Luxury: it's in your head
Author and journalist Naomi Wolf talks with Natalie Livingstone, journalist and author of The Mistresses of Cliveden, at the 2018 Cliveden Literary Festival.
The world of luxury has gone beyond the commodity economy. Yet picture this morning in Mayfair, London: grinding its halted diesel groins at red traffic lights, a top-end Range Rover SV with a £20k personalised number-plate, and the owner’s face a picture of bored. Conspicuous spending no longer evidences success.
People crave what people lack. When The Good Vikings speak to GMs and brand managers, we hear one train of thought informing their decisions. Commodity is no longer the currency of the best guest experience. Kobe beef shampooed in sake for 16 months? Who cares? For customers who have achieved comfort in every area of life except their calendars, the concept of luxury now revolves around two abstracts: time well used and good knowledge gained.
“Luxury now revolves around two abstracts: time well used and good knowledge gained.”
And where are those ambitions finding fruition today? On cruise ships. What? Even The Good Vikings feel queasy at the mention of a cruise. But certain sea-going endeavours are hauling on board stellar professorial intellects and known thought-provokers to run lectures and workshops. The Nobel Laureate Lecture Series on The World (the planet’s largest residential ship) sets the standard.
How can land-based hoteliers compete? Some serious thinking about thinking is where to begin. Such as the literary festival at Cliveden, that famous Home Counties Five Red Star stately-home hotel. It’s good to go beyond the well-worn Profumo affair, even if it did include a meticulously manicured floral parterre.
Legendary editor Tina Brown (Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Daily Beast) returns to the Cliveden Literary Festival’s 2019 line-up, along with Bret Easton Ellis, Kate Mosse, Ben Okri, Leila Slimani, David Walliams, Howard Jacobson and other literary and political notables for two days of lectures, panel discussions and readings.
But this heavyweight two-day lit-fest reads like a punch-up with Hay-on-Wye. The 44-strong participant list is global glitz – from Ian McEwan and Tina Brown to General David Petraeus. So hats off to Cliveden. It's heartening to find an establishment hotel spearheading the new knowledge economy that’s starting to shape people's lives.
