Mere life is a luxury
In these five words above lies the conundrum of our special topic. Both travel + luxury are very broad concepts and are very hard to define. And yet they are incredibly important … to all. Life itself, indeed. The two concepts that might seem at first glance non-essential are somehow the essence of enjoying life rather than enduring it.
To give the fuller quote from which the headline is drawn, here are Mark Twain’s words: “Mere life is a luxury, and the color of the grass, of the flowers, of the sky, the wind in the trees, the outlines of the horizon, the forms of clouds, all give a pleasure as exquisite as the sweetest music to the ear famishing for it.”
Put that way, everything may be seen as potentially luxury or travel as we pass through our lives. And, taken to absolute extremes, one person’s luxury adventure trip can seem close – and yet entirely different – to the horrific elements that make up another’s desperate journey from one country to another in search of a future, employment or refuge. Passages through life that are worlds apart and yet in the same world, using some of the same space and tools. ‘Travel’ and ‘luxury’ are shape-shifting concepts, calling up another dimension, when applied to the atoms and the hours of our days.
We often see the two concepts together, as in luxury travel, be it as transport or location or activity, or even the suitcases or suits we choose. But we also see them separately: as in luxury chocolates and travel essentials, where they start to mean something quite different.
Even when we try to reduce these two words to be simple descriptors – be it ‘comfort and style’ for luxury, or ‘long journey’ for travel – they wriggle free, refusing to be specific. What is style and what is long?
In Lürzer’s Archive’s categories, we may position travel + luxury as broad areas that range from the mundane and affordable (as in those chocolates and essentials mentioned before) to the most out-there of outside activities and the most extravagant of unnecessary expenditures.
They are two of the most teasingly challenging areas to build brands within. This is in part because they are über-labels for describing anything … cars, bags, watches, train and airline seats, water and wine, and so on. Just about everything can sit under these wrapper words.
That is, we might suggest, because both are forms of myth-making, similar to the building blocks of making any brand. They are all about belief systems and values, rather than actual things or places.
TravelTM and Luxury® might be mega brands under which so much else sits. We can wrap so much with them … indeed, right now, many of you are perhaps doing that in creating the next brands, the next ads.
In this Special we aim to give you raw material, food for thought and perhaps even inspiration. We examined the recent deep archives of L[A] and pulled out some of the best luxury and travel ads. Then we juxtapose them over the following pages with a few rare words, short statements that are each a reduction of some of the finer things said about luxury and travel.
Et voilà! It’s for you to enjoy and just think about what luxury and travel might mean now and ahead. It can be anything and yet it will be something intensely personal … like life. As Mr Twain said.
The greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time.
Luxury is the opposite of the naturally necessary. With enough luxuries we can dispense with necessities.
Is morality a luxury or a necessity?
Luxury is increasingly a necessity for wellbeing.
The best things in life must be recognized and elevated. Then challenged.
Travel and luxury are at their best when at their simplest.
A distant horizon is the ultimate wonder of the world.
Illusions of luxury and travel are reshaped by global politics.
Animals invite us to travel outside of ourselves, while reminding us of what it is to be human.
Travel is never really now, it is always in the past and the future.
Often the best part of luxury and travel is the anticipation.
Why do we desire to go somewhere we have never been?
The global luxury market is projected to grow by 60% between 2022 and 2030. The consumer base is estimated at 400 million rising to 500 million over the period.
In the items above, we invited you to engage with a shuffled deck of classic works and speculative words. We drew on and synthesized ideas from writers and commentators as diverse as Karl Marx and Oscar Wilde, Bill Bryson, Cesare Pavese, Jil Sander, Henry Adams and W. Somerset Maugham. We intended to stimulate inspiration and perhaps help you forge your own insight, or future production, around the luxury and travel space. We did it playfully but with serious intent. The more we thought and curated the subjects of travel and luxury, the more far-reach- ing they seemed to become.
As more than one of the cryptic thought-prompts over the previous pages suggests, luxury and travel are essential parts of life’s journey. It is, whether we are consumers or producers and often both, integrated into much of contemporary human existence. Even in poverty, or perhaps especially in poverty, aspiration goes beyond the bare necessities. Perhaps there lies the wellspring for the myths of all luxury.
For many of us though, luxury is never far outside of our routine, outside of our travel through the day from how we sleep, to how we wash, to what we put on, to what we do, where we go, and what we want to do.
There are so many little and large luxuries embedded in the narrative of our existence, whether we consciously note them or not. Note that flat white with oat milk in your manicured hand, for example.
Our cover picture by Markus Müller, showing a keen mountaineer with her faithful dogs, may not seem to capture that ubiquity but it does. As so often with luxury, it is an image that draws on the aspiration of travel. Or it could equally be a travel image that plays with luxury. And it is both retro and future: after all, it was from an ad we featured in 2013 but that look has more than a touch of Barbie and is very hot this year (a major feature film with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling). And rich pink is the color of the year, we are told.
Given the growth projection for luxury goods and services that we highlight on this page, and with experiences (ie. travel) a key part of the expected uplift, we predict major creative opportunities over the rest of this decade. A recent report into the industry by Bain Consulting provided us with the data points above and went on to conclude: “Luxury is converting into art, with the ultimate objective of transcending from its original form, rooted in craftsmanship and functional excellence, towards broader meanings.”
Marketing will be to the fore in shaping a new expression for what luxury is, a deeper and extensive establishment that is the very opposite of tasteless “bling” or over-consumption. In fact, luxury is at its best, at all and at any price points, an articulation of what can make being human highly enjoyable. We can all innocently want for more of that.
Advertised photographers in the print version of this piece were Stanley's Post, Chad Chisholm Photography, Nuno Correia Photography, Dean Alexander, Erik Almås Photography, Gregory Reid, Braden Summer Image + Motion, Chad Holder Photography, Abigail Bobo, Patrik Johall, Recom Group, Karan Kapoor, Harniman, Nicholas Duas, Martin Lugger Photography, and Bram Declercq.
