A World of Excess
Mink-lined yachts, designer handbags, wall to wall celebrities, champagne on tap. It seemed such a charmed life - and now here we are. What happened to the largesse of the Noughties? It mutated.
Everyone likes a bit of reflection at this time of year.
“I did have my head turned,” I admitted to Mel Rickey last week on her podcast, The Enoughness. We were talking about the days of excess, when we both were fashion editors, and life was one long champagne catwalk. Mel is pretty good at wrangling things out of people, and her conversations uncover the moments when people realise they went too far. Her guests (Henry Holland, Yotam Ottolenghi, Patrick Grant,
) are asked to identify when they had too much, not enough - and when they got it just right. The ‘Goldilocks’ moment, she calls it. The world is so far from a Goldilocks moment right now, swinging wildly between wars and the poly-crises, it’s no surprise I couldn’t locate mine.If you’re after some Christmas listening, I cannot recommend this podcast The Enoughness more highly. It’s warm, confessional and insightful. Perfect twixtmas fare.
I was a fashion editor during the Noughties, that decade that dedicated itself to rising excess, until it all came crashing down one day in 2008. As editor of Sunday Times Style, the highest circulation fashion magazine in the UK at the time, I had a ringside seat - except I wasn’t really watching, I was participating. In order to sell this version of luxury back to people, the journalists needed to be complicit, and an editor on a Murdoch owned vehicle scores big PR points. ‘Journalists’ of luxury experiences need to feel the benefit of those spas in the Maldives, that Chloé Paddington bag and a weekend in Dubai with Kylie. Else how could they possibly describe it? And so we were given this life. As journalists, we certainly weren’t earning the money to pay for it, it was all a massive freebie.
So many moments from that decade stand out. Posh Spice smoking a cigar on Roberto Cavalli’s mink-lined purple yacht; Tom Ford, high on vodka, charging through a chateau strewn with rose petals, his new Boucheron designer, Solange Azagury-Partridge, trailing diamonds in his wake; Beyoncé leaping to the dance floor in Donatella’s Milanese palazzo as Single Ladies came on. It all feels a bit ‘ick now, especially since someone has claimed Bey’s husband was raping a 13 year old at the same time. Cavalli is dead, Tom no longer drinks and Posh n’ Becks spend their weekends feeding the chickens. Nightclubs are closing all over the country, everyone is doing Christmas sober and we’re all going to bed earlier so we can get up before dawn.
Perhaps we will look back on the Noughties as a fin de siècle moment. A life of excess is not sustainable, mentally or spiritually, and so the age of wellness has dawned. Broken and limping, we check in to therapy, lymphatic massage and yoga retreats in search of shamans to fix us. Our workplaces have become temples to personal development instead of challenge - regulation is about to come in banning emails after 5pm. Yet there doesn’t seem much we have actually shed in the way of excess. The habits remain; a bit like misogyny, excess never really goes away, it just mutates and grows...
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