Flying Too Far from the Sun
Torstaina 4. lokakuuta 2007
The other night I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s show Delirium. Having admired the Canadian circus wizards on TV for years I was psyched to see them in Helsinki. Yes, the effects were amazing, the punk-glitz costumes fascinating, the make-up humorous, the props surreal and the music rocked and rolled. Now, there’s something missing here already… yes the acrobatics - they were also amazing, especially the unreal hula-hoop girl. It’s just that there was so little of that.
Walking out of the performance I felt both satisfaction and emptiness. Yes, I had finally seen them, and it was a good show, no doubt. But I had expected more - a more unique experience - more individual excellence, more moments of time standing still. When I listened to people around me exiting the arena I heard many of them muttering the same thing.
What we had experienced was modern brand management: spreading the good thing as thin as possible to rake in as much money as possible.
My Cirque du Soleil experience is still hovering in my mind as I’m now reading Dana Thomas’ Deluxe - How Luxury Lost its Lustre, a detailed and smart journalistic account of the contemporary luxury industry. In her book Thomas describes how in just twenty years the industry has diluted and inflated itself into the exact opposite of its promise. When everybody is carrying the same badly made handbag thinking that the logo on the fabric makes her special, it is consumerism, not luxury. And someone is laughing all the way to the stockholders’ annual meeting.
Luxury, as we know it, was born to serve the royal courts of Europe, and recently, through the mechanisms of global capitalism it has been “democratized” into something that everyone can and wants to buy into.
Or the so-called luxury brands have. Thomas ends her tour of the high-end fashion world with a few stops at providers of what she calls new luxury. And what is this new luxury? Well, it sounds very much like old luxury: it’s handcraftsmanship; it’s impeccable materials, its real commitment and care for your customers. It is the human element.
That’s what I missed watching Cirque du Soleil. What made them great was how they served old-school circus acts in a modern setting. But when the setting takes over and the moments of watching someone performing an amazing act of skill, daring and beauty are rare (optimized someone would say, because they are costly), the magic is lost. The magic is in the uniqueness of an incredible human performance.
Dana Thomas’ book predicts two things: there will be more of what we have seen so far, much more, and because of that, there will also be more of those who decide to put the personal back into business.