LUXURY ACCELERATIONISM

Botox, Balenciaga, and the Strange New Battle for Status

A guilty pleasure of mine is scrolling on the “luxury haul” side of TikTok, where the influencer girlies parade their candy-colored rotations of recently-acquired designer bags. The videos’ titles are always something like “My Designer Closet Tour” or “My Top 10 Designer Bag Purchases of 2024.”

This is consumption at its finest, taking the logic of consumerism—the fulfillment of desire through the act of the purchase—to its most extreme. The videos seem to say: Oh I need to spend money to be happy? Then I will spend SO much money and be SO happy. To find pride and satisfaction within the framework of consumerism itself—or if not, at least to project it—is almost an act of resistance. Apotheosis via conspicuous consumption.

But the luxury influencer also finds herself in a precarious position of her own making, with each new post eroding her own position as a creator of aspirational content. The law of supply and demand dictates that the more there is of something, the less it is desired, the lower its price. This goes for brands too—the easier they are to come by, even just in symbolic reference—the weaker their status-signaling power. But luxury cannot die, since as long as we have social hierarchy the conspicuously-consuming will always be on the hunt for new ways to show off their status. So where does luxury go from here?

Already, there are a couple distinct lineages along which luxury is beginning to mutate, which I’ll call the Cultural Remix and Biological Luxury. The Cultural Remix strategy is hypersignification, incessant reference-making that generates ironic bricolages of symbols and meanings from across the widening domain of all visual culture. For Cultural Remix brands, the barrier to entry becomes cultural literacy rather than mere economic capital that can be flaunted via association with a logo. Biological Luxury, on the other hand, takes a more traditional, materialist approach, in which the value of luxury derives from the labor and craftsmanship that gives a product its high-quality. It’s just that this time around, the craftsmanship is medical and the product happens to be your own body.

Thus, the two original functions of luxury—high-quality craftsmanship and status-signaling—diverge into two distinct approaches, with Biological Luxury picking up the mantle of craftsmanship and the Cultural Remix accelerating the signification game. 

The Cultural Remix

There’s perhaps no better example to illustrate the mechanics of the Cultural Remix than Balenciaga. Under Demna Gvasalia, the brand has diverged from the traditional playbook of building customer loyalty around a centralized identity, instead nuking the notion of identity altogether to become the ultimate remix machine. As Nemesis’ Emily Segal explains:

In Balenciaga's world, fashion’s more nuanced references and subtle inspirations were thoroughly cooked off, transforming looks into memes. Many of these new codes were based on taking an impossible “ugly thing” from the margins of culture and mixing it back into fashion, but done over and over to an aesthetic breaking point. [...]This was meme logic, using a brand as a deep fryer that could add a layer of ironic detachment to everything. 

For Balenciaga, all of visual culture—not just fashion or the fashion-adjacent—is fair game for appropriation, metabolization, and re-processing. Balenciaga is a radioactive agent that creates mutated assemblages from the DNA of all other cultural entities in the ecosystem. The results are post-apocalyptic bricolages of signification, from $2,145 Ikea bag lookalikes, to stiletto-heeled Crocs, to t-shirts referencing the infamous Tumblr-era slogan ”Keep Calm and Carry On,” to collaborations with Ebay and Erewhon.

Cultural Remix brands engage in schizophrenic conversation with culture as a whole rather than advancing their own brand narratives or cohesive identities. Their strategy employs the memetically virtuosic mechanics of the internet to deploy cultural references in increasingly frenetic ways, couched in layers of irony. Like the brand- and logo-centric luxury of Hermès, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton, the strategy of the Cultural Remixer is still symbolic, meaning that the value it creates lies more in signifying membership to an in-group rather than in the underlying assets themselves. However, through this strategy of hypersignification, the Cultural Remixer creates a new form of exclusivity—instead of access to capital, the barrier to entry is now cultural literacy. In essence, it’s about getting the joke.

Balenciaga isn’t the only luxury brand going the conceptual route. MSCHF, the creator of the infamous Big Red Boots, began as a conceptual art collective that then forayed into fashion. True to their name, their other creations include a microscopic Louis Vuitton bag sold at auction for $63,000, Birkenstock sandals made from Hermès Birkin bags, and a dog collar that turns barks into spoken swear words. Fashion-as-cultural-literacy has also spawned a host of meme-inspired brands like Praying, whose plain t-shirts are emblazoned with no-effort, ironic phrases like “God’s Favorite” and “Feral.” As J’Nae Phillips writes in her Substack, Fashion Tingz, 

Fashion memes are like an inside joke that you can only sort of explain. They demand a cocktail of wit, irony, and a PhD in Pretentiousness Studies. In other words, you’ve got to earn your stripes in the fashion trenches to truly get it. The higher you climb in the fashion hierarchy, the weirder the clothes, the wilder the statements, and the more unapproachable the gatekeepers. This is the perfect breeding ground for memes to thrive. 

Yet the economic elite—and most people in general—will find themselves increasingly alienated from the Cultural Remix's conceptual gestures, which demand not just capital but an extensive temporal investment in cultivating fluency across an ever-expanding landscape of cultural signifiers. And if signification is either cheap and abundant (Hermès, Chanel, Louis Vuitton), or too convoluted to keep up with (Balenciaga, MSCHF, Praying), then real matter—biological matter—is priceless. As fashion goes the way of conceptual art, many may look to place their status-signaling funds elsewhere. Enter the rise of Biological Luxury.

Biological Luxury

Luxury has always been biological. Only in recent decades, especially after the Logomania of the early 2000s, has luxury's intrinsic value become decoupled from its material craftsmanship in favor of pure status signification. Historically, the high value of luxury goods—from textiles to woodwork—was derived from craftsmanship, which involved both intensive human labor and highly-specialized technical knowledge that required decades to master.

To reinscribe luxury as craftsmanship is to take an opposing strategy to that of the Cultural Remix. While the latter operates as pure semiotic play, craftsmanship anchors value in material substrate through specialized labor and technique. Today, our most rarefied, consumer-facing techniques happen to be biological—plastic surgery, genetic technology, experimental spa treatments, longevity science. These products and procedures command premium prices through their dependence on highly specialized practitioners—doctors, technicians, scientists—who employ specialized techniques developed over years, in some cases refined down to the molecular level. Biological Luxury, then, is the craftsmanship of the body itself. This means that the consumer also becomes the product. What Biological Luxury really sells you is a better version of you.

Many Biological Luxury protocols and procedures are downright scientific. The skincare market is full of premium, dermatologist-created brands offering research-backed treatments. Spas, too, use laboratory equipment. In a vampire facial, for example, blood is drawn and centrifuged to isolate the platelet-rich plasma, which is then micro-needled back into the face to stimulate collagen production. Bryan Johnson’s Blueprint longevity protocol crunches biological data then offers it to consumers through a nutritional plan, which has itself become somewhat of a status symbol, complete with a rejuvenation leaderboard. Plastic surgery consists of high-priced procedures dependent on the labor of skilled practitioners. A wave of newly fresh-faced celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan and Donatella Versace, has stirred up buzz in recent weeks for their more natural approach. If the “Instagram Face” was as much about signalling one’s access to cosmetic technologies as it was about enhancing one’s beauty, the current “less-is-more” trend marks a return to youth and vitality—signifiers tied more to biological health than to pure status.

Biological Luxury isn’t something that’s easy to share online. It’s subtle, often denied (Lohan still disavows any intervention), and sometimes invisible (e.g. one’s vitamin stack or the organic produce in one’s fridge). It manifests in subtle shibboleths, through glowing, plump skin or snatched eyebrows. But this means Biological Luxury, too, like the Cultural Remix protects itself through specialized knowledge, through being “in the know.” This reveals an important turn in the next phase of luxury—both the Cultural Remix and Biological luxury establish moats that are not only economic, but also epistemic. It makes sense. In our regime of abundant information and total visibility, the possession of privileged knowledge becomes a luxury.