Essential in Every Wardrobe: Young People Shopping for Luxury Like Never Before

Retail giants in the luxury sector like Chanel, Tom Ford and Dior, invest heavily in their brick-and-mortar stores — a physical pronouncement of their brands’ prestige and authority in the fashion landscape.

In the past five years, these retailers have taken significant steps to court Millennials and members of Generation Z, with routine invitations to come in and purchase everything from small leather goods and high-end trainers, to micro-bags and belts.

These luxury retail environments feel “expensive” and “exclusive,” and this is the result of co-ordinated efforts on behalf of a team of cultural workers who often go without notice.

Visual merchandisers, for example, position products and arrange decorative fixtures to produce a vision of beauty and glamour. Sales associates and stylists connect with clients and drive sales in store.

I interviewed several cultural workers to identify and explain how they do this, how they leverage a series of techniques to foster aspiration, class-based desires and anxieties to command three- and four- figure purchases.

They cite current designers and fashion trends, lending knowledge to clients with cash and credit to spend. Stylists also make use of carefully crafted stories related to where clients’ purchases might be worn and what these purchases say about them. Put differently, they romance their clients with visions and dreams of who they could be.

All the while, the material dimensions of place give stylists and merchandisers authority and what sociologists call “capital.”

Pony-hair upholstered furniture, tufted cushions and bronzed mirrors are some of the things that help them produce a sense of awe among clients who in turn, defer to their stylists and their well-furnished fashion knowledge. But they do something more too. These physical and symbolic markers of place remind purchasers that some, but not all are welcome inside.

Historian Sarah Miller-Davenport has discussed what it means to feel unwelcome in these settings; to be, as she puts it, a “trespasser, a class-tourist in a rich person’s department store.”

For young people, the physical and symbolic markers of these luxury retail environments bear significant weight. They communicate “a sense of one’s place” and suggest the purchaser might be made more fashionable and therefore worthwhile, if and when they purchase luxury products the likes of which we see on celebrities and social media.

Of course, there are few of us who can truly afford to make these purchases and fewer still who can make them regularly, leaving many stretched thin and others, in debt to their aspirations and desire.