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LUXURY IS DEAD. LONG LIVE LUXURY. The luxury industry must radically change if it really wants to embody the age’s aspirations. MARK STEVENSON leads a call to arms
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Illustration by AASE HOPSTOCK
o, the world is on fire – and you sell designer shoes at £800 a pair. What exactly is the point of you?’ This was the challenge I put to the full staff of a luxury footwear brand one afternoon a few years ago, a day the news was dominated with stories of Californian wildfires that had turned much of the state into a vision of hell. The scale of the fires was unprecedented, but no longer. We now grimly accept that much of the world is a tinderbox, just one indicator of our broken relationship with our fragile home. There was an uncomfortable silence in the room. I let it play out. What, I pressed on, was the point of selling footwear that only the most financially privileged could afford (but certainly didn’t need) in the context of the climate emergency, not to mention a world riven with unconscionable levels of inequality? The silence grew in power as those in attendance looked down at their (no doubt expensive) shoes, shuffled uncomfortably, and offered nothing.
No one had an answer to my challenge, so I relieved them of their gilded misery and told them how they could find relevance and regain a sense of worth in their work – but we’ll come to that later. The recent IPCC report tells us that changes observed in the climate ‘are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years’ – include the added effects of the rise in sea levels and the end result is ‘irreversible’. These changes are due to a temperature rise of 1.1 degrees Celcius since the industrial revolution and are the direct result of human activity. The way in which we work and consume makes nearly all of us complicit in nurturing/fostering the economic and political conditions that have created this disaster. And most of us, CEOs and politicians included, feel powerless in the face of the embedded status quo. That complicity and helplessness are a large part of why, according to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace research programme, between 70 and 80 per cent of employees globally feel disengaged from their work. As the corporate world’s sluggish enlightenment creeps forward, everyone from CEOs to sales assistants tell me that their salaries have
High sustainability companies significantly OUTPERFORM their counterparts over the LONG-TERM
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