Liveable Luxury — Microdosing Opulence

When it comes to microdosing luxury, take the trend towards premium grocery stores, spearheaded by LA’s favourite market for the supers, Erewhon. Where luxury food shopping was once confined to the marbled food halls of Harrods or Fortnum & Mason and tightly correlated with class, Erewhon’s $20 celebrity smoothies (Hailey Bieber’s sells 40,000 per month) and Erewhon x Balenciaga paper grocery bags are as much a symbol of luxury as a $2,000 handbag. ​“We need people to understand that we’re not just a grocery store. It’s something you buy into,” says Alec Antoci, part of the Erewhon dynasty.

These small pleasures aren’t one-off extravagances, but regular indulgences that signify cultural know-how and give the buzz of a luxury purchase on a weekly or daily basis. These micro-luxuries add up to a lifestyle that feels luxurious, as well as expanding a brand’s universe to new fans and potential future customers who can get a taste for the brand and decide if it truly reflects who they want to be without initially making a massive investment.

High-end fashion houses are reflecting this shift through branded cafés and coffee shops. There’s Ralph’s Coffee for Ralph Lauren, as well as the Prada Caffé, Tiffany and Co’s Blue Box Café, and Café Leon Dore, the in-store café at lux streetwear brand Aimé Leon Dore. Even the humble fry-up has got a glow up, with Burberry x Norman’s contentious collaboration and Veuve Clicquot’s Sunny Side Up Café. These efforts are the crux of liveable luxury: they unlock status not through wealth, but through culture. Liveable luxury is about scarcity not in volume, but in knowledge. Personalisation not in bespoke products, but in how we mix and remix culture. Cultural clout not through an expensive item, but through participation in a niche community.

The best brands realise that it’s no longer up to them to dictate and gatekeep culture, but instead to celebrate and amplify it. In a more decentralised and democratised culture increasingly driven by Web3 principles, individual creators, curators and fans participate in and even own these communities. Culture isn’t dictated from the top down, but grows organically from the ground up. Traditional luxury brands know that they need culture to be credible, and are collaborating with artists, musicians, athletes and other tastemakers to get it — see Pharrell as Creative Director for Louis Vuitton, or Mercedes’ partnership with A$AP Rocky exploring 90s pop culture through a brand lens. They’re also beginning to behave more like media platforms, producing and curating art, film and literature

LVMH and Saint Laurent now have their own production houses. Prada’s film Castello Cavalcanti was made by Wes Anderson, and there’s a boom in brand podcasts, from Chanel Connects to Vestiaire Collective’s ​“What Were You Thinking?”. Jimmy Choo and Miu Miu have both infiltrated literary culture, the former with its Shreeji Newsagents takeover and limited-edition Jimmy Choo city guide, and the latter with its Summer Reads pop-up. Luxury houses like Dior, Tiffany and Moncler have also launched public museum exhibitions: Gucci Cosmos Land not only had a physical exhibit designed by Es Devlin, but also a twin in The Sandbox metaverse, allowing Gucci to reach audiences in their increasingly important digital lives, too.