Deluxe III

Why women fancy handbags? Handbags are visible on the body and give the wearer the chance to brandish the logo and publicly declare her aspiration. They are the easiest luxury fashion item to sell because they don't require sizing or trying on: you look at it, and if you like it, you buy it. "It's easier to choose a bag than a dress," Miuccia Prada told her, "because you don't have to face the age, the weight, all the problems." For brands, it is easy money. Unlike shoes and clothes, there are no leftovers because there are no sizes. "Everyone can afford a luxury handbag, Karl Lagerfeld said. Handbags "make your life life more pleasant, make you dream, give you confidence, and show your neighbors you are doing well." (p. 168)

The luxury brand handbag is a study in globalization: hardware, like locks, come from Italy and China (primarily Guangzhou); the zipper comes from Japan; the lining comes from Korea; the embroidery is done in Italy, India, or northern China; the leather is from Korea or Italy; and the bag is assembled partly in China and partly in Italy. The sourcing is sometimes as questionable as the true provenance of the bag. (p. 202)

Luxury brands deny outright that their bags are made in China make their bags in China. Thomas visited a factory in Guandong province and she had to promise the manufacturer that she wouldn't reveal the brand names. Each brand made the manufacturer sign a confidentiality agreement stipulating that he could not reveal the fact that he produced their products in China. (p. 197)

Vouge China is among the most popular fashion magazine in China, selling about half a million copies every month. The editor Angelica Cheung said, "Most Chinese buy luxury as a status symbol rather than taste. They like logos. The want people to know the are carrying something expensive. You see people walk into stores and say, 'Where is this brand from? Italy? Must be good!" They can't pronounce the names and they don't know where it comes from. The just want it because it's expensive." (p. 303)

"Chinese people," said Tom Doctoroff, director for JWT advertising in Shanghai, "will gladly spend a price premium for goods that are publicly consumed. But it's like buying a big glob of shiny glitter. They know which brands are famous, but they can't tell you the difference between them in terms of quality or design. [They buy] to burnish their credentials as someone of the modern world by stocking up on a year's supply of prestige." "These people," explained Wang Lianyi, an expert in comparative cultural studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, "are rich economically but lacking in basic manners, and they are not very fond of their own reputation," and they "not only want money, they want people to respect them in the future." (p. 307)

Deluxe II

"Luxury," said Cristiane Saddi, a customer of Daslu, Sao Paolo, Brazil, "is not how much you can buy. Luxury is the knowledge of how to do it right, how to take the time to understand and choose well. Luxury is buying the right thing." (p. 345-6)

"Luxury is exclusivity - it is made for you and no one else has it," Francoise Montenay, Chanel's president for Europe, explained "at a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique. It's the way you are spoken to, the way the product is presented, the way you are treated."

French actress Leslie Caron once said: "It was as important to be well dressed at it was to be educated, have good manners, eat well." (p. 29)

"Most of the designs have been around for almost a century and are coveted not because they are in fashion but because they never go out of fashion." (p. 172)

In Japan, parasite singles are very common; they are unmarried university-educated women, ages twenty-five to thirty-four, who worked in good-paying jobs - as secretaries, teachers, executives and lived with their parents. Living with parent without worrying about household expenses, they have a large amount of disposable income and impressive economic power. (p. 79) Parasite singles are also becoming very common in Hong Kong too.

Luxury fashion is a clubby world - designers all know each other, many intimately so, support staff such as press attaches and assistant designers move freely from one company to another, everyone dines in the same restaurants and vacations in the same locales. They refer to themselves as "the fashion tribe." Individualism has given way to homogenization, not only among stores within a brand but also among brands themselves. They tend to hire the same architects and use the same design tricks to get crowds into the stores and try to avoid leading the way for fear of alienating customers. (p. 90)

The former designer for Gucci Tom Ford said "luxury fashion brands today are too available, everything is too uniform, and customer business is too pedestrian." "It's like McDonald's: the merchandise and philosophy behind it is very similar. You get the same hamburger and the same experience in every McDonald's Same with Vuitton...The world was becoming a global culture." (p. 325-6) So much so the book is covered by the New York artist Tom Sachs's Prada Value Meal (1998), which converts McDonald's-style value meals Prada's logo wrap, on the dust jacket.

If there is one thing that has changed in luxury in the last thirty years, it is the single-minded focus on profitability. Since the tycoons have taken over, however, the primary objective to produce the finest products possible has been replaced by a phenomenon Thomas call the cult of luxury. Today, luxury brand items are collected like baseball cards, displayed like artwork, brandished like iconography. Luxury tycoons have shifted the focus from what the produce is to what it represents. (p. 41)

Deluxe I

It is hardly difficult to spot a woman wearing anonymous clothes and shoes but with a luxury brand handbag.

Dana Thomas's Deluxe: how luxury lost its luster (Penguin, 2007) became my recent hot pick to fight autumn boredom. Brilliantly written with lots of wit and insight to offer.

The legendary designer Christian Dior said: "I am no philosopher but it seems to me that women - an men too - instinctively yearn to exhibit themselves. In this machine age, which esteems convention and uniformity, fashion is the ultimate refuge of the human, the personal and the inimitable. Even the most outrageous innovations should be welcomed, if only because they shield us against the shabby and the humdrum. Of course fashion is a transient, egotistical indulgence, yet in an era as somber as ours, luxury must be defended centimeter by centimeter." (p. 7-8)

"Luxury is the possibility to stay close to," the French shoe designer Christian Louboutin said, "your customers, and do things that you know they will love. It's about subtlety and details. It's about service." "Luxury is not consumerism. It is educating the eyes to see that special quality." (p. 327)

The way we dress reflects not only our personality but also our economic, political, and social standing and our self-worth. Luxury adornment has always been at the top of the pyramid, setting apart the haves from the have-nots. (p. 6)

Luxury wasn't simply a product. It denoted a history of tradition, superior quality, and often a pampered buying experience. Luxury was a natural and expected element of upper-class life, like belonging to the right clubs or having the right surname. (p. 7)

The luxury industry has changed the way people dress. It has realigned our economic class system. It has changed the way we interact. 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. Luxury, regrettably, has lost its luster. (p. 13)

The idea was to "democratize", to make luxury "accessible," to target on the middle market, that broad socioeconomic demographic that includes everyone from teachers and sales executives to high-tech entrepreneurs." The message was clear: buy our brand and you, too, will live a luxury life. (p. 9). Today, luxury is indeed democratic: it's available to anyone, anywhere, at any price point. In 2004, Japanese consumers accounted for 41 percent of luxury sales, Americans 17 percent, and Europeans 16 percent. By 2011, China is expected to be the world's most important luxury market. (p. 12)

Erotic capital

Pierre Bourdieu's distinction between economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital as the major three personal assets of any person is too famous for any scholars in social sciences and humanities.

Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at LSE, put forward a fourth personal asset, erotic capital. She considers 'erotic capital is just as important as economic, cultural, and social capital for understanding social and economic processes, social interaction, and social mobility.'

Erotic capital has greater value when it is linked to high levels of economic, cultural, and social capital.

Our modern societies are highly 'sexualized individualized' and 'erotic capital becomes more important and more valorized.' Hakim identifies six elements of erotic capital and some of them highly intertwined with each other.

Firstly, beauty is a central element though it could vary in different cultures and societies.

Sexual attractiveness is a second element, which is about sexy body and they way someone, men and women, moves, talks, and behave.

A third element is rather social: grace, charm, social skills in interaction, the ability to make people like you, feel at ease and happy, want to know you, and desire you. In other words, it is like flirtatious skills.

A fourth element is liveliness, a mixture of physical fitness, social energy, and good humour.

The fifth element is social presentation: style of dress, face-painting, perfume, jewellery or other adornments, hairstyles, and the various accessories that people carry or wear to announce their social and style to the world.

Last but not least, the sixth element is sexuality: sexual competence, energy, erotic imagination, playfulness, and everything else that makes for a sexually satisfying partner.

Erotic capital, Hakim suggests, is a combination of aesthetic, visual, physical, social, and sexual attractiveness to other members of our society, and especially to members of the opposite sex, in all social contexts.

She contends that erotic power becomes increasingly important in the most advanced societies, because it incorporates interpersonal skills. Sexuality is a performance, one that is learnt well enough to become second nature, and includes emotion management.

Women have more erotic capital than men in most societies because they work harder at personal presentation and the performance of gender and sexuality. She also tries to explain the intentional oblivion of the social sciences to erotic capital. Women generally have more erotic capital than men, so men deny it exists or has value, and have taken steps to ensure that women cannot legitimately exploit their relative advantage. Feminists have reinforced 'moral' objections to the deployment of erotic capital.

Source: Catherine Hakim's "Erotic Capital," European Sociological Review, Vol. 26, No. 5, 2010, pp. 499-518.

Route 312 (cont.)

Following my earlier post on Route 312 some of Gifford' stories are intriguing.

A Tibetan teaching Tibetans Chinese

Gifford met a young Tibetan, Xiao Lin, who was returning from training in Lanzhou to his hometown, south of Xiahe, in Tibet and to teach the Chinese language to Tibetan kids.

'You are a Tibetan. But you have been raised in the Chinese system. And now you are returning to teach the language of what many Tibetans call your "oppressors' to your own people. Doesn't that make you uncomfortable at all?' Gifford asked.

'I have no choice,' Lin replied, who was among the top students in Tibet to enter one of the best universities in western China, 'The only way to say I'm not going to take part in this is to not learn Chinese and reject the whole Chinese system. But that would condemn me to poverty. You can never get a good job and improve your living standards if you do that.'

'Of course our culture is being diluted,' he admitted, 'The need to learn Chinese, the influx of more Chinese people. And that is sad. But it is not being completely diluted. There are some non-negotiables.' What are they? 'For instance, I would never marry a Han Chinese girl. And my Buddhist faith is something I will never give up,' he added. What about the lifestyle? Tibetans are nomads.

'First, there is nothing romantic about being a nomad. It's a very tough life. Second, I think nomads realise there is no future as nomads. That is simply today's world. The modern world. The globalised world. I'm not sure we can completely blame the Chinese for that.' (p. 172-3)

One-child policy

Gifford has two children. Unfortunately, it seems to be an offence to some.

'It's not right to have more than two children,' a woman, who worked in government family planning, listening to his conversation with his neighbour on a bus said.

'what happens if you find that there are women who are pregnant who shouldn't be pregnant?'Gifford asked.

'We try to persuade them to have an abortion.' 'And if they don't agree?' 'We have to fore them. You know. There are too many Chinese people.' 'But how do you force them? What if they won't go?' 'if she will not come voluntarily, she is taken to the clinic by force.' 'But what if there is a woman who is eight months pregnant, and she shouldn't be?' 'She is...' The woman makes an action with her hands in front of her stomach, an action of flushing something away.

'But that's a living child, that could be born and survive.' 'There are too many Chinese people.'

'But don't you find it...a bit brutal?' 'It's necessary. There are too many Chinese people.'

'But how do you actually do it? How do you kill an eight-month-old baby?' 'You inject into the mother's uterus, and that kills the child.' 'But she still has to give birth to the child, doesn't she?' 'Yes. Sometimes the child doesn't die in the womb and is still alive when it is born. But, we leave it...and it...' to drown the infants in buckets of water. (p. 189-193)

Facai

Travelling along the desert area near Qilian Mountains on a bus, Gifford looked out of the window towards the open scrubland of the desert separated by a wire fence and found small groups of people walking around looking at the ground, and occasionally stooping to pick clumps of greenery from the dry desert earth. They're picking facai, which is a type of edible grass to be sold to Hong Kong. 'The name of the plant sounds like the words for "get rich" in Cantonese, so the Hong Kongers like to eat it. They are very superstitious.' A young seed salesman explained.

Why humanities?

The more the humanities become subjects for the elite, the more inward looking and bigoted the rest of the population will become. If you want a vibrant multicultural democracy with well-rounded and contented citizens which is well integrated into the rest of the world, you have to properly fund the liberal arts and encourage those from all social backgrounds to study them.

Education was divided into two classes, one for the aristocracy, the other for the destitute and impoverished. We called the former free education, for it taught the freeman what a thing was (a peculiar and valuable knowledge); the later was called trade or indentured service; it taught a pleb how to perform some economically useful task, made him feel jolly and highly skilled but kept him in ignorance of the finer truths.

Employers prefer a mediocre business studies degree to a good humanities one these days. That's not because business studies or its students are superior, but because people not au fait with humanities (a group set to grow and grow) just don't understand the skills they impart.

Why would you encourage the perpetuation of poverty by enticing poor students into doing history or even more uselessly English (can you not already read and write decent English?)

The bigger worry for our society is that the field of journalism is dominated by those with an upper class background.

The choice by the rich reflects the later salary expectations. Science and technology are low class jobs and have lower salary expectations in the UK and the rich realize that. Computing is not particularly well paid with many jobs being outsourced to India and age discrimination is particularly rife in computing which the rich will know. Dentistry and medicine have extremely high salary expectations which is why they are favoured by the rich.

The figures for medicine and dentistry are the ones which make me wonder. Are you really telling me that so many students from wealthy backgrounds choose these subjects because they are interested in anatomy and teeth? Or just because they value money, prestige and security...? And if the latter, can we really blame them? It seems an awful waste for talented people to do something they don't enjoy much, in order to have a secure, well paid job, but these days it seems ever more common. And yet with ever-increasing work hours, who really has time for hobbies?

We're already well on the way to being a society dominated by mediciocre busininess administrators and philistine politicians (both of whom increasingly resemble each other) who have no sense of history, aesthetics, ethics or anything else that enhances the quality of life, and can't use language with any precision at all, resorting to hype and spin.

You Major in What?

Autumn is a flowery season and flowers embrace the campus from the main entrance to the square. An accounting graduate bounced to my office for photo-taking and I congratulated her. She is now working in one of the Big Four. Good for her. After wishing her luck for the coming examination in Christmas I withdrew to the office and picked up again Katherine Brooks's You Majored in What? Mapping your Path from Chaos to Career (NY: Viking, 2009) by my side.

Brooks addresses the key challenges faced by many uni students. An English major does not necessarily translate into a job in the publishing sector. Linear-path thinking usually applies only to pre-occupational majors like accounting and medicine. Non-specific liberal arts majors like English or foreign languages are open to more possibilities.

As a commentator said Brooks's work "is truly a great guide for the soon-to-be-launched students" and "has provided liberal arts grads with exactly what they need to compete and succeed." A university career counsellor suggests the book "should be sent to all students with their letters of admission or given to every first-year student at the start of orientation." Unfortunately, the book is no available in our own library (I borrowed this book through interlibrary loan) and I hope the library and the career centre would make the book available soon.

Since I am teaching compulsory liberal arts courses, which are widely seen as a pointless chore, for non-liberal-arts students, some discussion in the book attracted my eyeballs. Brooks provide a common scenario for students: you required to take class you really don't want to take. She provides two tracks of thinking, i.e. negative and right-mind, a student might have.

THOUGHTS:

Negative thinking (NT): "I have to take this required class I'm going to hate."

Right-mind thinking (RT): "I have to take this required class. I don't think I'm going to like it, but because I want to do well I'm going to see what I can do to make it a good experience."

BELIEF:

NT: "I shouldn't have to take this class. I'll never need this information. This is ridiculous. It's a complete waste of time and a stupid requirement."

RT: "I can't control the class, but I can control my experience of it."

EXPECTATION:

NT: "This class will be boring and useless."

RT: "I'm going to see what I can learn from this class."

ATTITUDE:

NT: "There's no point in putting much effort into it. I'm just going to do the minimal amount of work to survive and suffer through the semester until it's over."
RT: "I'm going to make this a personal challenge. Because it's a required class, someone must think it's valuable. And the professor must think there's something valuable in what we're studying. I'm going to find out why. If nothing else, I'll have a great story for an interview about how I survived a difficult class."

BEHAVIOUR:

NT: "Cut class. Sit in the back row. Use the time to instant-message friends or play a game on your laptop. Do minimal work on assignments."

RT: "Attend class. Take good notes. Study for the tests. Keep looking for something interesting about the course - even if it's just the professor's bad wardrobe!"

PERFORMANCE:

NT: "Get a C or worse."

RT: "Get an A or the best possible grade in the situation."

WHAT YOU'VE LEARNED:

NT: "I'm helpless and at the mercy of ridiculous rules."

RT: "I'm in control. I can make the best of a bad situation. I can challenge myself." (p. 51-2)

Is it very hard not to come up with some choice adjectives to describe these classes: useless, boring, awful, wasteland, and so on?

My uni

It is the best of times. The 2010 congregation is drawing joyful and promising young graduates back to the campus with their gratified parents and excited friends to celebrate their once-in-a-lifetime ceremony with triumphing smiles. It is always heart-warming whilst passing by them and even when I turned to be an amateur photographer for a moment or two.

It is the worst of times. The heart-breaking news about our record high fresh graduate unemployment rates as high as nearly 8% among all eight universities in Hong Kong hit everyone from the President to students.

It is the age of wisdom. The university is, finally, able to situate its unique role as a research-based professional university endeavouring to transform students to young professionals by liberal teaching and learning. I hope it is the spring of hope.

It is the age of foolishness, however, if the executives are yet to identify the hurdles and overcome it with determination but try to fool the stakeholders in particular students with non-employability-related university rankings. Perhaps the winter of despair is not far.

The Curse of Knowledge

Knowledge makes us weak and vulnerable. And it curses us.

"This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has 'cursed' us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind."

"There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them."

How? Chip Health & Dan Heath have the answers to transform ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge, and literally make ideas stick to make people listen, understand, remember, believe, care, and change.. In their Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die (New York : Random House, 2007; or Chinese translation: 姚大鈞譯：《創意黏力學 : 簡單、意外、具體、可信、情緒、故事》（台北市：大塊文化，2007）), the Heaths present six principles of sticky ideas: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Stories - SUCCESs.

It is an interesting and easy-to-follow book. Strongly recommended.

Autumn breeze and The Shadow of the Wind

Autumn breeze gently touches my face and carries me away.

The Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind (2004 [2001]) came to life, to my life in Edinburgh last summer. During my three-month stay, I finished only one and a half fictions. The Shadow of the Wind is the one. Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves (2010) is still unfinished on my bookshelf (one-third to go). I picked up writing and editing this blog recently and found my excerpts from The Shadow of the Wind. It is brilliant! It is a book connecting two generations of mysteries, romance, and friendship in Barcelona. It is also a book with lots of wisdom, some from the main character Daniel Sempere's confidant Fermín Romero de Torres.

"if you ever have a daughter, you'll begin, without realizing it, to divide men into two camps, those you expect are sleeping with her and those who don't." (Isaac Monfort, p. 70)

"Nobody knows much about women, not even Freud, not even women themselves. But it's like electricity: you don't have to know how it works to get a shock." (Fermín, p. 89)

"Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption and gossip. That's the intrinstic blueprint for our 'ethical behaviour'" (Fermín, p. 95)

"As Freud tell us, women want the opposite of what they think or say they want, which, when you consider it, is not so bad, because men, as is more than evident, respond, contrariwise, to the dictates of their genital and digestive organs." (Fermín, p. 134)

"man, going back to Freud - and excuse the metaphor - heats up like a lightbulb: red hot in the twinkling of an eye and cold again in a flash. The female, on the other hand - and this is pure science - heats up like an iron, slowly, over a low heat, like a tasty stew. But then, once she has heated up, there's no stopping her. Like the steel furnaces in Vizcaya." (Fermín, p. 134-5)

"the echo of my footsteps followed me through the corridors and galleries that led me to the cloister...sitting on one of the benches, her silhouette outlined against the fountain" (p. 177-8)

"One has to pay some price for being able to piss standing up." (Fermín, p. 194)

"Womandkind is an indecipherable maze. If you give her time to think, you're lost. Remember: warm heart, cold mind. The seducer's code." (Fermín, p. 195)

"Love is a lot like pork: there's loin steak and there's bologna. Each has its own place and function." (Fermín, p. 200)

"There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite." (Mr. Barcelo, p. 201)

"The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich. That is the poison with which capitalism blinds the [poor]" (Fermín, p. 203)

"Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you." (Daniel, p. 215)

"Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visit. You have to go for it yourself." (Fermín, p. 233)

"Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen." (Mr. Barcelo, p. 303)

"This city [Barcelona] is a sorceress...It gets under your skin and steals your soul without you knowing." (p. 496)

"I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books." (p. 504)