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The Globalized Death of Class; or, Why I Disliked Monte Carlo
BlogThe opposite of luxury isn’t poverty; it’s vulgarity – Coco Chanel
Recently we went on a babymoon, and it was awesome. Nevertheless, there was one part of my trip that really bummed me out, and that was the visit to the area around the Monte Carlo Casino.
As we approached the casino, I was expecting some sign of Old-World, European elegance.
Taste, class, beauty
But we did not see this. Rather, class and elegance evaporated as we traversed the approach to the casino. Like a Bedazzled ™ Grecian urn on a neon platform, the old-world casino was festooned with shops of the brands advertised to represent a high-net-worth lifestyle worldwide: Bottega Veneta, Rolex, Tag Heuer, van Cleef and Arpels, Prada, Coach.
Those aren’t special, they’re the exact same line-up of merchants as one finds on 5th Avenue, NYC; Rue de Rivoli, Paris; Honolulu; London; Rodeo Drive; the promenade in Heathrow terminal 5. Why buy a thing in Monaco that you can get just as well in Dallas on your way home from the Whataburger?
Further, because fashion is a shell game of having pieces made in China and then having the work finished in e.g. Milan so that you can legally affix a “Made in Italy” tag, the fashion is derivative and boring. There’s no “Ah, that’s a closer European cut” or “Why, those French, they’ve gone nuts for pleats.” Instead it’s a homogenized gray goo of fashion where it’s one product fits all.
And what’s sold isn’t some sort of evolutionarily superior offering that is the best that a particular fashion house has to offer. In a weird bit of postmodernism and late-stage capitalism, it is stuff that has a huge price tag that justifies that it’s a luxury offering because it has a high price tag.
This is what the well-to-do, do?
It’s like a Tommy Bahama shirt by Donald Trump
A Versace-patterned bucket hat with a grown up man-romper? I can imagine neither Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, nor Prince Ranier III in such a thing.
Elegance
As we approached the plaza, the brand-whoring on display reached a fever pitch. Same blood-red soles; same short skirts; same designer tits; same yacht-top-perfected tan paired with some iron pyrite pirate’s tasteless display of price tag uber alles.
There was no multicultural display of noblesse; there was only the same, boring, commercial, oppressive-as-COVID-in-your-lungs sense of the utter banality of a world ruled by the trilateral hegemony of American marketing, Chinese manufacture, and kleptocrats’ consumption.
Given such a vulgar display, I was astounded by the people of my own class who were there to watch and, astoundingly, gawk. Gawking at the wealthy-but-inelegant as a thing to do on vacation? What hath Keeping up with the Kardashians wrought?
The gawkers were the same people that I saw walking around the Venetian in Las
Vegas with Harley-Davidson T-shirts, basketball shorts, and Crocs. Actually,
that’s what they were wearing outside the casino as well. Pulling up Android
phones, they snapped the lime Lamborghini or the Ferrari as it slid through the
driveway. They had been conned into thinking that seeing this vulgar display of
1% largesse was a spectacle worth their time and shoe-leather plastic.
It was a vulgar display wrapped in a pitiable display of hopelessness to create
the most vulgarly depressing tourist destination I’ve ever seen.
As a jaded New Yorker let me say fuuuuuuuuuck that.
At least in New York, the 1% are swift, silent and out of your face on 5th Avenue. We don’t gawk at them; they don’t care about us. They have the decency to not expect us to “ooh” and “ahh” around them while they fulfill their role in educating us to be temporarily embarrassed (and impecunious) millionaires instead of an (aggrieved and) exploited proletariat.1
That might be one of the great glories of 5th Avenue. You can hop out of a Bugatti to pick up a new watch. But your security guy knows better than to stand in the middle of the sidewalk stopping me from getting my hot dog from a Bhutanese immigrant.