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I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it

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I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it

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Luxury and Design, Zeynep Din | 9783838348940 | Boeken | bol.com

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Luxury and Design (Paperback). Luxury is a concept that has historical and cultural values in terms of humanity and design, and a term that is difficult…

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The Triumph of Pleasure - Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle | 9780226211558 |... | bol.com

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The Triumph of Pleasure - Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Paperback). Prominent components of Louis XIV’s propaganda, the arts of spectacle…

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The New Luxury: Highsnobiety, Gestalten | 9783899559835 | Boeken | bol.com

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Negatief, positief, neutraal: we zetten een review altijd online. We controleren wel eerst of 'ie voldoet aan onze reviewvoorwaarden en niet nep is. We controleren ook of 'ie is geschreven door iemand die het artikel heeft gekocht via bol.com en zetten dit er dan bij. De controles gebeuren automatisch, al kijken er soms mensen mee. Bol.com betaalt niet voor reviews. Als een reviewer door een andere partij is vergoed, staat dit in de review zelf.

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Crafting Luxury, Mark Bloomfield | 9781789385809 | Boeken | bol.com

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In a world that is obsessed with luxury, critical luxury studies is a rapidly emerging field. This is the first book to explore the interplay between the real and imaginary realms of luxury, considering the most significant developments in the theories and practices of luxurious places and spaces over the last fifty years. Providing a critical approach to contemporary interpretations of luxury, the book interrogates the distinction between real places and imaginary spaces. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, it features a range of case studies which take the reader from the Rolls-Royce Ghost Black Badge to expressions of sensuality in the 1970s domestic interior, and global conceptions of fine wine and art. The Third Realm of Luxury considers the interplay between luxury and space in both the past and the present, examining the abstract conception of excess and exoticism, as well as the real locations of the home, hotel, apartment, and palace. Full of original research, it is a key contribution to the study of consumption, design, fashion, and architecture.

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The Third Realm of Luxury Connecting Real Places and Imaginary Spaces | 9781350062771... | bol.com

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In a world that is obsessed with luxury, critical luxury studies is a rapidly emerging field. This is the first book to explore the interplay between the real and imaginary realms of luxury, considering the most significant developments in the theories and practices of luxurious places and spaces over the last fifty years.

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Negatief, positief, neutraal: we zetten een review altijd online. We controleren wel eerst of 'ie voldoet aan onze reviewvoorwaarden en niet nep is. We controleren ook of 'ie is geschreven door iemand die het artikel heeft gekocht via bol.com en zetten dit er dan bij. De controles gebeuren automatisch, al kijken er soms mensen mee. Bol.com betaalt niet voor reviews. Als een reviewer door een andere partij is vergoed, staat dit in de review zelf.

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Luxury | 9780857853318 | Patrizia Calefato | Boeken | bol.com

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A sweeping history of luxury-from the pharaohs to the plutocrats-celebrating the quintessential role of opulence in human evolution From diamonds to Daimlers, a garden planted with porcelain roses, a mantle sewn with 45,000 feathers, a staircase fashioned of crystal, and tea served in a $36 million cup, here is luxury as pleasure, luxury as splendor, and luxury as beyond. Across fourteen chapters longtime Vogueeditor Jill Spalding chronicles what luxury entailed for such of history's icons as Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Kublai Khan, Montezuma, Elizabeth I, Marie de' Medici, Louis XIV, Shah Jahan, and the Emperor Qianlong. Discover how luxury flourished the table, the arts, travel, and architecture; how luxury drove fashion, marked politics, and advanced religion. Holding that luxury remains a global pursuit, Spalding links its evolution and impact to modern-day aspiration. How did luxury define the Rothschilds, the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, J.P. Morgan, and William Hearst? What has luxury meant to Coco Chanel, Elizabeth Taylor, Valentino, Daphne Guinness, and Leonardo DiCaprio? Find them all in this panoramic new survey. Informative, entertaining, and illustrated with more than 300 iconic archival images, Luxury: A History is a stunning, essential read for history lovers, fashion enthusiasts, art aficionados, and more.

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Luxury, Jill Spalding | 9781620975633 | Boeken | bol.com

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A sweeping history of luxury-from the pharaohs to the plutocrats-celebrating the quintessential role of opulence in human evolution From diamonds to Daimlers, a garden planted with porcelain roses, a mantle sewn with 45,000 feathers, a staircase fashioned of crystal, and tea served in a $36 million cup, here is luxury as pleasure, luxury as splendor, and luxury as beyond.

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From couture fashion to opulent perfumes and decadent food, the luxury goods and services industry has grown at an unprecedented rate even in the context of a global recession. But in contemporary digital culture does luxury still reside in material things, or rather the look of things? In this first study of luxury through the lens of visual culture, Armitage argues that luxury is undergoing a shift from material culture to the immaterial culture of the visual, offering new forms of luxury engagement and unparalleled levels of pleasure never before offered to the senses. Calling for a new understanding of luxury in the changing visual landscape of contemporary society, Luxury and Visual Culture embraces an extraordinary range of cultural forms, including fashion, photography, social media, television, and art. From the masterpieces of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, to Richard Avedon's photography and Louis Vuitton's Flagship stores, the book explores key issues of globalization, digitization, consumer identity, mass luxury, and the role of art. This text is ideal for all students of contemporary luxury studies, as well as scholars and researchers in the field of visual culture.

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Luxury and Visual Culture | 9781474246033 | John Armitage | Boeken | bol.com

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From couture fashion to opulent perfumes and decadent food, the luxury goods and services industry has grown at an unprecedented rate even in the context of a global recession. But in contemporary digital culture does luxury still reside in material things, or rather the look of things?

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Negatief, positief, neutraal: we zetten een review altijd online. We controleren wel eerst of 'ie voldoet aan onze reviewvoorwaarden en niet nep is. We controleren ook of 'ie is geschreven door iemand die het artikel heeft gekocht via bol.com en zetten dit er dan bij. De controles gebeuren automatisch, al kijken er soms mensen mee. Bol.com betaalt niet voor reviews. Als een reviewer door een andere partij is vergoed, staat dit in de review zelf.

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Luxury World, Mark Tungate | 9780749452636 | Boeken | bol.com

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Negatief, positief, neutraal: we zetten een review altijd online. We controleren wel eerst of 'ie voldoet aan onze reviewvoorwaarden en niet nep is. We controleren ook of 'ie is geschreven door iemand die het artikel heeft gekocht via bol.com en zetten dit er dan bij. De controles gebeuren automatisch, al kijken er soms mensen mee.

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Palgrave Advances in Luxury- Interpretations of Luxury, Linda Lisa Maria Turunen |... | bol.com

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Palgrave Advances in Luxury- Interpretations of Luxury (Hardcover). Exploring the elements that constitute the perceived luxuriousness of a brand, this…

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communist idea would have little chance of succeeding if it were concerned only with needs and reductions. We also need to remember that the goal of politics is to improve life. Certainly, a 'salary for life' (offering protection against the uncertainties of life and material distress), the sovereignty of associated producers (abolishing relations of pure subordination) and the right to leisure time (as part of disarming the productivity imperative) are all gains that would make life incomparably better than under capitalism.

But perhaps more should be said to remove the negative associations with which abandoning capitalism, and the word 'communism' itself, have been saddled - collective housing, a diet of potatoes and sausages, grey cars, grey coffee grinders, grey clothes, grey walls, grey cities.

In our imaginations, capitalism has a monopoly on colour, light, and even life itself. That must change, as it is destroying absolutely everything: the planet, homes (of all but the rich), physical health (except that of the rich), mental health (that of the rich too, though in a different way). If communism is ever to be viable, conceptually and politically, it must reclaim all this. It even needs to stake a claim to luxury - since lux is light. And that is what it's all about: light in our lives.

In one of the many grotesque and shameful acts of which advertisers are guilty, after 'concept' and 'creativity' (to the chagrin of 'creatives' everywhere), they have set their sights on 'the city', its 'lights' and its 'colours'. The idea that ads make the city more beautiful is the kind of moronic rubbish those bearded ad-folk in flip-flops and thick glasses are happy to peddle. Remove advertising, and you go back to Tirana, or East Berlin before the Wall came down.

Also read Philippe Pataud Célérier, "Bringing some magic to vulgar reality", Le Monde diplomatique, October 2016.

The reality is rather different: if we take down the JC Decaux signs and hand our cities back to graphic designers, street artists and indeed everyone else, we'll see an explosion of shapes, colours, ideas and slogans. we can hold competitions to decorate those gigantic tarpaulins that cover buildings under construction, sure of seeing something other than photos of watches, perfumes or mobile phones blown up to 20x10m. But perhaps we should not blame the advertisers: as zombies themselves, lost in a false world of commercial images, how could they spot the difference between the living and the dead? We know, in any case, that they'd be prevented from causing harm: obviously, advertising would come very high on the list of things to be abolished. Shutting down the advertising industry would set an example of new priorities in the division of labour.

Human beings want to make things

Advertising's mistakes are a concentrated version of capitalism's: to have confused a desire for material goods with desire itself, then to have concluded that, without those goods, desire would vanish from the world - and colour and light with it. With a little hindsight, it's a scam of shocking magnitude. Everything today, especially street photography, contradicts this big lie, and speaks to a surge in our desire to make, paint, design, write, build, create - but this time for real. That is to say, outside the concept of currency values?? and demands of capital. One could even say that the premise of Friot's well-founded, almost anthropological proposition is exactly that: human beings want to use their abilities. It may sound silly, but it is still true, and profound: human beings want to make things.

Capitalist luxury reserves the most beautiful things for the rich, while communist luxury can emerge from conditions totally other than purchasing power

The configuration of social structures at a given time forces this urge to fit pre-established forms, and humans to use their abilities in a certain way - most often one that corresponds with the aims of those in charge and serves their interests. But release individual abilities from this trap, and they'll be used more. This is the ultimate justification for Friot's salary for life: people will make things, and those things will contribute to social life.

Of course, people 'making things' in and of itself does not automatically constitute a division of labour that will meet all the needs of collective material life. Some part will still be subject to coercion. But which part? Many employees know how, and like, to make things that fit perfectly into the division of labour, but are forced to make them in conditions that are degraded by capitalism and its demands of competition and shareholders. Yet these degradations are exactly what the system of a salary for life frees workers from, leaving intact a fully functional division of labour and the possibility of making things well.

The beginning of luxury

The desire to make things means a desire to make them well, and even the best we can, because when we are making them for ourselves, we put all of ourselves into them. For certain things, to make them well is ipso facto to make them beautiful. This is the beginning of luxury.

We may already see a little more clearly what 'luxury' will be about, and especially what it will not be about: certainly not the solid gold bidets of those who have got rich on neoliberalism or the accumulation of stuff: as well as exploiting human beings, the logic of quantity - that of capitalist value - is wrecking the planet. It is strange - in fact, absurd - that the word 'communism' is embedded in Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a sort of technologist prophecy based on 3D printers, ubiquitous photovoltaic cells and the conquest of space, promising solutions to the climate and energy crises and 'abundance' for all. That is more or less the prospectus of a barely reconstructed capitalist vision.

Well, no; the numbers of objects that surround us and their rate of renewal will fall - they must. The idea of luxurious communism, then, must mean rejecting the idea that this reduction would mean a loss of beauty in our material life - because we will still have one. And, to be more precise, the aim will be to maximise the beauty of the minimal number of objects that we will keep.

The beauty of objects, beyond quantity and hype, is the first difference between communist and capitalist luxury. The second is the way they are accessed. Capitalist luxury reserves the most beautiful things for the rich, while communist luxury can emerge from conditions totally other than purchasing power: the freedom of producers to make things according to their desires, which will most often be to make them well and beautifully. In other words, freedom from all the constraints of capitalist production, which cause producers to make things badly.

Also read Razmig Keucheyan, "Make do and mend", Le Monde diplomatique, September 2019.

These constraints express an overarching logic: capital always tries to remunerate work as little as possible, thereby creating demand among those with little money, who need goods at a low enough price; that means they will be made under conditions that doom them to be badly made by mistreated and poorly paid employees, so completing the cycle. Only the richest of the rich escape this junk loop. The few who hold most of the wealth then find a supply that substitutes the 'poor quality/productivity' blend of the mass markets for a 'good quality/high price' formula.

The system of salaries for life breaks the inevitable junk loop by uncoupling activities from remuneration. When people are protected by a salary for life and can devote themselves to an activity and make things without this having the slightest impact on their remuneration, they do so under completely different conditions: according to their desire, which is to say well. Here again, we must overturn the capitalist axiom that, left to their own devices and freed from the 'healthy spur of having to earn a living', people do nothing - that they are essentially lazy. The opposite is true: 'left to their own devices', that is to say freed from the violence of being made to work under capitalism, people make things, they never stop making things, and they even make them better and better, for they are beings of desire and activity.

For example, a farmer can produce for the satisfaction of producing well, supplying healthy and good quality products, when he is no longer held back by the straightjacket of supermarkets and their requirements on price, and therefore on productivity, which mean using chemicals. Or when he ceases to be held back by the debt incurred by investing in mechanisation, imposed by the logic of high yields and low prices - all things he can break with under a salary for life. He will probably produce them in smaller quantities, but many more people will want to go into agriculture if it is satisfying, uncoupled from capitalist demands and released from economic uncertainty.

In a capitalist system, it is manufacturers outside the mass market who provide gourmet dining, at very high prices. This is, in turn, caught in a similar debt trap when it comes to its facilities and, by the same logic, quality suppliers (of furniture, crockery etc), which means high prices. According to the capitalist adage, 'you have to pay for quality'. But this is not true. Quality doesn't have to 'come at a price'. Capitalism has put the idea in our heads that quality is always linked to a quantity of money, otherwise we would only have access to junk. This is a lie. Quality comes from conditions that allow people to produce as they wish, that is, without depending on it for their survival. It's obvious straightaway that quality is the immediate corollary of this freedom, and always for the same reason: people do something well, the best they can even, when they do it for themselves, to present their labours for social recognition, provided that this does not take the form of a monetary price to which their material reproduction will be attached. The conditions are then met to ensure that, without piles of money being exchanged, the best standards of production spread as far as possible, and becomes the rule rather than the exception.

The aesthetic vocation of communism

If communism is a grey idea, it will not capture imaginations. But it doesn't have to be - quite the opposite. There is no contradiction in arguing that it can, and should, be luxurious. That is to say, it can shine the light of beautiful, well-made things all around, because everyone will have been placed in conditions in which they can make them beautifully and well - receiving a salary for life. Here we see how critically important it is to maintaining the greatest possible freedom of expression for private creators. Division of labour is necessary in some cases, and enough has been said about that, though it is not a subject that can be ignored. But division of labour in no way contradicts the idea that the necessary objects that come out of it are beautiful and good. But for that to happen, their production must be freed from the tyranny of capitalist value, and not regimented by top-down planning.

'Remember East Germany and the Soviet Union, how ugly they were, and how beautiful and classy things are here? Well, that's capitalism.'

Then, the sovereign associated producers will give their best, because they will be doing what they love. In this communist form, private initiatives will offer us good food and beautiful furniture, perfumes and clothes, in short, beautiful things, which make for an aesthetic life. Design will no longer be capitalism's capture of aesthetics, as today - because, from the skylines of metropolises to the metallic shine of cell phones to the styling of cars, everything is currently calculated to invite us to contemplate the material power of capitalism. To plant in our heads, most often unconsciously, this unbreakable link between the 'beauty' of objects and the capitalist system of objects, and make us think, 'Remember East Germany and the Soviet Union, how ugly they were, and how beautiful and classy things are here? Well, that's capitalism.'

Communism will lose the battle for imaginations, then the political battle, if it locks itself in the austerity and ostentatious disinterest of critical intellectuals, and their contempt for objects and for the life of the senses, especially for domestic life. 'Let us think above all of developing our minds', 'let's be pure of mind', 'we are indifferent to objects', 'we are above material needs, 'these things are unimportant'. What a mistake. They have considerable importance.

In a surprising, though perfectly logical 'dietetic' scholium, Spinoza, who in matters of intellectual development was hardly a small player, recommends surrounding oneself 'with pleasant food and drink, with scents, with the beauty of plants, with decoration, music, sports, the theatre, and other such things , which anyone can use without injury to another'. Aesthetics must be applied everywhere in life, from its etymological meaning (of an appeal to our senses) to those elevated practices where stimulating the senses can lead to the deepest meditative states - as discussed by Pierre Gagnaire and Ryoko Sekiguchi in a conversation on the culinary arts, or in the arts of perfumes and flower arranging, or the Japanese tea ceremony.

Naturally, the highest achievements are also the rarest, so only a limited number of people will have access to them. The capitalist criterion for selection is well known: money. A visit to Pierre Gagnaire's website lifts the spell he casts by displaying the reality of his prices: dinner for two in his restaurant costs a month's minimum wage... We had assumed the criterion of money would no longer apply. Yet we will need another in its place, since the promise of having 'the rarest things within everyone's reach' is flawed logic - at least when it comes to the kind of goods economists call 'rival'. Some kind of lottery? Why not?

In reality, the most important thing is not to be found in these very exceptional experiences. It is now clear that that by 'luxury', we should understand not so much the absolute rarest things reserved for the few, but beautiful, well-made things that are universalised and put within reach of the many. Luxury is also the presence of fewer but more beautiful things in everyday life, both as a habit and an education, which eventually prepares us for the most elevated experiences. And it is the desires of free producers that will make communism luxurious.

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communist idea would have little chance of succeeding if it were concerned only with needs and reductions. We also need to remember that the goal of politics is to improve life.

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Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc on JSTOR

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Much has been written about the workings of communist governments in the USSR and the Soviet bloc, yet there is still a great deal to explore regarding their re...

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In the Soviet Union, money did not equal power: For the nomenklatura (Soviet elite), almost everything was free but State-owned. With high military spending at home and on allied communist States, the USSR experienced constant shortage. However, this wasn't a problem for those with the right Party contacts, which proved to be an even cannier strategy for survival than stashing heaps of rubles under your mattress.

The 'nomenklatura' (the word comes from the Latin nomenclatura, meaning a list of names) did not just apply to bureaucrats, but to their families too, and also to Soviet "celebrities" - writers, astronauts, sportspeople, etc. According to dissident Mikhail Voslensky, author of the 1984 tell-all Nomenklatura , this extended to some three million people by the 1980s. As Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana once recounted, not a penny of her father's salary ever left his desk.

The top end of the Soviet nomenklatura were given the country's finest cars, usually in the form of a GAZ Volga (the Soviet equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz), a vehicle luxurious enough for President Vladimir Putin to show off to U.S. President George Bush in 2005. The even ritzier ZiL limousine or Chaika were also available, but were essentially reserved for the general secretary and other Central Committee members. Some Moscow roads even had their own "ZiL Lanes," to make sure the most important politicians were never late for meetings.

Of course, the fact that these were Party cars certainly mitigated the "luxury" aspect, as officials could perhaps buy less luxurious with their own money, but could not own a Chaika or ZiL. Party cars may have been decked out with a private chauffeur, but if an official left his post, he would also lose the car that came with it.

This was not the case for everyone, however, as during the Brezhnev era (1964-1982), the Soviet Union began to produce cars for private consumption. The state never made mass production a priority: In a 1959 speech, Khrushchev declared that "it is not our goal to compete with the Americans in producing more private cars." By 1975, the car-to-person ratio was only 54:1 (as opposed to 2:1 in the U.S.), and these cars were only available to ordinary citizens who could afford them through a system of work-based merit and queueing.

The quickest and easiest way to get your hands on a car, therefore, was to serve a government organ or to occupy a high-ranking position. In the classic Soviet film Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears , the main character Katerina (a factory boss) is portrayed as the epitome of the well-to-do Soviet woman by her use of a State-owned Lada - not exactly a Ferrari.

Other lower-down officials were also given the privilege of jumping the automobile queue, but the car they'd get would be a long way from luxury. In the book Pleasures in Socialism , for example, Jukka Gronow describes how a large quota of the distribution of Lada and Pobeda cars was overseen by military officials, who would administer the cars for deserving members of their department. Some might even get more than one Pobeda for other family members - a feat seen as the height of luxury at the time, despite the cars remaining state property.

The distribution of Soviet accommodation was much more rigorously centralized than cars, and the extent of their luxury changed drastically over time.

Officially, no one owned their own apartments outright, and the place in which you lived was determined by the proximity to the job you worked and to where your colleagues also lived. This was no different for the nomenklatura, who were packed into buildings with other elites - this was a tradition started by Stalin, who erected ubiquitous structures like the enormous Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building for artists and the House on the Embankment to house NKVD officials (the residents of these apartments were chosen by Stalin himself). The high demand for rooms in these elite blocks was alleviated by the high number of bureaucratic repressions under Stalin's rule.

After Stalin's death, the thaw in urban repressions and exponential growth of postwar bureaucracy meant that there were more members of the nomenklatura , and in order to house them, elite homes began to move outside of Moscow city center, and became somewhat less luxurious. Also, in stark contrast to the Brezhnev did not intend for his top officials' homes to be landmarks and had them blend in with their surroundings.

A case in point is the Tsekovsky Houses in Kuntsevo (a middle-class suburb of West Moscow), the "Tsar's village." As one former high-ranking Soviet lawyer named Lidia Sergeevna recounted, "I got a three-room apartment for my family, total area 93 square meters, in the 'Tsar's village' in 1980. It wasn't a palace, but we did have a mezzanine, two balconies, and a concierge."

As far as leaders' houses went, the Soviet Union's general secretaries usually lived somewhere a step up from the "Tsar's village," but a far cry from Washington's White House. Leonid Brezhnev refused a luxurious pad in Moscow's Patriarch's Pond area, for example, and lived in an apartment from his pre-General Secretary days at the prestigious 26 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The apartment went on sale in 2011 for 18 million rubles ($620,000 at the time), and boasted a mere 54 square meters in floor space. Even as general secretary, Brezhnev didn't own this joint.

Mikhail Gorbachev's on 10 Granatny Lane in Moscow City Center, which he occupied from 1986 to 1991, was considered a major upgrade, and even though he didn't own the apartment himself, it angered many people at the time. The apartment was later bought by composer Igor Krutoy for an alleged $15 million.

Even greater outrage was caused by Gorbachev's $20 million dacha in Foros, Crimea, built entirely at the state's expense. That's not to say that Soviet elites didn't holiday well before that: A recent revealed the modern-day market prices of the nomenklatura 's enormous holiday homes, with the most expensive mansion worth $26 million in the Moscow suburb of Nikolina Gora. Other million-dollar pads in prestigious areas outside Moscow like Peredelkino, Zhukovka, and Barvikha are shown to have been inhabited by the great and the good of Soviet history: Pasternak, Yevtushenko, Eisenstein, Yesenin - you name it.

It is well documented that Soviet government officials were served by separate grocery stores to the rest of the USSR population, a fact much begrudged by the man on the street, who would be refused entry without a Party card or a series of vouchers for food there. In 1985, a man named N. Nikolaev from Kazan captured the sentiment of the nation when his letter was published in Pravda newspaper, reading "Let the boss go the ordinary store with everybody else, and let him stand in line for hours like everybody else!"

While Soviet shops tended to supply its people with "basics" such as bread, potatoes, and sweets, meat and sausages were usually in short supply, particularly outside of Moscow. On the other hand, sovietology expert Mervyn Matthews's 1978 study entitled "Privilege in the Soviet Union" uncovered the extent to which the upper echelons of the Soviet government were eating well; According to Matthews, 8 percent of Soviet shops accepted "preliminary orders," delivering otherwise-invisible food like fillet steaks, lobster, and black caviar directly to officials' doors twice weekly.

However, the extent of the luxuriousness on apparatchik 's plates has been debated, with former Deputy Prime Minister of the Tajik Socialist Republic Georgy Koshlakov declaring in a 2008 interview that the restricted supermarkets resembled any other shop. "The shops had everything there should have been in normal shops, and for the same prices," he said. "Everything was fresh: Butter, cheese, sausages. But I don't recall any exclusive delicacies." Whether Koshlakov's account is true or not, it's clear that government officials never went hungry, something the public could not boast.

In the USSR, healthcare was usually organized by workplace management, with polikiniki (health centers) installed in the workplace and in most apartment blocks.

Needless to say, the healthcare afforded to nomenklatura families was of a different standard. Poet and writer Korney Chukovsky, who was treated in a Party hospital in 1965, in his diary in that "the families of the Central Committee built for themselves a paradise, all while people in other hospital beds were starving, dirty, and without the right drugs." This practice was extended to lower-down officials under Brezhnev, too, as he built several enormous sanatoriums for mid-level bosses in seaside resorts like Riga and Sochi, as well as Kursk and Novgorod.

Aside from being well looked after health-wise, it seems the children of Russian government officials were also guaranteed a job of their choosing. In his book The Russian Ten , Ilya Stogoff details how the kids of the nomenklatura went to special schools, from which they were given a path to a bright future. "After getting their diplomas... They could go abroad as diplomats, trade representatives, journalists - whatever they wanted," he wrote.

Brezhnev's niece Luba also spilled the beans on the sweet life of nomenklatura heirs in her memoir The World I Left Behind . In this candid portrait of the Soviet elite, Luba laid bare how she and the children of officials were given jobs with little to no responsibility, and would occupy their time filing their nails or writing poetry. "Some went off to volunteer for hard labor," she wrote, "simply because they could not bear the boredom."

The extent of the nomenklatura's nannying only became truly visible after the USSR's collapse, when high-profile figures struggled to live without their privileges. "Enfant terrible" Galina Brezhnev (the former General Secretary's daughter) is a case in point - she died in a psych ward in 1998, having struggled for years with alcoholism. "She broke no law," as newspaper Izvestiya explained in her obituary, "because the law was not written for people like her."

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Did Soviet government officials live in luxury?

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In the Soviet Union, money did not equal power: For the nomenklatura (Soviet elite), almost everything was free but State-owned. With high military spending at home and on allied communist States, the USSR experienced constant shortage.

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When asked what she wore to bed, Marilyn Monroe famously told reporters, "Chanel No. 5." I've

often wondered if Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of Comrade Molotov (of the Molotov cocktail) ever said the same thing. Zhemchuzhina, who ran the Soviet perfume factory Novaya Zarya, or New Dawn, in the early 1930s, believed in a luxurious communism, less red, more rouge. While her husband, born Vyacheslav Skryabin, adopted an appositely revolutionary last name derived from molot, which means "hammer," Polina chose "Zhemchuzhina," from the Russian for "pearl." Under her leadership, New Dawn offered Soviet women a vision of socialism that rejected austerity; choosing instead, in what would become a Soviet tradition, to recast supposedly bourgeois pleasures like candy, champagne, and perfume as examples of the abundant future that communism promised.

New Dawn produced a number of fragrances - Crimean Violet, Scythian Gold, Elena - but its signature perfume was Krasnaya Moskva, Red Moscow. It came in a fine glass bottle with a red cap designed to look like a Kremlin tower. While there were many fragrances made to celebrate the Soviet woman, including one to honor the Georgian chess champion Nona Gaprindisvilli (her perfume, Nona, came in a black bottle in the shape of a queen), none attained the cultural status of Red Moscow. In times of national pride, it was a symbol of elegance and glamor. In his poem "Through Farwell Tears" Timur Kibirov reflected on the waning years of the USSR by recalling the country's most familiar smells: "birch leaves at the sauna," "Belomor cigarettes," and "a woman in Red Moscow perfume." In the hands of a cynic, Red Moscow was the butt of a joke. In Vladimir Nabokov's novel Look at the Harlequins, the cantankerous protagonist makes his first trip back to the Soviet Union and complains: "The farcical air-conditioning system failed to outlive the whiffs of sweat and the sprayings of Krasnaya Moskva." The scent functioned in the popular imagination as the Soviet answer to Chanel No. 5, a reputation helped along by the rumor that the factory New Dawn was housed in used to be known as Soap and Perfumery Factory No. 5.

Unfortunately, Red Moscow had a rather inconvenient capitalist history. The scent is alleged to actually be a fragrance created by Henri Brocard, perfumer to the tsars. A gift for Maria Feodorovna, mother of Nicholas II, its original name was "The Empress's Favorite Bouquet." Brocard's factory was nationalized in 1918 and renamed New Dawn in 1922. While Red Moscow was officially a new fragrance, many suspected, then and now, that it was actually just a case of socialist rebranding. In an interview with the BBC, perfume expert Galina Anni said, "chemically of course, yes," it was a different fragrance, "because some of the ingredients and aromatic substances that the Brocard family worked with in 1913 simply did not exist in the Soviet Union in 1924." However, the underlying composition, Anni told the BBC, "iris accentuated with bergamot, orange blossom, cloves, and ylang-ylang, was preserved."

Red Moscow smelled like "iris accentuated with bergamot, orange blossom, cloves, and ylang-ylang"

To some, "Soviet perfume" sounds like an oxymoron, an extension of jokes about champagne socialism, but there was such a thing as the latter: sovetskoe shampanskoe, which translates to "Soviet champagne." To a Soviet citizen, the idea that wearing perfume or drinking champagne were somehow uniquely incompatible with communism would have been nonsensical. While excess and pleasure were firmly associated with the evils of capitalism in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, over time Soviet leaders adjusted their thinking. Communism would not mean the end of luxury goods, they decided, but actually the proliferation of them - a bottle of Red Moscow perfume for every factory worker. In The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s, Amy Randall explains: "Strange as it may seem today, there was once a time when retail trade and consumption were heralded as not only central to the socialist revolution but also the stage upon which the limits of capitalism would be exposed." In this way, Soviet perfume might be considered the first step in the kind of abundance-driven socialist ethos that motivates the popularity of "fully automated luxury communism," a coinage promoted by 21st-century socialists like Aaron Bastani to overturn socialism's association with scarcity.

The Soviet embrace of luxury goods wasn't, however, a seamless transition. For much of the 1920s, perfume was permitted but regarded with suspicion. In the wake of the Russian Civil War in 1921, Lenin instituted his New Economic Plan (NEP) in which some elements of capitalism (like small-scale private enterprise) were re-introduced to stimulate the economy. Boutiques selling foreign perfumes, make-up, and cigars began popping up on Moscow's boulevards alongside jazz clubs and bootlegger bars. Armand Hammer, grandfather of the actor Armie Hammer, was in Russia at the time, amassing a fortune selling wheat, pencils, and buying up Fabergé eggs. He came to be known as "the red millionaire." Reflecting on his glory days in NEP-era Russia, Hammer remarked: "One could buy the choicest French wines, liquers and the best of Havana cigars. The finest French cloth lay side by side with the most expensive French perfume."

Soviet champagne, chocolates, and perfume were all meant to prove that the capitalist West did not have a monopoly on pleasure.

After a decade of warnings about the ills of bourgeois capitalism and morally corrupt capitalists, NEP brought on something of a moral panic. Soviet citizens made "rich" from NEP came to be known as "NEP-men" and were often villainized in popular media, even children's books. (One from the era shows a greedy capitalist NEP-man gorging himself on ice cream until he freezes to death). Women, likewise, were scolded about the dangers of falling into bourgeois modes of being... and smelling. In The Body Soviet, historian Tricia Starks says magazines and articles geared towards Soviet women insisted that "rouge and lipstick, which were necessary in capitalist countries, where women had to hide their pasty complexions, lost their necessity in a country ruled by and for workers." Soviet women's complexions were to be vitalized through labor, not blush, and no perfume could match the fragrant aroma of sweat from a hard day's work on the collective farm.

But things began to change under Stalin's second Five-Year Plan, which altered production goals to include consumer goods, even luxury goods like champagne. In 1934, a chemist developed a way to ferment the beverage in large reservoirs, making an item once considered the height of luxury available to the masses. By 1942, the middle of World War II, the USSR was producing 12 million bottles of champagne a year; it was even available on tap at Soviet supermarkets. After Gastronom, a chain of upscale grocery shops, opened in 1932, chocolates from the Red October candy factory were widely available. (Nationalized by the Soviets a decade earlier, the red-brick factory in the center of Moscow was formerly known as Einem Chocolatiers) Soviet champagne, chocolates, and perfume were all meant to prove that the capitalist West did not have a monopoly on pleasure.

The recasting of the USSR as a consumer society only ramped up in the post-war years under Nikita Khrushchev, especially after the 1959 American Exhibition in Moscow. In a glitzy pavilion on Red Square, the U.S. government laid out a dizzying array of consumer goods (washing machines, Polaroid cameras, Pepsi) for the Soviet public to see firsthand. In 1951, American sociologist David Reisman published a satirical essay titled "The Nylon War," in which he claimed, "if allowed to sample the riches of America, the Russian people would not long tolerate masters who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners and beauty parlors." By the end of the decade, that had essentially become Cold War policy. Khrushchev responded by reopening tsarist-era shopping arcades, and, of course, making sure people were well-perfumed. In 1960, one year after the American Exhibition, New Dawn released a new line of fragrances. The 1960 Women's Day issue of Ogonek, a weekly Soviet magazine, included an article with a picture of a perfume saleswoman standing amidst glass vials. As historian Susan Reid explains, the photograph positioned the saleswoman as "an operator before complex space control panels, thus synthesizing... the alchemist's art with that of modern science." To wear perfume was to show off the preeminence of Soviet science, both in the skies and on the skin.

Red Moscow, an early token of the promise of abundance that communism would deliver, sadly remained just that. In the final years of the Soviet Union, the country was plagued by food shortages and rising levels of alcoholism led to reports of people drinking perfume. New Dawn still operates in Moscow, but now it embraces its pre-Revolutionary history, proudly displaying the Brocard name on its storefronts. You can even buy Red Moscow on Amazon. Some of the reviews there are from people who lived in the Soviet Union. The scent seems to provoke nostalgia: "What a good memories of our youth it brings to me!" reads one.

Luxury communism is not a straightforward demand in the face of the climate crisis.

Luxury communism is not a straightforward demand in the face of the climate crisis, when many of us are considering how a consumer society might give way to a livable future. But Red Moscow is less a testament to consumerism than it is a symbol of a moment when socialism's success was judged in part by its ability to democratize beauty and pleasure. It's easy today to think of socialism as merely a remedy for the worst predations of capitalism - debt and impoverishment, ecological devastation, and murderous policing. It can be difficult to imagine a new world amid such dire conditions. Red Moscow simply marks an era in which the promise of an equal society did not just stave off the darkness but sparkled briefly in the light.

Jennifer Wilson is a Lux contributing editor and a contributing writer at The Nation.

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Champagne Socialism: What luxury looks like without rich people

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When asked what she wore to bed, Marilyn Monroe famously told reporters, "Chanel No. 5." I've often wondered if Polina Zhemchuzhina, wife of Comrade Molotov (of the Molotov cocktail) ever said the same thing. Zhemchuzhina, who ran the Soviet perfume factory Novaya Zarya, or New Dawn, in the early 1930s, believed in a luxurious communism, less red, more rouge.

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No kick from shampanskoye: new law falling flat at upscale Moscow bars

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Drinkers are unimpressed by Putin’s ruling that only Russian bubbly passes the test while French bottles must be labelled ‘sparkling wine’