Ignorance, Injuries, and Delusions: Why We All Need to Understand Hermès

Prompt No. 29: Yes, It took me weeks to write this. Yes, I am tired of thinking about it. No, I did not conduct a final proof this so hopefully it makes sense.

Depending on who you are, either: Wait for it! or IYKYK.

Last week, I compared Hermès fandom to that of Taylor Swift — two camps clamoring to borrow against the cultural capital of brands that reinforce class and racial hierarchy, respectively. I planned to follow it with a piece on Hermès detractors and how criticism of the brand rarely challenges existing notions of status, but a class action lawsuit filed against the French design house forced me to revisit my thesis. It seemed fans and detractors were not so dissimilar. Legal merit aside, the complaint reads a bit like this TikTok referring to the $200 billion company as “that gatekeep, gaslight, girl boss of a business.” This callow, dismissive sentiment is a uniquely American one. Prior to the lawsuit, I never considered those on the “journey” might be chasing something they fundamentally do not understand. That something is not so much status, but Hermès itself.

To start, Americans view luxury rather differently than the rest of the world. We want rare, high-quality goods and services, yet find ourselves bleating about the inherent time, expense, and exclusivity that comes along. Granted, we are a purely consumptive society that has no idea what production in the modern world entails, but that is only part of the problem. Luxury requires status to give it meaning, and here in the U.S. no one’s position is stable. Unlike aristocratic institutions with generations of fixed, interdependent stations, democracies allow for status fluctuations that, according to Alexis de Tocqueville, foster individualism. “All a man’s interests are limited to those near himself. As each class catches up with the next and gets mixed with it, its members do not care about one another and treat one another as strangers.” This isolation results in ignorance, and that ignorance becomes inconvenient when met with outside perspectives. Inconvenienced enough, and the perception devolves into injury; we believe real harm has occurred and a sort of delusion takes hold where common sense would thrive. We see it so often we refer to its actors as “Karens.” Of course we admonish the behavior when directed at baristas and birdwatchers, combatting individualism for the common good. However, when it comes to consumption, particularly luxury, the constitutive properties of democracy take hold.