Green is the colour of (big) money

LET’S start with the basics; what makes luxury? Probably a large chunk of the definition is rarity; if we are hectically busy, then finding a few minutes for oneself is a luxury. White truffles are both scarce and hard to find. And if a process were invented tomorrow that could make flawless diamonds, they would cease to have value. Luxury is scarcity.

Now it just so happens that scarcity is the key characteristic driving a different attitude to consumerism, and one which may be seen as diametrically opposed to the whole luxury industry; the scarcity of resources. And you can add to that the shrinking amount of clean air, sustainable forest, unpolluted oceans… the list goes on. So it’s no big shock that luxury marketing gurus have put one and one together and come up with a formula that works for everyone. Scarcity is damned good business. They’d love stuff to be more scarce… because then they could charge more money. And how to do this, without looking like they are profiteering? Simple: it’s the planet, stupid.

The trend in the high end of consumerism is to bolt-on a conscience. Add in philanthropic programmes. Source materials ethically. Address an indulgence, figure out a way to make it ‘play well’ as the political spinners like to say, and package it – normally with a higher price tag.

It’s hard, at this early adoption stage, to figure out the real motivations in this. It’s easy to be cynical, but a decade ago publicly-listed companies began looking seriously at corporate governance and corporate social responsibility because not just a bunch of feisty activists were demanding it – it simply made better business practice than not doing it. So the division between what’s good for the planet and what’s good for business has become, well, indivisible. There may be practical reasons at one end – for example, foreign land ownership in places like Mexico or Indonesia is forbidden, so resort developers have no option but to partner locally to get the job done. At the other end is pure philanthropy for its own sake.

At the luxury consumer level, there’s often a happy marriage between conscience and desirability. What is rarer than diamonds? Right-on diamonds. How can you justify that private jet flight? Offset the carbon. How do you sleep at night, knowing your caviar involved the death of a rare beluga sturgeon? Buy your caviar from well-managed sturgeon farms in Aquitaine or upstate New York.

Fur is an ethical minefield – and also newly fashionable. What to do? In London Julia Dee, of Design Alterations, has been ‘repurposing’ vintage furs for clients like Elle Macpherson and Claudia Schiffer, with the philosophy that the fur itself is not part of a supply chain that will result in more farming and killing, because it was produced decades ago. It’s a tricky subject; ‘it was dead anyway’ is not the most water-tight of moral excuses.

We’re natural cynics and inclined to believe the worst of anyone selling us something new – especially with a higher price tag. But call it what you like – greenwashing, giving something back, being a good corporate citizen, eco-marketing, or consumerism with a conscience – the fact is that it’s positive. The issue isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about why it’s happening – it’s just a huge positive that it’s happening at all.