After a Year of Stealth Wealth, Is "Quiet Luxury" a Dirty Word?
The term quiet luxury wasn't born in 2023 but it might've well been. Quiet luxury, also known as stealth wealth and the "old money" aesthetic, was easily 2023's most visible fashion movement, driven by early-year virality of Succession and influencers like Sofia Richie, pushing the concept of intentional understated clothing to mainstream highs.
Truly, interest in quiet luxury as a look and a lifestyle veritably exploded this year, reaching a fever pitch over the summer. Even a half-year since its peak, quiet luxury is still not dead.
The trend is actually in an interesting place: it's simultaneously a sought-after ideal still commanding about half the search volume it did six months ago, according to Google, and a sort of undead buzzword inspiring a vacantly enthusiastic press releases and marketing blasts.
But there's more to today's perception of quiet luxury than just empty demand. As popular as it remains, quiet luxury has become a dirty word, of sorts. It both does and doesn't exist, Schrödinger's aesthetic.
Quiet luxury succeeded where so many other flash-in-the-pain trends flopped (wherefore art thou, coastal grandmas?) because it's both aspirational and widely applicable.
Who wouldn't want to look wealthy in a tasteful way? We all want to believe that we aren't merely shopping but "investing" in clothes, right? Disagreeable she may be, weren't Gwyneth Paltrow's courtroom outfits bangin'? And we all love The Row, don't we folks?
This is the crux of quiet luxury: not all of those brands that connote wealth make things that're obviously expensive; some of their goods are subtle enough to signal prices only to those who recognize it. You know it's expensive without having to know what it is, in essence.
"A brand or a designer becomes shorthand for having taste or money or exclusivity, and that’s where people flock to, regardless of whether they like it or it makes any sense for their personal style," writer Tyler McCall recently posited.
This is the mentality that keeps advertising-agnostic luxury house Goyard in business and why terminally swagless Mark Zuckerberg coughs up $300 for a stable of Brunello Cucinelli T-shirts.
As it enters its second year of ongoing relevance, quiet luxury continues is still a potent force of desire.
The phrase itself informs an undercurrent that runs through all tiers of contemporary fashion, from the fashion houses that set the quiet luxury tone to labels to fast-casual imprints like Banana Republic, which is in the process of overhauling its entire brand to affect that old money look (BR's Instagram bio currently reads, "Lived in luxury.").
Even omnipresent athleisure brand Alo Yoga waded into the quiet luxury movement with the late 2023 debut of Alo Atelier, a clothing line styled and priced more in accordance with stealth wealth staples like Khaite than Alo's workout peers or even Alo's own mainline fare.
Compare the ~$100 pricetag of a conventional Alo sweater to the three or even four-figure MSRP of Alo Atelier knitwear, for instance.
That a company as mass-market as Alo would opt to enter the quiet luxury discussion in 2023 is reflective of quiet luxury's sheer omnipresence.
It's hard to overstate just how difficult it was to escape March 2023's Succession-wrought "ludicrously capacious" bag moment, for instance.
Just like every other peak trend, quiet luxury's ubiquity yielded ample pushback in the short term.
And, though that backlash only slightly slowed interest in stealth wealth, it did reveal an interesting contradiction at the heart of the trend.
To different people, "quiet luxury" represents different things: an attitude, a wardrobe, a sense of style. But it also reflects inherent contrasts: self-branding at odds with the anti-trend attitude of its core practitioners and prices untenable for the wider audience that seeks to channel it.
Quiet luxury is still a thing, quiet luxury is still desirable and, yet, quiet luxury is a dirty word.
One of the curious elements of the aesthetic is that the people who intentionally sought it only found themselves further away from true stealth wealth than when they first started. Actually embodying quiet luxury is like going to sleep — those who willfully chase it will find it impossible to grasp.
This clash became especially apparent with towards the latter half of 2023 with the confluence of several subsequent stealth wealth events, an unexpected visible quiet luxury eclipse.
First, The Row almost abashedly opened the doors to its annual sample sale; buzzy New York designer Peter Do then launched his Banana Republic collection; weeks later, Phoebe Philo debuted her eponymous brand.
These three seemingly disparate events underscored a handful of truisms. For one, everyone loves a discount. For another, true adherents will always pay up.
And: no matter where it comes from, true quiet luxury is expensive
The blocks-long queues outside of The Row's sample sale were themselves fairly shocking (The Row? More like The Line! ha ha ha) but shoppers who suffered the hours-long wait were equally taken aback by the prices.
Nearly everything at the sale was upwards of 75% off but there were hardly any true bargains to be found. A $1,400 sweater at a quarter of its value — before tax — is still $350, y'know.
Similarly, Phoebe Philo's return to fashion partially crossed over into mainstream conversation simply because of its prices.
The return of a critically acclaimed but relatively niche designer would've ordinarily been relegated to fashion-nerd discussion only but that Philo's new line debuted with five-figure ready-to-wear items proved so shocking that even tabloids were moved to cover the discourse. And there was much discourse.
Do's Banana Republic collection was comparably affordable but it still pricier than most of the stuff made by GAP subsidiaries, with some of its outerwear commanding four-figure sums.
Point is, the quiet luxury look isn't cheap — by design. You can get clothing of similar quality for less money but quiet luxury is just as much about branding as conventional luxury, it's just that quiet luxury clothing emphasizes form over logos, itself a form of branding.
Since the taste for stealth wealth doesn't rely on logos, fast fashion brands have gamely catered to a quiet luxury-hungry market, but their cheap, disposable clothes aren't a real stand-in for that old money aesthetic.
Not that folks who can't afford upper-crust clothes should be shamed for purchasing affordable items, obviously, but there is a divergence between aspiration and reality here.
Then, there's the descriptive form of the phrase, the stealth wealth mentality.
Quiet luxury is akin to the term "punk": no one who epitomizes it actually describes themselves with it. There's nothing less punk than calling yourself punk. And there's nothing less stealthily wealthy than admitting that you're purposely trying to look rich.
Take Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, the near-invisible queens of quiet luxury, who plainly side-eye quiet luxury's branding-free branding.
"I don’t know why there’s this new idea,” said Ashley in a recent, rare interview. "It’s not a new concept at all," continued Mary Kate. "Anonymity is a luxury as well.”
Indeed, true quiet luxury is attained by well-to-do folks who affect it without trying. To achieve stealth wealth is to be, well, wealthy enough that you wish to only broadcast it stealthily.
It's incidental, not intentional. It's expensive, not affordable. It exists only for the people who wish that the term did not.
Still, quiet luxury as an ideal has endured. It helps that the look isn't relegated to a single piece of clothing or commitment to a single style. You can ostensibly tap into the vibe with an ordinary-looking wardrobe elevated by flair and fancy.
And that's why quiet luxury is at this interesting crossroads.
It's become a dirty word despite people continuing to pine for and exhibit it. Quiet luxury is something you can't really verbalize if you actually aspire to it and, even then, you probably aren't in the requisite tax bracket to actually embody it, because that's how exclusive quiet luxury truly is — again, by design.
It was made famous by society at large calling attention to it but quiet luxury was born generations ago when the ultra-rich acquiesced to signaling their wealth to other ultra-rich people through codes and subtle clothes.
This guardedness is part and parcel with quiet luxury as an idea and it's also at least partially why it remains so covetable. After all, we all want what we can't have.
