San Francisco winery owner Urannia Ristow canceled her lavish Christmas party after Sept. 11, but don’t cry for Nob Hill. “I’m seeing a lot of little holiday dinners,” she confided last week.
Nor is the pall around the diamond display at Tiffany & Co. lately the sole measure of America’s trauma; the sterling-silver jewelry department there has been bustling.
At the same time, even in the midst of America’s recessionary despondence, Gloria Litz, a Los Angeles-area travel agent, has been besieged by callers who’ve decided at the last minute that it’s Aspen, Colo., or bust. In New York, publishers of event calendars say the holidays will be lower-key but as full of engagements as ever.
Unemployment may be at a six-year high and the Age of Ostentation may be beyond over, but indulgence hasn’t entirely gone away. Even as recession and terrorism have drained Americans’ confidence levels and checkbooks, that hardy perennial conspicuous consumption has evolved to suit the occasion. “What we’re seeing,” said Robbie Blinkoff, a cultural anthropologist and market researcher in Baltimore, “is a sort of changed definition of luxury.”
Haves are still splurging
Call it Conspicuous Austerity. Broadly speaking, researchers say, the haves are still splurging — they’ve just downshifted to the familiar, the understated and the safe. Blinkoff, whose Context-Based Research Group has been tracking consumer attitudes since the attacks, says a number of basic American assumptions were undermined after Sept. 11, from broad civil liberties to low-risk travel, leaving U.S. society with “a new value filter” that has emphasized — permanently, he thinks — “meaning and family and security and community.”
It’s a 180-degree shift from last year’s Prada bowling bags and extreme tourism. Cozy home items are selling now in a way that cannot be said for that dot-com status symbol of yore, the Herman Miller Aeron office chair.
Those who can afford to are still remodeling their houses or buying vacation homes. Author Judith Krantz, who is renovating her Beverly Hills home, said her construction supervisor “has never been busier.” But she added that she and her husband have decided not to exchange gifts this yearand she has opted out of her usual holiday ritual, in which, she joked, “I find something I desperately need at Van Cleef and lead my husband there. For me not to think about jewelry is unusual, but it just seems utterly unimportant this year.”
To the extent that high fashion is selling, it’s old-hippie chic — the Yves St. Laurent peasant blouse, the unassuming silver teardrop Tiffany earring. Wealth — flaunted in the New Money Nineties — has retreated to insularity. Private holiday gatherings have turned intimate or, if they’ve been planned too far in advance to be scaled back, are being downplayed.
Rebookings are down
Merry Miller, a Manhattan harpist who also runs a music agency, says that of 23 corporate events she booked last year, only four have rebooked. Last-minute calls from hosts of private parties, however, have been burgeoning, she says, as “people who would have held dinner at a restaurant for 40 people with a jazz band last year are having cocktails in their apartment this year.”
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Ristow, the wife of a cosmetic surgeon and owner of the Ristow Estate winery, agrees that “everyone has toned down the big parties, just out of the understanding of the number of people who’ve lost jobs and loved ones.”
Conspicuous consumption — a term coined 102 years and many crises ago by the American social critic Thorstein Veblen — involves style and substance. Everyone consumes. The question is, how noticeable do we want our spending to be? Like so many other social indicators, what and how Americans buy is being watched differently, post-Sept. 11, for what it says about the social fabric.
Carl Steidtmann, chief economist at Deloitte Research, says that the luxury sector — jewelry, furs, designer clothing, expensive cars and boats, etc. — boomed in the 1990s as bonuses and stock options boosted legions of upper-middle-class Americans into the high-income brackets. With the recession, that “aspirational customer” has faded from traditional high-end markets, leaving the sector once again to its usual old-money customers.
“But the rich are still rich, and they’re still spending,” Steidtmann says. “There’s just a reduced ostentatiousness that comes, especially in New York, from the desire to pull together. One of the things luxury goods do is to differentiate people, and the rich don’t want to be as differentiated right now.”
New values persist
Blinkoff agrees. “People were having existential dilemmas over whether to have a latte or just make do with a small coffee” in the first days after the attacks, he said. As time has passed, “people have gotten past that, but they’re still into their new values, and this Christmas shopping season has been their first chance to match their spending to who they are now.”
For example, 45 percent of respondents to a survey by Deloitte & Touche with BIGresearch said they plan to spend more time than they have in the past with their families this holiday. Fifty-six percent said they had sprung recently for cell phones, bottled water or stockpiles of extra batteries. Seventy-three percent said they plan to spend at least as much or more this year on home improvement as they did last year. Sixty-two percent had the same plans for home furnishings.
Two-thirds of holiday shoppers said they would be paying with cash or checks — not credit cards — for this year’s Christmas presents. And discount outlets ranked, even by upper-income households, as the first or second shopping choice for nine out 12 categories of gifts.
It is in this spirit that people such as Debra Ballard say they are forgoing Christmas extravaganzas in favor of family vacations that cost almost as much.
“Last Christmas it was DVDs for everybody,” Ballard, a mother of two, said, sorting through gag gifts at a San Francisco Bay Area Target — a store where she had “not shopped in ages” but to which she had found herself drawn the other day.
“This year, we’re going to (Lake) Tahoe. We just wanted it more to be about family and connecting — just being together as opposed to material things.”
She’s not the only one.
Slowdown letting up
“I don’t know whether the slowdown has been financial or emotional, but it seems to be letting up,” said Litz, the travel agent. “In the last 10 days, a lot of people have decided they want to go skiing immediately.” Callers, she says, have besieged her with requests for ski resort accommodations and non-stop tickets to Aspen at $980 apiece.
At Neiman Marcus in San Francisco, last season’s strappy Manolo Blahnik stilettos were languishing at $505 a pair — marked down from $755 — on the sale rack last week, while a pair of shoppers pestered the clerk with requests for the latest Tod’s loafers, at a not-that-much-cheaper full price of $350 a pair. At the San Francisco Wine Trading Co., no fewer than eight bottles of the rare cult wine Screaming Eagle were being sold on consignment for $1,495 to $1,795 each — not because the wealthy owners were down on their luck, said proprietor Gary Marcaletti, but because “they decided they aren’t into hoarding it anymore.”
Not all businesspeople welcome an age in which less is the new more. “It’s terrible,” said Miller, the Manhattan harpist, with a sigh as she shushed her boyfriend, who was warbling “Silver Bells” in the background.
“Yeah, ting-a-ling, hear ’em ring, but that’s not my cash register ringing,” she said.
Shawn Hubler and Mimi Avins are staff writers for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune newspaper.Like so many other social indicators, what and how Americans buy is being watched differently, post-Sept. 11, for what it says about the social fabric.