation for conversation and connection. Unusual fibres and craftsmanship is an opportunity to ask questions, learn, and connect. And food has always been a vehicle for connection, the perfect excuse for socialising while doing “an activity”, per se. But these things can only happen at a(n extremely) local level.
This has been picked up on by businesses. My parents recently went to Italy and brought back coffee by Italian brand Bialetti, produced in collaboration with D&G.2 The collection also includes associated crockery. I also read this morning about how fashion brands are now collaborating with hotels to further the worldbuilding in a way that feels tangible. By building offline experiences, they further consumers’ (hopefully) positive associations of the brand to encourage business.
While this desire for offline life is being used as a marketing strategy, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing if it does actually serve its purpose to encourage offline socialising (instead of keeping the focus on the brand names involved). I read this article this morning about how craft nights are cool and inclusive opportunities for social connection. I love the idea (not at all surprising to anyone who knows me) and want to explore implementing it in my own life. And during those craft nights, why not light a scented candle and serve special coffee in the name of bringing festivity to the occassion? It’s these moments of warm and memorable connection that build the community we’re all so desperately seeking, as we continue to blend life on- and offline.
This could tie in very nicely to a post on audiological health, podcasts, etc. So many potential spin-offs here. But for now we’re focussing on the chosen three.
If anyone was interested, I’m not a coffee person but the D&G x Bialetti coffee is quite nice imo.