Learning Curve Luxuries of the East and the West

The middle ages in Europe are often portrayed as the dark ages, yet in many ways they could have not been more splendid. Rich and glossy silks imported from China and the Middle East adorned liturgical vestments and draped Madonnas in churches. Princes and kings created perfect settings in which to entertain friends and impress political enemies, and none was more splendid than the court of Louis XIV, King of France from 1643 to 1715. In Japan at this time, the capital was descending into turmoil. Poets, artists and performers fled throughout the country, finding work in the households of the daimyo warlords, while a flailing shogun of greatly reduced means devoted himself to the aesthetic perfection of simple luxuries.  

Luxury has always been entangled with the rare and the exotic. In 17th- and 18th-century Europe, the ‘Orient’ was often framed as a place of opulence and decadence, and Europeans developed new luxury formats by imitating Chinese porcelain or Indian cottons. In the French court of the late 1700s, Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette took up Japanese lacquer and porcelain as well as foreign modes of dress. Although secluded from the world, Japan found great wealth in the peace and centralisation of the Edo period (1615–1868), culminating in an explosion of material luxury during its golden age (1688–1704).

By the 19th century, Japanese and European culture were more intertwined. The Japanese danced in their own versions of the Moulin Rouge, the famous Paris caberet club. Japan also rapidly built a hybrid world of tailcoats and bustle dresses, railways and department stores, transforming a feudal order into a modern consumer culture at breathtaking speed. In Europe, figures from couturier Charles Worth to writer Oscar Wilde adopted aspects of Japanese iki – chic – in their designs and prose, while Impressionist painters' embrace of Japonisme extended from subject to technique. This was the period of Paris as city of light, technology, luxury and leisure.

In the early decades of the 20th century, French art deco celebrated global cultures, travel, luxury and adornment, and with it came a desire for self-improvement. New looks for women and men developed, using couture clothing (or home-made copies of it) and props such as jewellery and watches. Luxury moved from clothing and accessories to changing the body itself: through hairdressing, sport, slimming and eventually cosmetic surgery. In Japan, ‘modern girls’ or moga assumed unheard-of freedoms and purchased new accessories to go with them, as the fabulous wealth of their country’s industrial success translated into a new bright but fragile material culture, which was soon to be destroyed by earthquake and war.

In the later 20th century as France launched the Concorde supersonic airplane and Japan the shinkansen bullet train, the two cultures assumed their positions as the luxury capitals of the West and the East. Japan’s economic miracle turned into a speculative bubble by the 1980s and the country seemed destined to be the wealthiest nation on Earth, awash with cash for spending. At the same time, France was turning their luxury heritage into supercharged luxury business conglomerates. Each country remained, and continue to be, in the thrall of the other’s aesthetics and visions of a life well lived.