The most luxurious thing I ever owned was a white tablecloth. I bought it on a windswept beach somewhere on the coast of Brazil from a young woman who had no shoes and just three front teeth. She moved from sunlounger to sunlounger, nervously presenting it to the wilting crowd of tourists. They looked up, looked down, then performed the perfunctory dance of the First World tourist when presented with a Third World reality: a shake of the head, a jutting bottom lip and a whispered “No”, whose tone hovered somewhere between annoyance and shame.
Finally, she alighted on my friends and me, where she remained for some time. Perhaps it was the offer of a little shade. Or the desperate need for a final sale. The truth is, I’ll never know. But as she stood there, hot, tired, holding it out to us with all the care and pride of a Savile Row tailor, I noticed that it was not a tablecloth at all but a sort of gossamer-light blanket.
It was made entirely out of lace and was not so much white as the palest cream, a hue so perfect I’d only ever seen the like on the fresh buds of a gardenia. I held it in my hands. Its edges were scalloped, made to appear like a hundred little open seashells, and its entire body was a swirling canvas of geometric shapes mixed with almost psychedelic swirls. It should not have worked; it defied ‘good’ taste. “Six weeks,” she said, pointing to the needlework. I didn’t question it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Over the years it travelled with me from home to home, dressing corner tables and the backs of chairs, bringing a quiet luxury to every room it sat in. When, after two decades or so, it finally gave up the ghost, I took it to one of the best embroiderers in the land to have it repaired. They stared at it in awe, handed it back to me and said they had never seen anything like it. Which was exactly why they couldn’t fix it.
This, by the way, is not a story about a tablecloth. It is a story about the lie we tell ourselves about luxury. Ask the man in the street what he thinks luxury is, and he will proudly tell you: exclusivity. But luxury’s gatekeeper is not its price but its singularity. Which is why it often takes an outsider to create something truly luxurious.
If you are not born into luxury you have a clear sightedness about what it can be: an ability to cut through all the gilt and gloss. You are not swayed by other perceptions of what luxury is and this, of course, is its dichotomy. Sometimes the further away you are from luxury, the better you are able to understand what it can be.
Take Alexander McQueen, the working-class son of an East End cabbie, who approached the rarefied art of tailoring with an audacity never seen before, filleting out the back blades of the classic suit silhouette and narrowing the shoulders to create an elongated, almost tail-like profile. Then there’s Roland Mouret, the son of a butcher from rural France, who learned the complexities of form and shape by watching his father fold his leather apron at night and slice through animal muscle with a blade. (The result: he intrinsically understood that luxury is as much about utility as it is aesthetics. “A dress is a tool, and a tool has to work,” he famously said.) And who can forget Gabrielle Chanel, the French girl who grew up in an orphanage, and went on to set the template for women’s luxury fashion. And yet her influences came from the simplest and most unorthodox of places: a nun’s wimple, a sailor tricot, the white cuffs and collar of the working waitress.
But if great, original talent is to be found in those who have had the furthest to travel, then we have a problem. The creative industries have always been difficult to penetrate for those short on cash, networks and the confidence to take risks. But in the slipstream of Covid it will become ever harder. Scholarships, access programmes, the willingness to take a chance on an unknown will become thinner on the ground as economic hardship grips. This isn’t projection, by the way. This is the reality no matter what the proclamations in the boardroom. We have seen it before and if we’re not smart about it, we will see it again.
So, what can you do? Firstly, look for talent in those places most affected by inequality. A good place to start is the UK’s geographic ‘cold spots’, areas where opportunities for those coming out of education are thinnest on the ground. Secondly, stress potential over polish. Is a dazzling and eloquent performance at interview really crucial to what you do? Thirdly, ask yourself, is an ability to think differently more important than a CV filled with glittering educational merits? Lastly, put the time and thought in. Make sure your doors are wide open and the stairs inside easy to climb and navigate no matter what your background. Do this now and you will have a business that, like the products you create, is built to stand out and last the distance.
Farrah Storr is editor-in-chief of ELLE UK and on the board of the Social Mobility Commission. Farrah is a contributor to the Walpole Book of British Luxury 2021.
