"Luxury is not a logo": Op-ed by Laura Sänger

She has come a long way with her sustainable luxury silk label "La Katz". She has summarized her thoughts on the subject in a guest commentary for L'Officiel Austria.

First of all, I have an appeal for a new way of looking at and dealing with luxury fashion: there is no greater luxury than our future. 

But what is luxury? It is an object of contempt or glorification. Especially on Instagram, one quickly gets the impression that luxury fashion is the epitome of flaunting purchasing power. Add to that a mass of logos that makes your eyes hurt. 
I tiredly scroll through the app and ask myself when we actually forgot that it's purely a sales channel. Instead, we keep telling ourselves that we're just being inspired here. Basically, I'm consuming a string of new merchandise including filtered faces. Missoni swimsuits, pink Valentino dresses - like Mytheresa, but not well curated. 

Even traditional brands like Hermès are reduced to their Oran loafers, unmistakably and oversized with the 'H' logo. If perfumes and sunglasses are defined as the first entry into the world of prestige labels, then the Dior saddlebag draped on the Paris Bistro table for the beige-tinted photo is the logical continuation. 

Luxury is polarizing because it is often reduced to purchasing power and the object per se. The versatility of a garment - design, philosophy, material, and craftsmanship - is then broken down to price by the logo. 

The name of the label may be the main reason for ownership, but how much employment really goes into the details of the production chain here? And can anything be properly valued at all if it appears as a trend, i.e. with a planned time limit? Basically, the first contradiction already starts here, because luxury in its original sense stands for quality, timelessness, and appreciation - and thus durability. These indicators die when you replace one new luxury handbag with another every few weeks.

Is luxury an aesthetic experience or ostentation? 

Oscar Wilde wrote: "Provide me with luxury, I can do without everything necessary". Now the concept of necessity is debatable here. I see luxury fashion as an aesthetic experience - which is another reason why ostentation is a fundamentally different phenomenon. It is also an outdated understanding of economic activity if the economic activity only serves to produce use values and status symbols instead of contributing to making life better.

In 2020, I founded my silk label La Katz precisely out of this idealism: to really make a product better, to link every step in the supply chain to this philosophy, and thus reconnect luxury with what it actually stands for: Design, material, production, and time. That would not be simply to use pure silk, but organic and no polyester yarn in the processing.

Why organic silk? One-third of all chemicals end up in our clothing. Most of them are really never intended for skin contact. And yes, this also runs through the entire price hierarchy, because the old familiar saying "expensive does not equal better" applies here. As an entrepreneur, it is my responsibility to question the actual state of affairs. And unfortunately, this is not automatically better in the luxury sector than in the fast fashion sector. The Greenpeace report "Luxury fashion with side effects" is interesting. For example, chemical antimony was found in the textiles of well-known luxury brands. Antimony is a toxic heavy metal that is classified by the WHO as carcinogenic. A "small" detail points to a big problem because there is no internationally valid seal for general regulation in terms of sustainability in the fashion industry.

And then there is the time spent to create products. Each of our silk coats takes up to six hours to make in the tailor's shop in Germany. This time factor alone demands appreciation.