The Human Code of Luxury
Why our obsession with status isn’t vanity — it’s evolution. And what that means for the next wave of taste.
Editor’s note: This feature replaces our March 2025 edition of “The Human Code of Luxury”, updated and expanded for context and clarity.
We first published this conversation with bestselling author Will Storr in March 2025, when Dark Luxury was still a smaller operation with fewer subscribers. We’re bringing it back with an update now because it feels newly relevant — proof that, somehow, the world’s most unserious shoe remains our most serious fashion signal.
With fashion deep in what editors are calling The Great Fashion Reset — almost every major house unveiling a new creative director and a new vision — it feels like the perfect moment to revisit Storr’s ideas about how desire in luxury is made, not just commercially and creatively but at the deepest psychological and emotional level.
Just how much is too much for a pair of loafers?
Take the ones on my feet right now: Gucci, plain black with a gold buckle. They cost £810 today. The same pair set me back £185 when Tom Ford still reigned at the house. Even then it felt criminally expensive, especially for a student — something to keep quiet about.
Now, after years writing about shoes for GQ and The Times, I know £810 is absurd. Yet here they are, gleaming beside the George Cleverleys, John Lobbs and Edward Greens, the holy trinity of English shoemaking. Those brands arguably offer better craftsmanship and value for money, but they don’t possess the same talismanic power.
What’s wrong with me? Am I an idiot?
According to writer Will Storr — author of The Status Game, The Science of Storytelling and his latest, A Story Is a Deal— no, I’m simply human. One of the many fuelling a $1.5 trillion global appetite for expensive things no one really needs.
“People like luxury stuff because it’s a core part of our humanity”, Storr told me. “It’s how our humanness works”.
For centuries, philosophers and playwrights have explained humanity through our desire for sex, money and power. Storr flips that: it isn’t those things that drive us, but the deeper hunger beneath them — status. We’re animals forever signalling our place in the tribe. Shoes, bags, cars, stories: all shorthand for who we think we are.
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In his newest book, Storr writes that our identities are “partially constructed out of products that tell a story of who we are”. The loafer on my foot, in other words, is a form of storytelling — a way of whispering to the world and to myself that I am sexy, rich, fun — and laid back enough to know a little bit of tacky can go a long way.
Humans, he says, need status to stay psychologically and even physically well. “That’s why people buy luxury goods”, he adds. “It’s a signal to people like them”.
“We’re not showing off to strangers; we’re connecting with our own. Nancy Mitford called them People Like Us — PLUs. “The woman who wears a Cartier watch isn’t lording it over the man with a Casio”, Storr says. “She’s signalling to the woman in business class with the Birkin: I’m one of you”.
The story we tell ourselves is just as important. Time can be told on a phone; economy gets you there at the same time as business; and few can tell faux Gucci loafers from the real thing. But the point isn’t utility — it’s emotion. When I slide on those loafers, I feel like… well, I feel Gucci. The black ones are the only loafers I can wear with blue jeans and black tie: supple enough to dance in, respectable enough for the boardroom.
“We’re emotional animals”, Storr reminds me. “How we feel is the most important thing of all”.
If spending more makes you feel ten per cent better, he argues, perhaps that’s money well spent.
“ People like luxury stuff, and they like that stuff because it's a core part of our humanity.” - Will Storr
At Dark Luxury we love stories of when it all goes wrong — when brands chase “mass luxury” and lose the intimacy that made them desirable. Storr calls it a dangerous game. He remembers visiting Soho House — once a discreet refuge for creative insiders, now a global network of nearly fifty clubs — and finding it “full of kids on the sofas, all with their phones out. It was like being at a bus stop”. The signal no longer meant what it once did.
That special, elevated feeling, Storr says, survives only when it balances familiarity with surprise: “It has to be connected to the values and stories of the past that define that group, but still doing something new”.
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Gucci’s own evolution proves the point. With Demna Gvasalia recently installed as creative head, following Sabato De Sarno’s disastrous tenure, the brand faces that eternal test: how to move taste forward without losing what made the original so good. Taste, as Storr notes, “is a manifestation of identity”. Too much novelty and the signal fails; too little and it fades.
That delicate dance between heritage and reinvention, belonging and differentiation, is the heartbeat of luxury. And perhaps that’s why I still slip my feet into a shoe that costs more than rent once did. It’s no longer just a shoe but a club, a signifier of belonging. When I see another Gucci man, I know — and so does he.
Luxury isn’t just what we wear; it’s the story we want to tell about ourselves.
The next wave of taste won’t be about loud logos or even stealth wealth. It will belong to those who understand that desire for luxury is powered by that same dance between what feels like now and what feels like forever.
Crucially, we are signalling to what Nancy Mitford famously called, ‘People Like Us’ - or PLUs. “The woman who wears a Cartier watch is not lording it over the man who has a Casio watch,” says Storr.
Look at Ralph Lauren, which has quietly beaten sales expectations under its first Black creative director, James Jeter. A Morehouse alumnus and longtime Ralph Lauren insider, Jeter has used his tenure to expand the brand’s Americana mythos into something more inclusive. His Oak Bluffs Summer 2025 collection, shot on Martha’s Vineyard and inspired by the traditions of America’s historically Black colleges and universities, reframed prep as a story of Black leisure and heritage. Critics at The Impression called it “prep with purpose”; others praised it as proof that the Ralph Lauren dream can evolve in a more inclusive direction.
A few observers worry the pivot might alienate traditionalists or prove cosmetic if it isn’t embedded beyond imagery. Yet the results so far speak for themselves: the collection sold through quickly, and Polo’s social engagement jumped by double digits. Jeter’s blend of reverence and renewal — classic prep recast through a new Black lens — already feels like a blueprint for where taste is heading.
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