and Quiet Luxury

With the fourth season of Succession airing, Gwenyth Paltrow’s sultry courtroom style, and my TikTok for you page instructing me how to dress like “Old Money,” I got to thinking about how fashion trends have slowly started turning since the pandemic from screaming logomania maximalism to the so called “quiet luxury.” Quiet luxury is a staunchly minimalist style that focuses on quality of the clothes, solid and muted colors, and heavy tailoring. Think Ralph Lauren and your rich New England aunt’s beige cashmere sweaters. This fashion philosophy comes from the saying “money talks but wealth whispers.” The fashion world has turned away from garish, obvious displays of wealth, to more silent, if you know you know luxury statements.

The cause of this drastic flip in trends has to do with the onset of the recession. With recessions, people are not going to be spending as much, thus it is more fiscally responsible to buy better quality pieces that can go with everything and be worn forever as opposed to buying a new wardrobe every season based on microtrends. I also think that people don’t want to be flaunting designer labels in a time of economic downturn, as it can be viewed as tone deaf and out of touch. Recently, we have been seeing a lot of discussion surrounding brands such as The Row, Loro Piana, and Brunello Cuncinelli. These fashion houses are known for their amazing quality and minimal designs, and eye popping prices. Loro Piana especially is known for their excellent wools and cashmeres, which are some of the best in the world. And no family loves these brands more than the Roy family in the hit HBO show Succession.

A fashion statement that has become synonymous with the show is the $1195 all black cashmere Loro Piana baseball cap. At first glance, this hat looks as though it was bought at your average mall kiosk. But according to the Italian fashion house’s website, it is “made from The Gift of Kings® — Loro Piana’s exclusive selection of the world’s finest wool.” There are no logos and no marketing. It is a statement of wealth to those who recognize it and completely unassuming for us plebeians who don’t. To people with serious money, it is not Chanel, Dior, or Louis Vuitton that are a display of wealth, but the custom suits, million dollar watches, and $7000 cashmere sweaters that silently complement their obscene fortunes. To them, the logos and monograms of the most famous designer brands are simply too bourgeois for their tastes. Anna Wintor once said that “Armani dresses the wife and Versace dresses the mistress.” In the same manner, Gucci dresses the nouveau-riche while Brunello Cucinelli dresses generational wealth.

Zara, H&M, and Uniqlo all have collections that emulate this “old money” style, so what is the point of spending thousands of dollars on unlabeled, basic clothes. The answer is: because why not? When someone has that much money to burn, it becomes not about the quality or the style, but to prove to everyone else that they can afford to buy a $1000 baseball cap and wear golfing. So in that way, this quiet luxury fallacy is just that, a fallacy. The price tags of these items scream money more than Versace sneakers. Although trying to be understated, the baseball hat is practically an exclamation point over the head of the investment banker, financié wearing it. It screams I have oil money. It shouts aristocracy. While this all may seem so outlandish to our bourgeois sensibilities, this is the reality of the generational wealthy. They want to fly under the radar as much as possible, especially during recessions, where much more scrutiny is given to their fortunes.

The quiet luxury aesthetic shows how pop culture, the economy, and social media are an overwhelming influence on how we dress. This makes sense. Recessions permeate our lives, change our spending patterns, and thus affect how we dress. Pop culture, such as TV shows, enthrall us, we obsessively watch them, and therefore of course they will impact how we present ourselves, giving us a standard to dress to. So the quiet luxury style becomes more than just a style, but a microcosm of class philosophy, popular culture, and economics. It shows that fashion is not separate from the politics of our world, but deeply intertwined with every aspect of our lives.