Confession time: I irrationally avoid espresso machines like the plague.

There are many mysteries that pique my interest, but the daunting black box known as the espresso machine has never been part of that list. I’ll be the first to admit that espresso machines aren’t terribly difficult to work out from a experience design perspective. But I have irrationally feared them for my entire life on some vague account of them being too difficult for me to use. I also don’t care much for coffee in general, another contributing factor I’m sure.

Ever since I moved to Italy in 2012, an inevitable showdown between the espresso machine and me was looming on the horizon. I’m definitely sure that most of my Italian co-workers found me off-kilter when I told them that I had never used (let alone touch) an espresso machine before. I mean, the entire morning (warning: generalization) of an Italian workday is spent congregated around the espresso machine like some kind of holy relic. While I would spend my mornings browsing on Reddit, my colleagues sipped espresso delicately from their tiny cups between energetic bouts of conversation.

Self-imposed social ostracization because of some irrational fear of a simple machine be damned! I’m going to be integrated into Italian culture, so that I can return to America and pretend to be a refined Milanese.

Just kidding. Despite my resolution to learn how to use an espresso machine, I hadn’t even entered the same room as the espresso machine more then three times during the following six month period.

“But L, why didn’t you just ask a coworker to teach you how to use the espresso machine?” is what you’re probably wondering.

When an Italian is born (again, generalization), they come out knowing exactly how to use an espresso machine. It comes so naturally to them that asking an Italian how to use an espresso machine is akin to asking someone how to breathe. It’s just not something you can just ask an Italian (note: irrational self-justification). 

Now living in London, where the greatest culture-related challenge I face is trying not to fall asleep during afternoon tea, I decided once and all to confront my second greatest fear (the first being a global bacon shortage) – the espresso machine. It’s not the climactic death match I deserved, but it’s the one that I needed.

There are only around six buttons on the espresso machine in our office, and since there isn’t a self-destruct button on it, I assumed it would be safe to button mash random permutations of the buttons in order to get it to whip me up a nice, hot cup of espresso. Being especially clever, I decided to start the sequence with the red power button. God, I’m brilliant.

After 5 or so minutes of furiously pressing buttons in a haphazard manner, I decided it wasn’t working. I had to hurry too because I’m sure everyone in the office would soon wonder where I was and search off to find me, only to see my great shortcoming in using the espresso machine (nobody would notice if I were gone for a couple hours).

Time to use the ace up my sleeve. I had no choice but to resort to my secret weapon, a finely honed skill gained from years of paying for an outrageously high tuition fee at a private university. I grabbed my laptop and searched for the machine’s user manual on Google. I was Katie Couric and the espresso machine was Sarah Palin: “I gotcha.“

Ok, so now I had the order of buttons I had to press to get the machine to work. Turns out, you just need to press two buttons (one of which is the power button), but the secret is waiting for the machine to warm up before pressing the second button. I had pressed so many buttons within a 10 second period that the machine freaked out and stopped working.

Once the machine was ready, I reached forward to confirm my victory.

Click. Nothing. Click. Nothing again. Click click click click click. Nothing still. 

I stood there for another 5 minutes trying to understand how I could possible be outsmarted by the espresso machine this time. I had the entire might of the internet behind me in the form of user manuals and countless YouTube videos of Italians showing how to use the machine. (So apparently Italians do teach other people how to use an espresso machine after all.) 

I repeated the steps over a couple of times. I restarted the entire device. I unplugged it and replugged it. I was tempted to even take a screwdriver and take apart the damn contraption in a fit of Rambo style fury.

Then it hit me. I forgot to insert the espresso capsules. You know, those things that contain the actual coffee beans? I fail at life sometimes.

Behold! My first ever cup of espresso, made by yours truly.

Political theorist Karl Marx, best known for his work The Communist Manifesto, seems an unlikely comparison point for the luxury industry. After all, wasn’t he the guy who basically wanted the proletariat, or working class, to take over control of the government and overthrow the rich, upper class with whom luxury goods are associated? At first glance, communism and luxury may seem as related as vegetarians and bacon, but underneath it all lies a fundamental sense of solidarity between the two. And it is from this common ground that I believe the luxury industry can find a renewed sense of self

So where do we start?

The luxury industry is a thriving, global endeavour that in 2012 was worth an estimated €750 billion, with €212 billion spent on fashion. Within the next five years, it is estimated that it will hit the €1 trillion mark. That the fourth richest man in the world is Bernard Arnault, owner of luxury group LVMH, just goes to show how lucrative the business can be. Driven by the fashion industry, luxury is no small matter. Despite those who would find fashion trite and vapid, its commercial significance means that it is highly competitive and fast paced. And very, very capitalistic. Oh so very capitalistic. And because of that, the industry can be ruthless. But it’s also part of the reason why the luxury industry has, for the most part, lost its essence. Today, luxury is a just shell of its former self.

Luxury fashion used to be about craftsmanship, rarity, quality, creativity and excellence. Luxury used to be about using technically intensive and innovative methods to create beautiful objects that held great intrinsic value. Luxury used to be the epitome of craftsmanship, in its purest and highest form, because both are concerned with excellence for the sake of excellence.

The spirit of craftsmanship in luxury has been replaced with the pursuit of making profits. Can you really claim that Louis Vuitton’s iconic canvas bag is a luxury good when its made from plastic?

Newsweek journalist and author of the investigative fashion book Deluxe, Dana Thomas, points out how luxury brands have scarified their quality and integrity in order to get more money:  ”In the name of profit – or, to put it more bluntly, greed – luxury brands began to compromise their integrity. Some cut corners in ready-to-wear”. Brands starting moving production to China in factories that lacked skilled workers. Some brands started using cheaper materials and reducing the materials in the product. One brand even stopped lining their coats, which became an industry standard for a while.

Luxury has tried to “democratize” itself to the masses. Not out of a noble intention. But as a way to exploit a rich heritage and package it into an accessible dream that can be peddled to the masses in the form of over-priced products: “It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact with others. It has become part of our social fabric. To achieve this, it has sacrificed its integrity, undermined its products, tarnished its history and hoodwinked its consumers. In order to make luxury ‘accessible,’ tycoons have stripped away all that has made it special.”

While “craftsmanship” still exists today in luxury brands, it’s mostly a marketing gimmick. The number of luxury brands that consistently produce well-crafted products and are truly dedicated in maintaining a sense of integrity is a clear minority in the industry.

But this is not to claim that luxury today is void of any semblance of luxury. Fashion is still a highly creative field, and luxury goods are still produced by many brands that live up to their promises. In particular, I am currently impressed by brands like Hermes, Goyard, and Zagliani. But what has changed is the spirit in which the industry as a whole is run. Many luxury brands have left its artistic and craftsman roots for a highly corporate and capitalistic operating model. This is driven mostly by the growing consolidation of fashion labels into the hands of luxury groups like LVMH, PPR, and Richemont. To be fair though, the “luxury fashion industry” is a relatively new one, starting really in the 1980s with fashion houses being bought by people like Bernard Arnault and Francois Pinault.

Equally tragic is that the modern consumer is willing to lap up these products masquerading as luxury goods. The modern consumer is inundated with so much product wrapped in powerful marketing language backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising. The value of the product is no longer intrinsic, but extrinsic. Consumers pay a hefty premium to associate themselves with a brand, its heritage, its values, and other brand enthusiasts. Luxury goods become a form of identity that is ironically mass-produced. I sometimes question the average consumers ability to discern the quality of goods anymore judging from the astounding number of people who claim that Zara’s quality is just slightly under par with a brand like Céline.

What is luxury today? It’s an almost-commodity. It’s mass-produced. Even the creative design element of it can seem banal. And it’s not because we don’t have talented and creative people in the industry. We have more genius talent than ever both inside and outside the industry. It’s because the business are so profit-driven that designers have to water down their artistic integrity for commercial viability. The overly consumeristic approach to luxury is the quintessential spirit of capitalism and the antithesis of luxury. Luxury should never be about commodization, but it’s become infected by it.

As a result, the luxury industry has lost its way, no longer a reflection of its roots and true essence, despite how often executives will claim that their brand is steeped in a tradition of craftsmanship.

The second half of the 18th Century. The Industrial Revolution is well underway. A German philosophy by the name of Karl Marx, father to communism, witnessed the advent of the mass-production of goods and lamented the loss of craftsmanship in society. As workers migrated from the cottage system to an assembly line system, economic efficiency exponentially multiplied. But there were profound social impacts too. Workers traditionally were involved in the production of their goods from start to finish. A saddler would do everything from the fitting to the carving to the sewing of the horse saddle. Under the Industrial Revolution, workers would repeat a mundane task over and over again. They were no longer involved from start to finish, but rather a cog in the industrial-machine, just one person in a mass of many on the assembly line.

Marx feared that the capitalistic drive for efficiency would alienate man from the fruit of his labours. By no longer being fully involved in the production or even the final good, the worker loses his pride as a craftsman by becoming an automaton within the system. One of the great tragedies of capitalism for Marx was the objectification of the worker by the economic system. Marx wanted to preserve the spirit of craftsmanship, but believed that capitalism, with its drive towards profits, would always sacrifice the former for the sake of the latter.

Karl Marx pointed out in his seminal work Das Kapital that because of industrialization, “work is external to the worker.”

Marx, in many senses, saw himself as a modern Hephaestus who sought to restore pride into the economic system of production by giving political governance to the very drivers of production – the proletariat. This was his ideal to re-realize the dignity of the craftsman.

Marx may have been against what luxury represented within the economic system of ownership and consumption, as it was something only the upper classes could afford, but the spirit of luxury as an exercise in artisanal excellence is something he strongly believed in. It is in the link of craftsmanship and its erosion in our current society that the two can find common ground.

Luxury needs to rediscover itself in the 21st century. For me, that new luxury ethos will reject the current notion of democratic or accessible luxury. Luxury that embraces the spirit of craftsmanship as its operating model. Luxury that doesn’t hold profits as its primary objective, but rather the pursuit of excellence to create the most rare and beautiful objects.

Iron Rolling Mill by Adolph Menzel (1875)