Endlessly entertaining gifs and memes aside, one of Succession’s lasting legacies is that it helped usher in an era of ‘quiet luxury’.
Quiet luxury is low-key affluence that still speaks volumes – but only to those in the know. It is the plain black baseball cap that Kendall Roy wears in Succession that can be bought for $USD625 at Loro Piana. It is the moss green wool coat that Gwyneth Paltrow wore to her recent court case that costs $7400 from The Row. It is, in fact, anything from The Row.
But quiet luxury is not a trend reserved exclusively for fashion.
The same thing has been happening in beauty for a few years: ‘good skin’ has become a status symbol; something that separates those with the means to afford expensive treatments from the rest of us.
Because – no matter what celebrities might say about drinking water and wearing SPF – unless you lucked out in the gene department there’s no getting around the fact that flawless skin doesn’t come cheap.
Anyone with a couple of hundred dollars can nip down to her local shopping centre and have her forehead frozen and her lips blown out, but only the truly wealthy have the vast sums of money – and the time – required for the endless facials, lasers, treatments and infrared sessions to achieve quote-unquote “perfect” skin. And sometimes it’s these treatments, not necessarily expensive creams and serums, that make all the difference.
