On Quality

Quality and luxury are different things. The confusion is useful to anyone selling an ordinary object at an extraordinary price.

In the house where I was trained, and in every house I subsequently managed, the objects were good. The boots were good because they were made by a bootmaker who knew his trade and who kept the measurements of every gentleman he served on file, written in pencil on brown card, against the day they would be needed again. The writing desk was good because it was solid mahogany, properly joined, and had been in the family for three generations, during which time it had required nothing more than the occasional application of wax and the occasional repair of a drawer runner. The razors were good because they were steel, properly tempered, and kept sharp by a man (myself, as it happened) who understood that a blade which is maintained will outlast the hand that maintains it.

These were ordinary marks of competence, and simply what careful people bought when they bought anything at all. A bootmaker traded upon the boots and a cabinetmaker upon the furniture; paying a premium for a name in place of superior material and workmanship would have seemed rather like paying extra for arithmetic because it gave the correct answer.

Your era has reversed the relation. My assistant has walked me through the shops, regarding the exercise as educational, and shown me an ordinary cotton shirt of adequate construction offered at a price which, in my day, would have clothed a man for a year. Its visible distinction was the name upon the label; neither the cloth nor the careless stitching at the collar supplied a second argument.

I find this unintelligible, with immorality hovering nearby. The buyer pays many times the material value in order to carry an advertisement for the seller, and has somehow been persuaded that displaying another man's name constitutes refinement. Marketing has understood vanity very well.

The men I served would have recognised what is happening here, because they saw the beginnings of it. The conspicuous display of wealth was, even in my time, the mark of the newly arrived: people who had money but not yet the judgement to know what to do with it, and who therefore required their possessions to announce their position on their behalf. The established gentleman's wardrobe was often deliberately quiet. His country house might be magnificent, but it was inherited; his watch was his father's; his shoes were old and well-maintained. The entire structure of your modern luxury trade, which exists to make wealth visible, to ensure that strangers may calculate what you have spent, would have read to him as a confession of social insecurity. The people who need to show it are the people who have only just got it.

Many buyers no longer know how to assess cloth, a welt, or a joint, and use price as a substitute for knowledge. A salesman could hardly ask for a more obedient customer.

A quality object is well made, durable, and suited to its purpose. It rewards the maker's skill and is worth maintaining.

Luxury, as your era often practises it, places less importance upon the object than upon what strangers may infer about the owner's wealth and membership in a tribe of consumers. Taste has by then given way to performance, and the pleasure lasts only until something more expensive appears.

Learn to recognise sound cloth, leather, steel, and wood, then maintain what you own and repair what can be repaired. When a shop values an object at ten times what its materials and workmanship suggest, ask whether the price belongs to the thing or the name upon it, and whether in the quiet of your own home, with the label hidden, you could still perceive the difference.

Crale