Luxury x Culture

Welcome sartorial weirdness, Polyvore 3.0, vintage markets and performance art

Once upon a time, when an item sold too well or too quickly, a luxury brand would discontinue it. Hermès is still doing it, but examples are dwindling. In the visual culture of luxury, it doesn’t even matter — photos of rare Birkins are everywhere all at once. To participate in luxury culture, a person does not even need to participate in the luxury market. They can own, share and trade in luxury images. As the scenarios outlined below show, luxury’s migrating towards ever more imaginary — literally and figuratively — from bizarrely imaginative designs that are bound to do well on TikTok to images that are consumed as the real thing. This migration doesn’t come as a surprise: memes, references, recontextualization and cultural symbols are Internet’s language that got to dominate culture as well. These new formats gave rise to even newer formats — performances, resales, shared closets and sartorial weirdness — that turn luxury into commerce via culture.

The four scenarios are outlined after the jump.

Gill Linton is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Byronesque, a seller of vintage designer clothing with a point of view. We met at the end of 2019, through my book, and had a conversation that I still remember. Gill introduced me to terms “future vintage” and “contemporary vintage” to describe…