LuxePauvre.
Luxe pauvre: impoverished luxury. French poetic synonym for minimalism / reductionism with an emphasis of stripping everything down to the exquisite bare essentials.
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Luxury – accessible luxury – has been a marketing strategy for ages. For as long as there has been social comparison, entities have pulled on the heartstrings of the hoi polloi, promising a better, more glamorous, way of life – with a purchase.
Times have changed from the days of women prolonging the lives of socks by darning them, buying a smart new suit every few years, and yes, investing in a hairnet for the utmost in sophistication. Today, anyone from Ames to Anchorage can log onto net-a-porter.com – the wildly popular online luxury emporium – and buy goods that were once completely out of reach.
Net-a-porter.com, in it’s time, was totally revolutionary. It’s founder, Natalie Massenet, has been hailed as a kind of trend forecasting goddess for predicting that luxury would sell (and sell and sell) online. On its heels came sites like my-wardrobe.com, Gilt Groupe, and La Garconne. Each of them a slightly different rift on the original model. Luxury was suddenly everywhere: I saw young women in Pittsburgh dressed in Alexander Wang, and quite a few Balenciaga bags while on business in Chicago. Personal style blogs further pushed the trend, as luxury goods companies like Coach started sponsoring the amateur – yet highly influential – fashionistas. The whole racket reached a saturation point, and by 2011, everyone on the street looked like they’d walked out of the pages of Lucky.
Not that it’s such a bad thing – people should be able to adorn themselves with nice things, and communicate that they, too, are able to aspire and dream and feel fabulous. But with all of the colors, silks, leathers, studs, and lace-up booties on the street, the mood felt ready to burst. It was time for a stripped down – affordable – approach to living well.
Enter: Everlane. Everlane provides the type of products I love: simple, easy, luxurious, basic, no frills (my favorite brands are Theory, Helmut Lang, and Rag & Bone). And while I carefully select pieces from these fine companies, it’s difficult to justify paying $100 for a t-shirt. However, given the production techniques, the retailer, and of course, the brand – it’s virtually impossible for these pieces to be sold at a “reasonable” price. Besides, part of the cache of owning designer brands is that they are expensive. A colleague from Chicago recently visited New York and asked me how any stores sell anything given the prices. I told him that as we look at our dismally tiny closets, we know every piece has to count.
Circling back to the t-shirts and Everlane. I recently received an invitation to the new site, and was immediately intrigued. Here, their business philosophy:
To the extend of my knowledge, this is an untapped niche in the market. The closest analogue I could come up with is Muji, or maybe Uniqlo if you push it: affordable luxury basics with little to no branding. Muji, on its Wikipedia page, is described as “distinguished by its design minimalism, emphasis on recycling, avoidance of waste in production and packaging, and no-logo or “no-brand” policy.”
The age of the flashy show-and-tell logo has been waning for years now (ever since conspicuous consumption became déclassé), but the concept of quality for quality’s sake, regardless of brand, has recently gained momentum. More brands are opting for no signifying trace of themselves, save the discerning eye of those in the know. Valextra, the Italian leather goods company, for instance, creates utterly divine products without a trace of branding. Starting prices for a women’s handbag hover around $2300. They create an unspoken club that knows luxury when it sees it, with members seamlessly moving among each other, while the rest of us are walking advertisements for Marc Jacobs and Kenneth Cole.
a Valextra bag
Curious, and willing to spend $30, I ordered two t-shirts from Everlane. What I received was nothing short of perfection. The fabric, the fit, the color, the softness. Everything a t-shirt should be, yet maddeningly difficult to find at a reasonable price. Since Everlane is – at least on the surface – transparent about its production methods, as a consumer you can’t help but root for them. Coupled with a quirky, approachable personality, and attentive social media strategy (as far as I can tell, they reply to every tweet in which they are mentioned), the model seems like its come at the right time.
I’ll throw out a tangential analogue to food: the over-arching opinion is that organic, fresh food is out of reach – too expensive, too hard to find – for the masses. We must either spend like drunken sailors on a locally sourced quinoa-nettle-kale salad (Hermes) or settle for a soggy burger (H&M). But when companies like Le Pain Quotidien come around and show that a fast-casual, totally affordable, elegant place can serve delicious, creative, organic food, previously held public opinions start to change. While I’d love to eat lunch at Chez Panisse everyday, it’s satisfying to know that there are options with a similar philosophy and dedication to my values that I can regularly afford. The more the word gets out, the better.
Success begets imitation, so my hope is that a business like Everlane does well, sells a lot of basic luxury goods, and spawns authentic copycats. With more companies creating different value propositions targeted at various consumers, you cover more market surface area. Luxury and quality can be accessible, but it has to be real. I knew it the minute I slipped one of those Everlane t-shirts over my head. As always, an exciting time to be thinking.
