New Austerity Aesthetic and the decline of Conspicuous Consumption: When?

Perhaps when the global recession hits?

I like this thread but have no answers. This isn't 696 is it? Just wanted it snuggled next to: Brand loyalty 2007

Answer: not anytime soon:

Both sew and design sample garments for their downtown factory. Their line, Bishop of Seventh, is carried in high-end stores, and they recently made an $18,000 pair of jeans encrusted with diamonds and rubies for Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn.

Tough thing about this one is, it's incredibly difficult to be the first.

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/1/1e/350px-Neil_in_blue.jpg

two plates, two forks, two glasses. one chair. $2,000,000 house.

'Live-work' units enliven industrial areas

the l.a. times -- almost as behind the curve as the new york times! THIS IS NOT NEWZ U GUISE.

most things in newspapers aren't news unless there's been a natural disaster.

2008

maybe not till 2010

no, 2008

Is it really an "aesthetic" when you don't have any choice?

No you are right, it isn't, aesthetic change is a symptom of material change (same as gentrification is at the other end of the cycle)

whenever it becomes ok to wear patches to the office

early 70s seemed more pronounced for this than early 90s, be interesting to see how it manifests this time around

wearing patches? keeep 'em peeled.

Darning your old cashmere for A/W 2008 (I am wearing very ancient and very darned cashmere jumper now).

I woke up this morning thinking it would be kind of cool if draught animals make a comeback.

Probably a lot more cool as a hypothetical, though.

Not austerity exactly but just saw Jamie Oliver Sainsburys tv advert and when he says "wheres your car luv", it cuts to them waiting at a bus stop!

I don't see a lot of tv but target audience for this being presented as people without a car seemed unusual

Thorstein Veblen to thread!

No matter what form of consumption is chosen by the wealthy and powerful, it will inevitably be a form that is exceedingly difficult to reproduce for someone who is not weathy and powerful. It does not matter if the outward aesthetic is austere (e.g. Japan) or opulent. Even austerity is subject to endless subtle refinements that can only be learned and appreciated by those with plentiful liesure time.

What is unusual about the present age of cheap energy is that liesure is more widespread and more accessible than in previous ages and access to complex aesthetics is more democratic than ever before. That still doesn't upset the theory, though. It holds up surprisingly well.

It can be approximated through the extension of debt however?

that can only be learned and appreciated by those with plentiful liesure time.

is this true? isn't the prevailing aesthetic directed through the media and other sources and is learned and received almost by osmosis (and its effects felt even if we try to resist or ignore them - cf gentrification again)

The "liesure class" is larger now, especially in wealthy western nations and this has tended to complexify and refine the aesthetic of the middle class.

But is the "prevailing aesthetic" the one that is shared by the owning class? I'd say no. Look at Architecture Digest to get an idea of what money can do to set one's consumption patterns apart from those of the rabble.

By owning class - do you mean non-salaried?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3822981.ece

"Join me in the new austerity"

It is a tad difficult to swallow an article like that one when to the right there is a link to an article for "artisan cheeses - £27.50".

I've a feeling the new austerity will come with it's own price if it hasn't already.

Yes but its the fact that this article is aimed at people who buy artisan cheeses!

I love the first comment:

I have to say I am disappointed, I was born in 1980, I went to a compressive in Liverpool, and not only did sowing at school but all so knitting, as did ever other Boy! and the girls too.

Maybe its time to teach it in schools once more?

MR Jones, Liverpool, England

its when dinner party fluff writers pen dinner party fluff pieces like this that suggest something of an aesthetic change (ie when the sunday supplement crowd twig)

ie this isn't some wall street journal article recommending you hoard food

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120881517227532621.html

oo good revive

At Save-A-Lot, a discount grocery store in Cleveland, Teresa Rutherford, 51, chided her sister-in-law, Donna Dunaway, 44, for picking up a package of Sara Lee honey ham (eight ounces for $2.49).

“We can’t afford that!” she said. “Get the cheap stuff.” They settled on a 16-ounce package of Deli Pleasures ham for $3.29, or 34 percent less an ounce.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/business/27spend.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Hah, noticed that one the other day too. I love the ending:

Holly Levitsky, a 56-year-old supermarket cashier in Cleveland, buys a brand of steak sauce called Briargate for 85 cents and surreptitiously pours it into an A1 steak sauce bottle she keeps at home.

“My husband can’t even tell the difference,” she said.

...well he probably knows NOW.

These people are amateurs.

At the grocery store I worked at in high school, we had a group of Korean women who would come in together with boxes of coupons and every time they'd knock a $150 bill apiece down to less than $10.

http://www.thegrocerygame.com/ weird grocery circular advice
http://www.freecycle.org/ we've given and received bunches of great stuff. our bathroom floor is tiled from free tiles we got here.
http://www.lala.com/ cd pool trading
http://www.etsy.com/ craft goodness >> crappy retail bullshit

Is it really an "aesthetic" when you don't have any choice?

-- Bodrick III

Like have I really been on "diets" when I couldn't afford food? I did lose weight.

This will happen when I acquire a twelve-inch pianist.

are you a member of thegrocerygame, msp?

I dunno I think people are tightening up. Everyone I know is cutting back. Where friends and I might have met at a restaurant for lunch before, now we'll meet at a park with sacks or we'll head over to the other's place and cook. Everyone I know has been buying less beer/liquor since gas hit $3/gallon. GF and I participated in "buy nothing month" through April (buy nothing but "essentials" for 30 days) and saved a bunch.

xp

Everyone I know has been buying less beer/liquor since gas hit $3/gallon.

ie last fall i was buying a 6 pack a week (along with other non-essential "essentials") just for myself, i've only bought one 6 pack so far this year.

cue OH THE HORRORS OF YOUR LIGHT BEER CONSUMPTION HOW U COPE or whatever, i'm just saying that people are cutting back on conspicuous consumption in measurable ways. i haven't gone record shopping since november.

god if i didn't buy beer or records i'd be drowning in money, relatively speaking

now there's a thought

a RUBBISH thought!

I spent a chunk o time unemployed and unable to get welfare recently so I've become quite good at penny pinching. Literally, in this case - I discovered all those random jars of change I'd been keeping because I hate a wallet full of metal added up to about $120 and that kept me going for ages.

Also, I already totally swear by op shops, sales, 2nd hand record stores, public transport and cooking my own dinner.

And yet I never seem to have any money somehow :/

...I suppose buying all those laptops and synths doesn't help now I think about it.

i remember when pulling out $40 from the ATM made me feel flush with cash and set for the weekend, now it last about six hours. half a tank of gas, a six pack and dinner at a restaurant... bye bye $40.

now i have to withdraw $100 to get that old thrill, except... i don't have that much.

$40 would get me a taxi home and a can of cat food :( Stupid australian money.

$40 would maybe get me dinner plus booze at a cheapish restaurant. Welcome to Britain.

that's a lot of money in texas dollars.

or it used to be.

My mom was moaning yesterday that her grocery bill is up 38 per cent. I wonder how many other people who are 30 pounds overweight can't see the silver lining here?

I'm sticking with the old austerity:

Buying loss leaders at supermarkets as opposed to whim food, and going to shop after 7pm to get the markdowns on posher things which can be bunged into the freezer. Buying cheese from the cheese man on Leather Lane: £10 hunk of Brie, for example, is £1. Cheese board is £2. Going to Somerfield or Superdrug for branded cleaning/toilet/personal care stuff and not little shops. Using the fantastic butcher 100 yards from my window because it has the best cheap, seasonal cuts and random gourmet items cheaper than other places. Working Saturdays on a farmer's market stall - in the summer that's where my eggs, veg, bread etc. all come from, all at trader rates, or as a perk of working for my farmer, who is also setting me up with an herb garden. Asian/Turkish cash and carries for rice, chillis, ginger, garlic, onions, yoghurt, parsley, spices, tomatoes, potatoes, pulses. NO ready meals or take-aways except for the place that delivers on a low minimum, and then only when I've had a payday. Massive cuts in drinking/smoking, but I can rationalize that with the half-stone I'll lose over the next month.

Last week I was also fortunate enough to go to an art dinner and I've got another one this week, so my addiction to restaurants is not taking a beating yet, even if the dinners themselves are now buffets. Still drank champagne for four straight hours on Thursday. WIN!

suzy you may be the classiest scrounger I have ever met.

Thanks, Hand, though scrounging ain't the word, really. I come from a long line of folks who believe passionately that only idiots pay full price for anything. The top I'm wearing today came from my fave Fichley Road charity shop (not the one where I found the Jil Sander trousers for £4 but the one where I found a zillion dead stock Mary Quant fishnet ankle socks for 50p a pair) and I have just noticed it is late '60s Radley, ie. Ossie Clark/Quorum diffusion. £3! The Bloomingdale's cashmere sweater was $8 new, from designer clearance outlet in Minneapolis.

What did I tell you? No journalist ever needs a kitchen!

Simple rule of thumb where I am - Fulham Broadway: no, North End Road: yup and I can tick off everything Suzy mentions above except obv. the dress code.

haha I was talkin about the art/book/etc openings more really; there is a long and noble tradition of making these things one's own personal buffet

xpost

Chazzas old hat; now u gotta make yr own clothes:

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/fashion/story/0,,2276537,00.html

Chazzing also much easier for girls (unfortunately for me).

are you a member of thegrocerygame, msp?

my wife tried it for a couple months. we have friends who swear by it. we found it a little awkward. you basically buy something on sale today because you'll want it three weeks from now. following their guidance, you end up with crap to eat that was always on sale. i guess that's the trick... "crap to eat". several times, many of the items were things that we don't eat, so why buy them at all? i guess it depends on your diet cause our friends love it.

some friends and i have been talking about starting our own music/book library. set up a community website. list our stuff. since it would be us and/or our friends, there's trust. and you wouldn't have to share everything. (pls no mint signed rarities.)

our local library is great, but there's plenty of things (especially music) that they would never carry because the readership would be fairly small.

the biggest obstacle i can see so far is getting our shit into the library database.

Charity shops now full of George and Primark clothes, ick, but persistent digging and not giving away secret good places means I WIN STILL. Also I have no patience for sewing.

Today's austerity shopping basket:

Speck proscuitto, £2 for 150g, mozzarella £1, hummus 69p, yoghurt £1, anchovy olives £1.50, flatbreads 50p. Can do lunches and snacks for a week off that, yay.

My mom was moaning yesterday that her grocery bill is up 38 per cent. I wonder how many other people who are 30 pounds overweight can't see the silver lining here?

following their guidance, you end up with crap to eat that was always on sale.

I've been living perfectly comfortably within my means for the last few years and my means have just expanded pretty significantly, so I'm buggered if I'm jumping on the austerity bandwagon unnecessarily. The idea of buying a load of unnecessary shit on credit has never really occurred to me.

Then again, I don't actually buy anything other than food and beer, seemingly.

where it's easy to get out of control is when you get married and have kids. just 7 or 8 years ago, i could fit all my worldy possessions into my little toyota. flash a few years forward and we needed a big ass uhaul. it was so insane. now we've still got a bunch, but we've gotten pretty hardcore about purging everything we don't use. it's hard for my wife since she's got a serious packrat urge.

what's strange to me is how much modern lifestyles revolve around buying shit. i'm a recovering record store addict and it's bizarre how much of a void there was once i really started cutting back. i'm still kind of dealing with it. who the fuck am i now that i'm not that guy that buys all the limited edition cdrs of experimental drone?

i still really don't know.

I don't mind packratting at all! I don't think overall amount of stuff is THE problem (altho certainly for some people it is) as much as the reasons for acquiring it, and the costs of doing. When I get stuff for free or really cheap I don't begrudge the space it takes, if I couldn't replace it for what I paid and it'll come in handy some day. There's a tipping point where that becomes kind of ridiculous, of course, maybe my threshold is just higher b/c a lot of my stuff is vintage/midcentury/etc and I'd never find stuff again if I didn't keep it.

I'm anti-packratting as I can these days. Some habits are hard to break but book-buying is almost nil, music purchases are way off and I barely pick up DVDs anymore.

Ned, that makes me feel a little sad. I need stuff around, it defines me.

While I understand that approach, I no longer feel bound to it. Please keep in mind I still have a LOT of stuff around -- but I'm trying to reduce it all the time, and while it's a slow process it's well underway.

Although suzy is otm, I am not sure that the "new austerity aesthetic" and ferocious bargain-hunting quite equate.

I need some $$$ and I am thinking I should just rip all my overabundant CDs and sell them but the idea is so painful! Why do I need them in person? To make moving take an extra seven hours of packing and unpacking? It is simply a form of tangible nostalgia and mos defs the weird ownership hope that all zero of the people who come to my house will go "Whoa! You have a Confusional Quartet CD?" I don't need to/wouldn't impress anyone BUT STILL. Life is crazy.

Unless you have several ways to back that shit up, though, you can always re-rip the CD into whatever format is best/most useful at the time...unless you're using like studio-quality equip and digital know-how, mp3s and m4as and all those formats will eventually be superseded by something else.

Not that I know anything about it, obviously.

I was just gonna do hell of rippage to my external drive and then burn them onto individual CDs over the summer.

I don't want to sell them to the one shitty store here and I don't want to eBay them either (this would be a hideous pain in the ass!). This = excuse of some sort.

I've started ripping everything to Apple Lossless, but I still can't part with the CDs for some reason. Maybe if I had multiple HD backups, but that would basically eat up everything I'd make selling them.

I could pack up pretty much everything I own and take off without much trouble except for books. And they're harder to sell for a reasonable amount than CDs or movies - besides, what would I do without easy access to every Robert Frank and Eugene Richards monograph since the '70s?

In my part of Brooklyn (Prospect Heights), there's a strong aesthetic drive, perhaps even fashion, towards D-I-Y stuff in the past year or so. Walking in the neighborhood on weekends reveals a hobbyist trend towards vegetable gardening (for ground floor apartment dwellers), sewing / craft circles, bike riding, constant stoop sales, a barter / skill trading network, and picnics and games in Prospect Park over eating out.

This may be tied partly to environmental awareness, partly to demographics (ie having kids), and partly to the onset of spring, as much as economics. And, like I say, it may just be fashionable. But it's hard to miss nonetheless.

Posted this on another thread but thought folks who post on this one might not necessarily read the econ threads:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8794

Basically says that a lot of your grocery bill is the fault of hedge funds. Which makes some sense considering the strange rapidity of the rise in food and other commodity prices.

xpost - All that stuff: crafts, gardening, knitting, etc. has been gaining in popularity for years in Brooklyn. Economics don't have much to do it, as it's being done mainly by the people who can most afford not to.

any new observations on this from the US or Europe? more interested in actual aesthetics of austerity than in money-saving tips.

Well, there's this story as reflective of shifts in the wind, maybe:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/fashion/04SHOPPING.html

"The depth of the challenge was suggested by the incongruity this week of seeing Prada wallets, usually kept under glass at Saks, dumped into display stands that at Wal-Mart are known as “end-caps”; lizard handbags at Bergdorf Goodman jumbled on counters as if that Fifth Avenue landmark were an outlet of Loehmann’s; and Ralph Lauren dress shirts at Lord & Taylor thrown together and offered at prices roughly equivalent to the cost of two McDonald’s Happy Meals."

good stuff - do we have a rolling economy into the shitbin schadenfreude thread yet??

there was also this one, last month.

Harry Slatkin, the founder of Slatkin & Co., a home fragrances company, said he and his wife, Laura, recently canceled a 50th birthday party for her at the Pool Room at the Four Seasons. Instead, they plan to have a party at home, with defrosted White Castle cheeseburgers served on silver trays. “It’s not time to have splashy birthday parties,” Mr. Slatkin said. “It’s a time to stay home, spend time with friends and connect.”

defrosted White Castle cheeseburgers served on silver trays

ooh ooh pimp my own thread time

Discuss: New economic model(s) for practical/sustainable civilization

I think this shit dovetails nicely with my picture of a dishwasher

are white castle cheeseburgers on silver trays a sustainable model?

http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2009/02/austerity-nostalgia.html

pulls together a few examples of austerity aesthetics creeping back into design/typography, but doesn't really talk about consumer behaviour much.

Yup.

Oh if only there was some middle ground between "BOOM! loan credit card happy fun party time spend spend spend" and "RECESSION! debt austerity frugality penny pinching misery"

is it really "fashionable" if its done out of necessity and not out of choice