Last Friday, on my commute out of the office and into the embrace of a particularly strong Martinez, I managed to run afoul of several teenagers who โ like seemingly half of Sydney this time of year โ were out to partake in Vivid. (Translation: paying $40 a head to marvel at the wonders of electricity.)
I didnโt think much of this interaction at the time, but in hindsight, distinctly remember one of them โ letโs call him โNPC #2โ โ offering a snickering remark about my overly โcapaciousโ tote bag. And I wasnโt even carrying flat shoes for the subway.
It was around this moment that the relentless and inexorable popularity of Succession fell upon me. Like pretty much everybody else in the Western world, I had been vaguely swept up over the past few years in the sumptuous locations; acid-tinged dialogue (i.e. Shakespeare by way of Glengarry Glen Ross); helipad drama; and riveting soundtrack of HBOโs latest prestige TV series.
Now, here I was, about to start my weekend, being mocked by a gaggle of Gen Zโs finest โ who are evidently also big Succession fans.
For this particular demo, the topic of fashion is tightly interwoven with a minute-to-minute dissection of the show. Along with his writers and costumers, creator Jesse Armstrong has used clothing and worn objects over the course of four seasons to drive character arcs; and flesh out the world inhabited by media titan Logan Roy and his preternaturally un-serious progeny.
The last time I personally remember a prestige TV show inciting such fervent scrutiny โ for clothes, booze, furniture, and every square inch of production design โ was at the tail-end of the 2010s โ as Mad Men, AMCโs poignant and endlessly rewatchable period drama, was coming to a close. In that era, beleaguered fashion writers also made grand proclamations about a new โGolden Ageโ for preppy suits, Brooks Brothers and what they termed the Don Draper effect.
But, crucially, that was before TikTok โ and our observations have only gotten more reductive since.
Now, the relentless pace at which ByteDanceโs social media platform encourages a young, largely Zoomer-led audience to consume and compartmentalise has given us Successionโs answer to the Mad Men-era suit boom โ the โquiet luxuryโ trend.
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โQuiet Luxuryโ: A Rose By Any Other Name
Near as I can tell, the term โquiet luxuryโ has been used en masse in 2023 to describe a category of โpremium, minimal clothing with particular thought to cut, design, and quality.โ On Google, the 3rd most popular related search served up by the algorithm (at the time of writing) is โquiet luxury trendโ โ and that, therein, speaks volumes about a premise many fashion professionals will tell you is inherently flawed.
Of these, the most egregious is probably the notion that we could even classify quiet luxury as a โtrend.โ A rebadging of ideas that have been in the fashion journalism lexicon for over a decade (e.g. โstealth wealth,โ โold money styleโ) itโs a little rich of brands to manufacture a false sense of novelty out of the desire to wear expensive, extremely well-made yet aesthetically unremarkable clothing that you wonโt get rid of after a year.
And yet, TikTok is awash in instructional videos that teach audiences how to โdress richโ or โget the Succession look,โ oftentimes on a fast fashion budget โ spectacularly missing all the tangible selling points that made โstealth wealthโ (notwithstanding its implications as to class and race) so attractive in the first place.
Take Loro Piana as an example: a brand heavily rotated by real and imaginary plutocrats alike (Kendall, eldest of the three Roy siblings โ the dark emotional heart of Succession โ is clearly a fan) the Italian luxury house is frequently trodden out as shorthand for the showโs fashion clout โ described as a โchicโ or โanti-logomaniaโ addition to the wardrobes of the actors who wear it.
That, to borrow from Armstrongโs own in-show dialogue, is an โutterly fancifulโ suggestion.
The reason why the uber-rich have traditionally worn Loro Pianaโs cashmere sweaters or $2,000 Open Walks (a Moccasin-style slip-on shoe, now made infamous by comedy influencers like The Gstaad Guy) is that those clothes made sense for their gilded, PJ-heavy lifestyle. Indeed, as veteran journalists in the consumer luxury racket well know, only in the last 10 years has demand for Loro Pianaโs own ready-to-wear clothing begun to intensify โ with the real quarry being in the production and development of textiles (chiefly cashmere).
โI fell in love with [the brand] because its clothes reflected the style of the effortlessly suave Sergio Loro Pianaโฆa one-man testbed for the garments he found comfortable,โ says Nicholas Foulkes, the British historian, columnist and author of Patek Philippe: The Authorised Biography.
โLoro Piana did not need a creative director: everything came from the life led by Sergio and his brother.โ
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โYouโre too online. Youโve lost context.โ
Foulkesโ observation about Loro Piana โ equally relevant to many of the other designer labels (e.g. Tom Ford, Brunello Cucinelli, Zegna) that appear throughout Succession โ also brings to mind the issue of authenticity (assuming, for the sake of argument, that we characterise quiet luxuryโs recent spike in popularity as a โtrendโ).
Ripped from their native context โ aprรจsโski or a day at the Concorso dโEleganza โ most โquiet luxuryโ garments look an awful lot like what youโd find any given Sunday at your local branch of Uniqlo (a brand most clotheshorses love, incidentally). And while proponents of all things covertly bougie will tell you this is by design, I remain doubtful that a $12,800 coat would have gone viral had Mark Mylod chosen not to film it being worn on and off an endless procession of Gulfsteams.
And therein lies the rub: for most of us, itโs the unfathomable universe of privilege represented by the fashion of Succession, not the clothing itself, that has proved so fascinating all these years. The $600 dad cap; watches that cost as much as a house deposit; the Armani suit that โdoesnโt make you look like a prickโ โ remove these from the universe of a critically acclaimed dramedy and gradually, their lustre begins to dim.
As for the one-percenters themselves? Those economic colossi who pubescent cosplayers would have you believe stroll around to a โtoo much money, no styleโ type beat? Theyโre probably wearing Zara hoodies. Or sequined Celine jackets. Or a shirt thatโs also an NFT.
The reality is that โquiet luxuryโ doesnโt really matter โ but boy is it diabolical how Succession tricked us into thinking it should.
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