ike many, I suspect, I’d like to think that we will learn from the past year. Otherwise, it will just be like a bad dream that we wake from, and although that notion brings with it a degree of comfort, surely it represents a lost opportunity. In speaking to designers and those who run luxury businesses in the UK and abroad, over the past 12 months I’ve been struck by the overwhelming sense that despite the unforeseen interruption to business as usual and the difficulties this has caused, business as usual pre-pandemic was not so great. And arguably, unsustainable. This feeling among those steering luxury brands is not so much a comment on bottom lines, growth or demand, but something more existential. It was put best to me by one who has lived through his fair share of the vagaries of the luxury story, Giorgio Armani. The Italian designer is convinced that somewhere in the not-so-distant past we took a wrong turn as makers and consumers of luxury goods. He believes that luxury firms have been over-influenced by the methods of fast fashion and set about producing too much product and promoting the idea of trend-driven obsolescence. He now advocates a slower approach, talking of how luxury labels should make less but make better, and the consumer, in turn, should be educated to buy less and buy better. Armani is outspoken on the subject. He makes the case that the slowdown he is suggesting would lead to a more environmentally friendly approach. And as part of this readjustment, he also champions the concept of more timeless aesthetics. If products are designed to date quickly, people will not be inclined to keep using them. Instead, says Armani, if pieces are designed to last, not just in terms of the quality of manufacture but also with regard to style, they will see greater service over a longer period of time. Again, this is better for the environment. But it also speaks of a more considered approach to how we consume and a greater appreciation we might have of what we purchase. I for one can only hope that Armani is right about a shift towards a less frenetic pace of consumerism, where luxury is not a matter of price, but of design excellence. And aesthetic beauty. Another Italian springs to mind here. I remember seeing a documentary made by Italian furniture company Molteni & C explaining that polymath architect Gio Ponti believed Italy could be rebuilt after the war through beauty. Ponti is a personal favourite of mine, and Molteni & C still makes some of his extraordinary furniture to this day, a testament to alluring design that has resolutely stood the test of time. He once said, “Half of Italy was made by God, the other half by architects,” and it is in this idea of the human ability to create wonderful, life-enhancing, beautiful things that I see the essence of true luxury, and the hope for its future. Beauty is key. Was there ever a luxury product that was not beautiful? Talk of beauty always makes me think of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, a poem about a luxury good – a Greek vase. The characters depicted, while full of life, are fixed: a pair about to kiss, their moment of ardour and anticipation captured by the artist and held there: “Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair” says the poet to the young man depicted with his lover. The urn captures beauty, and though we will fade it will remain “a friend to man”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” If luxury is a celebration of human creativity and artistry, rather than merely a statement of wealth, it rests on the notion of our ability, like Keats and the imagined artist who made his urn, to fashion things. There is a Latin phrase, homo faber, meaning ‘man the maker’, which encapsulates the idea that we can have agency over our lives, that we can be creators of tools and our fates. This ancient concept was taken up by the humanists and later loomed large in the Italian Renaissance. Now it has been adopted by a contemporary Geneva-based organisation, the Michelangelo Foundation for Creativity and Craftsmanship, which celebrates specialist craftsmen and their work around the world. There is a Homo Faber exhibition in Venice; the first was staged in 2018, under the title ‘Crafting a more human future’, and the second aims to be revived this September. Meanwhile, the Homo Faber Guide website showcases the work of creators around the world. What is fascinating is that one of the men behind this is Johann Rupert, the chairman of the Swiss-based Richemont group. Rupert in his day job presides over some of the world’s most famous luxury brands, including Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Piaget and Chloé. And yet the Homo Faber project mentions none of these. It is not about global brands but small-scale enterprises, sometimes even individuals, who make exquisite pieces, mostly by hand, and always with immense skill and artistry. This begs the question: why would Rupert care to invest time, money and energy in an enterprise that has no bearing on Richemont? I will hazard a guess: because like many of us, he is interested in the future of luxury and understands that it begins with the act of creating, not with a marketing campaign or a SWOT analysis identifying business opportunities. Behind the very brands that Richemont owns are a host of stories about people just like those on the Homo Faber platform who started off with ideas and talent, and who planted the seeds that have flourished into global businesses today – people like Louis-François Cartier, Alfred Dunhill, Alfred Van Cleef and Salomon Arpels, and Mario Buccellati. Rupert knows that the lifeblood of luxury depends on nurturing inspired creative craftsmanship. It is no accident that his group’s slogan is: ‘At Richemont, we craft the future’. 5 2
W A L P O L E
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, & all ye need to know” JOHN K E AT S
Opposite ► 1. Gucci 2010 ‘Forever Now’ Campaign. 2. Giorgio Armani, the pioneer of the deconstructed suit jacket. 3. The work of ceramicist Sophie Kate Curran. 4. John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. 5. South London cycle manufacturer Caren Hartley. 6. Gio Ponti & Molteni & C. 7. Homo Faber 2021 Curators & Designers with Founder Franco Cologni & Executive Director Alberto Cavalli. 8 Molteni & C.
