THE TEXTURE
Is it good — or do you just want to feel wealthy?
There’s a difference between design that earns its price and design that merely performs the price. One is a patient craft—wood joined so cleanly the joint is a quiet brag; leather that will take on your life like a diary. The other is theatre—gloss, weight, and logos deployed like stage lights so you can feel a little richer when you look at it.
This essay asks a simple, awkward question: when you love a “luxury” object, is it genuinely good—or are you buying the feeling of being wealthy?
The stagecraft of “expensive”
Design has a small bag of tricks that read as money:
Shine. Humans are biased toward glossy surfaces (we’re literally drawn to them), so luster gets coded as premium—even when the substrate isn’t.
Heft. Heavier things feel more important and valuable; simply adding physical weight can inflate perceived worth.
Price tags as placebo. When tasters were told a wine was pricier, they actually experienced it as more pleasant—and fMRI showed higher activity in brain regions for reward. In other words, the number on the label can alter the flavor in your head.
Brand prominence. “Loud” logos versus “quiet” signals are carefully calibrated status cues; different consumers prefer each style depending on wealth and need for status.
None of these cues are inherently bad. Shine protects. Weight can signal durability. Logos build identity. But as a system, they can substitute for the harder work of craft, longevity, and integrity of materials—the things that make design worth its cost across decades, not minutes.
Why we crave the feeling of wealth
The urge to broadcast status has been with us since Veblen named “conspicuous consumption” in 1899. If goods can signal rank, the object becomes a social message as much as a tool.
Modern psychology tightens the knot. A large literature links materialistic value-orientations with lower well-being (and vice versa). Tim Kasser and colleagues, across multiple studies, find that prioritising money, image, and status correlates with lower life satisfaction and more distress; moving away from those priorities helps.
Biology adds detail. Our brains are exquisitely sensitive to expectations and labels—a raised price not only promises better taste; it recruits the circuitry of pleasure to make it taste better. That’s powerful, but it also means we can be manipulated by signals that feel like quality without delivering it.
Clothing shows a similar loop. The meanings we stitch into garments can influence attention and cognition (“enclothed cognition”), nudging how confident or capable we feel when we wear certain uniforms. Again: useful—and exploitable.
The case for another kind of wealth
If the theatre of luxury lifts mood briefly, what sustains it? Research points, persistently, to connection and meaning:
Doing over having. Experiential purchases (meals, trips, lessons, concerts) generate more enduring satisfaction than material goods, in part because they knit us to other people and become part of our stories.
Giving over getting. Prosocial spending—using money to benefit others—reliably boosts happiness across contexts.
Nature connection. Meta-analyses show that feeling connected to nature correlates with higher positive affect, vitality, and life satisfaction.
Purpose. In Japan, the presence of ikigai—a felt “reason to live”—has been associated in cohort studies with lower mortality risk over time, particularly from cardiovascular disease. (Correlation, not destiny—but striking.)
Call this spiritual wealth: money translated into relationships, attention, craft, and care—things you can’t flash, but that change how you live inside your days.
Western culture and the performance of luxury
In contemporary Western markets, status has learned to whisper as well as shout. The logomania of the 1990s gave way, in part, to quiet codes: the “right” last on a shoe, the exact hand of a cashmere. As Han, Nunes, and Drèze show, the rich who don’t need to prove it often prefer “quiet” signals only insiders catch; those hungry to be seen pick the loud marks. Either way, signaling is the point.
At the same time, much “premium” design leans on surface: glossier packages, heavier bottles, bigger bezels. Studies repeatedly find these cues sway judgments of quality, importance, even taste—irrespective of underlying performance. That’s not luxury; it’s semiotics.
Other design cultures, other answers
Japan. Traditions like wabi-sabi and shibui prize restraint, patina, and the beauty of imperfection—values that subvert showy expense and honor longevity and care. (Aesthetic traditions surveyed in mainstream philosophy sources.)
The cultural idea of ikigai—purpose as daily practice—also aligns with evidence linking purpose to better health outcomes.Nordics. Lagom and hygge channel sufficiency, warmth, and social coherence; the design mirror is quiet craft, light, and tactility—objects that support rituals of togetherness rather than status theatre. (See also the broader literature on nature connection and well-being, above.)
India & the UK. Cross-national work on status consumption suggests different drivers and contexts (e.g., social comparison pressures, category norms), but a common theme: luxury is as much about who sees you as what you own.
Global luxury codes. The same handbag can “shout” in one market and “whisper” in another. Brand prominence toggles to fit the local social game.
None of these cultures are monolithic. Each houses its own mass-market theatre and its own deep craft traditions. But the dominant stories they tell about a good life—and good things—do differ.
A loose lens on life expectancy
If you zoom out from taste to time, the picture is humbling. Recent WHO snapshots put Japan’s life expectancy around 84–85 years, the UK near 80 years, and the US closer to 76 (with health-span—the years lived in good health—lagging further). Many factors drive this: diet, inequity, healthcare, social safety nets, urban design, community life. Design, in the broad sense (what we build, buy, eat, and do together), is one thread in a dense weave.
It would be irresponsible to claim that owning fewer logos makes you live longer. But societies that invest status in purpose, social connection, and everyday rituals—rather than prize-display—often show patterns (from ikigai studies to nature-connectedness research) that line up with better subjective well-being, and sometimes, with healthier ageing. Correlation, not causation; still, a signal worth heeding.
So—what should luxury mean in design?
At The Goose, we use four tests:
Time test. Will it age beautifully—repairable, patinating, seasonless? (If not, the “luxury” may be costume.)
Touch test. Does it improve with handling? True materials deepen under the hand; veneers don’t.
Trace test. Can you see the maker’s thinking—joinery, grain, weave—instead of only the brand’s theatre?
Meaning test. Does it support connection—around a table, in a room, with a landscape—or is it just a mirror for status?
Design that passes these tests earns its expense. It doesn’t need to shout. It doesn’t even need to whisper. It just works, for a very long time, in the company of people you love.
If luxury is the feeling of being more alive in your own life—not merely richer in other people’s eyes—then the brief for designers is clear: less theatre, more truth.
Selected references & further reading
Veblen, T. The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). (Foundational critique of conspicuous consumption.)
Han, Y. J., Nunes, J. C., & Drèze, X. “Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence.” Journal of Marketing (2010).
Plassmann, H. et al. “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness.” PNAS (2008). (Price-placebo in the brain.)
Kasser, T. “Materialistic Values and Goals.” Advances in Motivation Science (2016); overview of links between materialism and lower well-being.
Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T.; Gilovich, Kumar & Jampol. On experiential purchases and enduring satisfaction. JPSP (2003); Journal of Consumer Psychology (2015).
Dunn, E., Aknin, L., & Norton, M. “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness.” Science (2008).
Capaldi, C. A., Dopko, R. L., & Zelenski, J. M. “Nature connectedness and happiness: A meta-analysis.” Frontiers in Psychology (2014).
Sone, T. et al. “Sense of life worth living (ikigai) and mortality in Japan.” (Ohsaki Study). (2008).
WHO country snapshots for life expectancy: Japan; UK; USA; and research on health-span gaps.
Jostmann, N. B. et al. “Weight as an embodiment of importance.” JPSP (2009). (Heaviness biases judgments.)
“Enclothed cognition.” Adam & Galinsky, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (2012).