Leaving aside the fact that this was probably the least rock’n’roll concept imaginable, the Habitat people explained that it would never make it into their collection for economic reasons. Not that this deterred the rock star. The cheese fridge, he insisted, was the perfect solution to his fromage predicament. His larder, you see, was a smidgen on the warm side and no matter which shelf he tried — from the salad chiller at the bottom to the cold penthouse at the top — he still found that the brie remained too cold. Did they feel his pain?
This isn’t the only example of preposterous refrigeration. Wallpaper magazine recently featured — wait for it — a bathroom fridge designed to keep male grooming products in optimum condition. You may think you can’t survive without a cooler for your scruffing lotions, but the idea terrifies me. I mean, isn’t the obsession with luxury (and the pursuit of it) getting a bit extreme? Isn’t the urgent desire for a cheese fridge God’s way of telling you that you have too much money?
One wonders, for example, what drives Karl Lagerfeld to own a total of 70 iPods and employ an in-house techno flunkie to constantly reload them? Does this kind of rabid, solipsistic profligacy make him a kind of contemporary Count d’Orsay, or just a complete dork? Why is it that Damon Dash discards his box-fresh trainers after just one outing, and David Beckham feels the need to splurge £1,000 a month on Calvin Klein pants, as if stocking up for an oncoming Y-front blight? The truth is that Beckham, Dash, Lagerfeld and our cheese-fridge man are all luxorexics: girlie, fussy, luxury obsessives who live their lives as bit players in their own private Gattacas, people who’ve come from nowhere financially and go straight from pavement to penthouse, avoiding all the icky, dirty, cheap stuff in between.
Like anorexics, who, according to the dictionary, crave appetite above anything, the luxorexic will take radical and occasionally warped steps to achieve absolute luxury: embassy-level security, Swiss hospital- standard hygiene, magazine-worthy interior design, high-end clothing and accessories, spa-style comfort and the kind of ordered neatness you only get in a suite in an Aman hotel.
Eavesdrop on luxorexic men and you will hear them discussing not just clothes and furniture — these guys are much more fanatical than your old-fashioned, lightweight metrosexuals — but also business-class lounges, flower delivery, wristwatches, handmade moisturisers, shoes made of “precious leathers” and bed linen. Especially bed linen. Bed linen is luxorexic pornography. They will talk of thread counts, Egyptian cottons, pillow mountains, mattress-mite repellents and the varying water qualities of different American states and how this can affect the laundering of their treasured duvets and pillowcases. A really top-drawer luxorexic will be able to tell you, to the nearest 100, the thread count of a Frette sheet just by looking at it. In the dark.
“Oh, I know the type,” says the style-watcher Peter York. “In fact, I might just be a bit of a luxorexic myself. The luxorexic male is a key player in the endgame of upscale brand democratisation. Their inspiration is taken wholesale from the media, hotels, shops and restaurants.” So, ethnic objets, for instance, are acceptable only if they are fenced, edited and endorsed by a Kelly Hoppen type. And to a luxorexic, the designer and lifestyle guru Tom Ford is bigger than Jesus. “They are an extraordinarily prissy bunch,” adds York. “A lot of hetero men who are turning into Jewish princesses.”
What is going on here is a sense of entitlement coupled with blissful and enthusiastic incapability. A luxorexic may be wealthy (he will be mostly involved in property, hedge funds or advertising), but he is utterly incompetent at anything practical outside of his work. To him, doing things yourself is a déclassé anathema. Calling up and ordering, or having one’s luggage FedExed in advance, validates him.
The service industries — interior designers, airlines, food-delivery and concierge services — are the luxorexic’s lifeblood. Sean Davoren, head butler at The Lanesborough in London, recounts how one guest always requests a special hairbrush cleaner to be in his room on arrival. Another is so paranoid about hygiene that he insists that his entire room is sterilised before arrival and throughout his stay. Then there is the counterpane psycho who is so obsessed with his bed being properly made that he measures the distance between the pillows.
Clementine Brown of Quintessentially reports how several members request that their clothes be unpacked and colour co-ordinated in their hotel room on arrival. Another customer had six tins of royal beluga caviar (£485 each) packed in ice and flown as Christmas presents to friends all over the world. And an old-school client has a seating request on all flights for “Posh” — port out, starboard home — as when travelling east, the seats on the left-hand side (port) are mostly in the shade. The idea that he could probably save himself a lot of hassle simply by operating the pull-down blinds clearly hasn’t occurred to him.
The luxorexic leaves nothing to chance. This explains why he has neither the time nor the inclination to form his own tastes. Where the rest of us might enjoy a bit of shopping and showing off our labels, the luxorexic is wet-nursed by them. He suckles on the sweet safety of APC or D&G. When he travels — extensively and long haul — he must tick off the necessary boxes at his Leading Hotels of the World destination (Frette sheets, Wi-Fi, plasma screen, Bang & Olufsen, Alain Ducasse, Chiva Som, Nobu and so on) before he sets off. The idea of experiencing anything authentic or local, something outside the parameters of his luxorexic comfort zone, is frankly abhorrent to him.
Jeremy Langmead, the editor of Wallpaper, the luxorexic’s monthly bible, is happy to admit to luxorexic tendencies himself. A recovering flexophobe (he has an irrational fear of electrical flexes), Langmead has managed, at great expense, to source a television that is completely wireless. “It’s not the biggest or best TV,” he admits. “But at least it doesn’t have all that ugly spaghetti hanging out of the back.”
But, like our friend with the cheese fridge, it is food and drink that truly defines the luxorexic. It should be clean (vodka, champagne, sushi, caviar) and global — but really, it is all about packaging. The luxorexic dies for neat little bento boxes and those mini Elastoplast- coloured health yoghurts. Even his diet is a Yakult of personality.
“Probably the most luxorexic thing about me is my fridge,” concurs Langmead. “The door is pretty much always closed, but all my food has to be nicely packaged. Even if that means endlessly traipsing from Selfridges food hall to Waitrose to Villandry just to get the right, nice-looking carton of milk. The only trouble is, if I see an even nicer-looking carton of milk, a nicer block of butter or Greek yoghurt, the old ones have to go. And I don’t even drink milk.”
