Neue Luxury is a global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

No other creative industry works at the speed of fashion, producing new product on a constant basis at ridiculously low prices, encouraging a disposable culture. Fashion has shifted from a historical formulaic process of two significant collections a year, to multiple delivery drops on a fast track turn around where similar styles are released across the globe simultaneously. 

Ask any group of people their opinion on sport, politics, art or religion and you are bound to receive a series of didactic and passionate responses. Ask a group of people for their perspectives on luxury and you open up a conversation that will anchor somewhere between the philosophical and the tangible.

“Drop in like a pin.” The words come from my friend, who stands beside me on the cliff. Rocks, scrub, dried mud. “There’s no other way down,” he says. The quarry water is brown, darker than everything except the sky. I wonder how many car wrecks are under me? How many crags? I have been tricked into jumping, I know it. But I also know I must.

Desire is always an expression of value: for this rather than that; for him rather than her; and now rather than later. Hunger, thirst, arousal, wish—these commit us to the world. Regardless of what we think, or what we think we think, desire takes over from mere existence. This is rightly frightening, threatening our ideas of liberty. Before we can deliberate and decide, we find we have already chosen.

Since Aristotle, Western philosophy has constructed perspicuous epistemological systems to apprehend the nature of truth, beyond what is available to the senses. However, logical paradoxes (e.g. Russell’s Set Theory paradox) and confrontations with the ineffable (e.g. Nagarjuna and the two truths) have resulted in disparate philosophical methodology

Yet again, I put this pen to paper. The steel nib loops with a little scratch “toothy”, the aficionados call it. Balanced between thumb, index and middle fingers, it is more guided than gripped. I turn experiences into tiny gestures of the arm and hand, which leave marks behind—marks you turn back into experiences as you read.

I recently discovered the term ‘power millennial’ and fell in love with images of Cara Delevingne in a cat suit, saving 20-somethings from urban ennui. And Gigi Hadid, tweeting her 34.4 million closest friends how to best belt their new Gucci bag. But while millennial ‘it girls’ are definitely a thing, they’re not as omnipotent as their antecedents— girls like Kate Moss or Chloë Sevigny. Why not? Because to millennials, luxury brands are no longer high church.

Since the beginning of this century luxury brands have re-defined how they communicate and engage with their audiences. Having long grappled with the changing beliefs of their traditional customers, the emergence of a new and unique generation of luxury consumers has changed the playing field entirely.

Once upon a time collectors were as eclectic and obsessive as the grand auction house themselves and true collectors filled their homes with their obsessions. “It’s become too sanitised,” says John Albrecht, proprietor and managing director of Leonard Joel, lamenting a change in collecting habits.

We live in a very anodyne world and frankly it’s bland. Eccentricity is not well regarded. Women no longer walk pet black pigs in Hyde Park with their trotters gilded—as some did before the First World War—or dye their doves rainbow colours, as did Lord Gerald Berners at his country home.