Janus Thinking

What better than to combine two activities which people love: art and travel.  A recent article in the Financial Times highlights a growing trend for guided, short-stay holidays centred on visiting art fairs or workshops. 

Sotheby’s and Christie’s both have established trips and representatives say that the level of interest has been high. The tours cover some of the most famous contemporary art events of the year, such as Art Basel, to more remote trips to visit the projects or studios of single artists.

As FT journalist Kathryn Tully puts it:

The tours aim to convey a better appreciation of both contemporary art and the broader art investment market. The art investment lectures include how to approach a dealer and get a good deal, and how to build a valuable collection.

These trips show how luxury providers are finding more creative ways to link wealthy people’s interests together to create bespoke offerings to them.  As the art market continues to see record prices, it will be interesting to see how demand for these trips keeps up.

The first commercial Airbus A380 superjumbo jet was unveiled by Singapore Airlines this week, and calling its interpretation of first class luxurious might be an understatement. The double-decker plane has 12 luxury suites, which are configured in numerous ways and include conference rooms and rooms with a double bed. The plane will fly from Singapore to Sydney and ’seats’ in suites will cost about $4000 apiece. The plane also has 60 business class seats and 399 economy class seats.

What luxurious comforts do the suites offer? In addition to full beds, there are 23in LCD screens, furnishings by Givenchy and food by celebrity chefs including Gordon Ramsay.

Rival airline Qantas has already announced its A380 design, which includes 14 suites, 72 business class seats, 32 premium economy seats and 332 economy class seats. I’d be curious to learn how different carriers decide on their configurations, and how important a consideration is luxury at the expense of maximizing profits.

Check out a photo gallery of the Singapore Airlines A380 here, and an article and video from The Scotsman here. BoingBoing also recently discovered photos of the plane configured without an interior, they’re online here.

The latest issue of the Financial Times’ How to Spend It supplement came out on Friday (October 12), and not unexpectedly it includes some great stories about luxury. My personal favorites:

• The Reign of Terroir by John Stimpfig (p8)–a profile of Bernard Magrez, wine magnate. Magrez owns 35 wine estates around the world and is rapidly buying up more. Output is about quality over quantity, thereby creating demand for a niche luxury product. He puts his umbrella brand name (Vignobles Bernard Magrez), picture and signature on every bottle he produces as a way to create competitive advantage, not for his own hubris or vanity. He says:

Compared to watches and fashion, wine is a much more complicated luxury good. So the message needs to be simpler and more recognizable. Moreover, the new affluent consumer wants to know the person behind the wine.

• No Flowers Please by Karen Wheeler (p15)–about how alpha women are wearing masculine scents in the workplace in order to project discrete power. Old favorites (Acqua di Parma, Terre d’Hermès) and new scents (Neroli Portofino by Tom Ford) are mentioned.
• Take My Breath Away by John Gibb (p19)–about the Javelin, a ‘Very Light Jet’ that looks like a fighter jet and has space for one executive who needs to get somewhere in a hurry.
• The Captain’s Table: Christophe Navarre as told to Max de Lotbinière (p70)–on the philosophy and typical day of the Moët Hennessy CEO.

Moët Hennessy is in the business of luxury wine and spirits so the moment of eating and drinking is very important to us. We are selling l’art de vivre à la française — even when we are selling a malt whisky, with all the DNA that its brand has, we are still selling that essential French identity.

This ‘How to Spend It’ is a bonus issue and doesn’t appear to be online (yet?)–so have a look if you missed it in Friday’s FT.

The latest issue of the Financial Times’ How to Spend It supplement came out on Friday (October 12), and not unexpectedly it includes some great stories about luxury. My personal favorites:

• The Reign of Terroir by John Stimpfig (p8)–a profile of Bernard Magrez, wine magnate. Magrez owns 35 wine estates around the world and is rapidly buying up more. Output is about quality over quantity, thereby creating demand for a niche luxury product. He puts his umbrella brand name (Vignobles Bernard Magrez), picture and signature on every bottle he produces as a way to create competitive advantage, not for his own hubris or vanity. He says:

Compared to watches and fashion, wine is a much more complicated luxury good. So the message needs to be simpler and more recognizable. Moreover, the new affluent consumer wants to know the person behind the wine.

• No Flowers Please by Karen Wheeler (p15)–about how alpha women are wearing masculine scents in the workplace in order to project discrete power. Old favorites (Acqua di Parma, Terre d’Hermès) and new scents (Neroli Portofino by Tom Ford) are mentioned.
• Take My Breath Away by John Gibb (p19)–about the Javelin, a ‘Very Light Jet’ that looks like a fighter jet and has space for one executive who needs to get somewhere in a hurry.
• The Captain’s Table: Christophe Navarre as told to Max de Lotbinière (p70)–on the philosophy and typical day of the Moët Hennessy CEO.

Moët Hennessy is in the business of luxury wine and spirits so the moment of eating and drinking is very important to us. We are selling l’art de vivre à la française — even when we are selling a malt whisky, with all the DNA that its brand has, we are still selling that essential French identity.

This ‘How to Spend It’ is a bonus issue and doesn’t appear to be online (yet?)–so have a look if you missed it in Friday’s FT.

One for the ‘too-good-to-be-true’ file: several weeks ago we mentioned the discovery of an unpolished diamond in the North-West Province of South Africa that was said to be twice the size of the Cullinan diamond. Turns out it’s a hoax: The UK’s Guardian reports that Brett Jolly, a British property developer, was apparently duped by former business colleagues who were trying to get him to buy the land where the ‘diamond’ was found. Upon Jolly’s arrival at the mine, they produced something that was clearly plastic and didn’t or wouldn’t use the testing machine properly on this ‘diamond’ to accurately test it. Shame.

In actual diamond news, Sotheby’s recently held an auction in Hong Kong that sold a 6.04 carat internally flawless ‘fancy vivid blue’ diamond for $7.98 million. That’s a price of $1.32 million per carat, about 10 times the amount that white diamonds of this caliber would sell for, and well above the previous record set by ‘Hancock Red,’ a red diamond that sold for $926,000 per carat 20 years ago.

The Diamond Vues blog notes that Sotheby’s is also going to auction off a nearly perfect 84.37 carat white diamond on November 14 in Geneva. It’s expected to fetch $15 million.

And so demand for exceptional diamonds continues to rise.

Dana Thomas recently wrote Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster, a well reviewed book about the history and transformation of the luxury goods industry from bespoke simplicity to global commoditization.

We’ve already mentioned an excerpt of the book that was published in the UK’s Times; I recently came across an interview with Thomas on AlterNet that hits on many of the topics in the book, and found it quite interesting.

You say the corporations that have taken over the luxury industry want to democratize luxury. Why isn’t that a good thing?

The luxury tycoons wanted to democratize luxury; they wanted to make it accessible. That’s a very noble idea except there wasn’t a noble reason behind it. They just wanted to make more money, and if they sold it to more people in more places and had a higher markup, they’d make more profits for themselves and for their shareholders.

Read the whole interview here.

A hotel in Sri Lanka is offering a luxury dessert for its luxury clientele–for $14,500. Is offering the dessert simply a publicity stunt to build awareness of the hotel, or is the dessert worthy of such a price on its own merit? It does include an 80 carat aquamarine stone, which has about the same diameter as the head of a soup spoon.

Of course if someone is willing to pay the price (which one person apparently already has), he or she believes the dessert will provide a worthwhile amount of pleasure and enjoyment.

But is it in bad taste, given the amount of poverty in Sri Lanka and the fact that this chocolate, champagne and caramelized sugar confection costs about seven times the average Sri Lankan national income? Not according to the general manager of the hotel:

We have had a positive reaction both locally and internationally to the dessert which we don’t think is out of place, even in a country where there is considerable poverty… We felt that there has been so much negative news emerging from Sri Lanka in recent months in relation to the war, and wanted to come up with something that was upbeat and fun.

Upbeat and fun indeed.

[via BBC News]