Reaching for luxury

Maybe you've noticed it, too:

• Pottery Barn, the high-end retailer, is now a model for home decorating.

• Housewares at Target stores are designed by people whose names don't usually adorn toasters.

• Your friends wear no-name jeans but pay big bucks for a refrigerator that does everything except buy the groceries.

Despite a belt-tightening economy, environmental lobbies, and social movements calling for everything from recycling to voluntary simplicity, many Americans today are reaching up for high-style luxury goods. The new luxury kick exposes a long-running tension between the nation's Puritan roots and its infatuation with plastic credit cards. But it also suggests a newer dimension to mall frenzy.

Are Americans, who invented mass production and turned discount retailing into an art form, coming to value a higher, aesthetic style? Do candy-colored computers and granite countertops suggest the nation's tastes have matured, perhaps along European lines?

Watch TV makeover shows, or glance around a newsstand or bookstore, and it's easy to get caught up in the high-style hype, especially right now. It's fashion week in New York - when designers roll out their latest creations - and trade and fashion publications are pushing extravagant consumption ($2,800 for an alligator purse) on people eager to splurge again. At least one forthcoming book proclaims that American families making $50,000 and up are increasingly willing to "trade up" to luxury goods - like a $2,000 washer-dryer combo - and are pumping hundreds of billions of dollars annually into the economy.

Those who follow consumer culture say discussions of spending in various media today are like the sermons of yore.

"[They] are part of the effort to recast the debate and suggest that a love of style, a fascination with style, is not morally corrupt," says Daniel Horowitz, a professor of American studies at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. "These issues raise profoundly moral questions about what is enough, and what is a good society, and does satisfaction in our lives come from ... consuming more," he says.

Despite the current economy, Americans over the long run have become increasingly affluent. They have more money to spend thanks to trends like women in the workplace, people marrying later, access to credit, and the rise of discount stores where low prices allow people to retain more of their cash. As a result, they can go after more big-ticket items - cars, clothing, home furnishings.

Katie Mazza and her husband bought a flat-screen computer earlier this year for $2,000, preferring to spend more for a product that would last longer. In her view, if people are short of cash they should cut back on purchases. Otherwise, "If you have it, spend it," she says while browsing at a Boston mall. "The economy ... gets better by spending."

To some observers, American consumers appear less concerned about overconsumption and the environment than those in other Western countries.

"There's a purity to America's clarity about what it wants - there's not a whole lot of anxious second guessing," says Harry West, vice president of strategy and innovation at the Boston-based Design Continuum.

Michael Silverstein, a consultant and co-author of the forthcoming "Trading Up: The New American Luxury," says consumers are smart, information-seeking, and rational about their decisions.

After surveying thousands of people, he's concluded that consumers are willing to pay a premium price for goods. "I don't accept that there's very much guilt any more in these purchasers," he says.

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