I don’t know about you, but I find the picture of a golden twosome frolicking in a sunlit tepee somewhat lowering. Partly because I’m allergic (I’ve been tested) to this new trend of glamping (“glamorous camping” – what an oxymoron), but mainly, it’s jealousy. Pure lifestyle envy. I can’t bear it that the couple picture live a hedonistic, fairy-dusted life in a place where tents come with silk cushions, pillowed double beds, drapes and coverlets. I also can’t bear it that they might get off on the fact I can’t bear it and secretly long to live it, too.

It’s the same love/hate marketing of aspiration that sells stripy flannel pyjamas in the Boden catalogue. It’s not so much the clothes – nice though they are – but the heavenly possibility that, one day, you too might be cutting a homemade jam sponge, warm from the four-oven cream Aga, as one of your many blond children romps with a labrador puppy on the vast French oak table.

It’s what sells Spanish riding boots and pin-tucked, wispy poplin blouses in the Toast catalogue. The fond yearning that in the not-so-distant future, we too might be crossing the yard at misty dawn from the dairy in our Welsh homestead to snuggle under a huge damson velvet throw with a battered Penguin original of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

And look! It can happen to real people, too. One half of this sun-kissed couple is the beautiful and hard-working Mary Temperley, sister of Alice Temperley, the fashion designer with shops in LA, New York and London. The other half is her fiancé. Here they are, in their tepee. Or “tipi”, as it is called at Sol Kerzner’s One&Only Resorts. The company commissioned Temperley to create an “unforgettable hideaway” for its Le Saint Géran resort, on Mauritius, and this is a picture taken from the advertising campaign. Past collaborations have been just as “fabulous” – a One&Only kaftan by Matthew Williamson and One&Only bags by Anya Hindmarch.

Selling yourself on behalf of your label is the next level of the lifestyle brand. It was all started by Ralph Lauren, who sells his East Hampton old-money life so effectively to the bridge-and-tunnel brigade. It is a practice that entails certain small sacrifices. It means blurring your life with your label, and ruthlessly deploying (I am not saying “pimping” – some of my best friends are brands) yourself, your family, your homes, your famous friends, your children and your dogs in a never-ending series of lifestyle shoots, to be drooled over by others who are less fortunate, successful and photogenic than you.

Not that I’m sniping. It’s just the upmarket version of soap stars and footballers’ wives inviting Hello! into their beautiful homes, so those with what Betjeman called “ghastly good taste” can sneer at the gleaming country kitchens in new-build Cheshire suburbs.

Alice Temperley and her husband, Lars, throw over-the-top four-day fancy-dress parties at her parents’ cider farm in Somerset. Pictures of which always seem to make their way into the glossies, leading to snitty sour grapes about Temperley constructing a canny image of herself and her background simply to flog the clothes.

“Dad made this whole dream in Somerset,” she explains. “There’s a kind of utopia that happens on the farm.” But she also admits that she uses the whole hippie, sparkly cider-farm-in-Somerset thing to shift products. “It’s really important that our whole life is not for everybody else to see. At the same time, it is about a lifestyle, so we all do a little bit here and there to build the brand.”

But is it harmless? As the country-style writer James Delingpole harshly observes: “If these people really are living happy, fulfilled lives in their country piles, with their herb gardens and four children, instead of – as one hopes – living separate lives, with the man working all hours in the City to keep the show on the road, then we should all go and kill ourselves.”

The painter Giles Wood, who lives in a small workman’s cottage in Wiltshire, agrees that seeing lifestyle porn can ruin an entire day. “If I see something about, say, Sarah Raven’s cutting garden and her husband, Adam Nicolson, who owns islands in Scotland, as well as their wonderful organic farm, Perch Hill, it makes me want to curl into a foetal ball and rock gently until the images have gone out of my mind,” he says.

Others react to lifestyle envy by trying to recreate it for themselves. Judy Rumbold, the author of Reasons Not to Move to the Country, actually responded to the call of the wild. As a result, she no longer lingers over pages showing blowsy country houses.

“At least I know that, just out of shot, a dog is being sick and there are cupboards full of crap. People look at these pictures and imagine themselves living there, just as they look at Nigella on telly and imagine cooking something. Then what happens is, they stay where they are, in the same way as they get up after the programme and slam something in the microwave.”

It’s like buying Kate Moss Topshop. You may not be Kate Moss, but you can always buy a frock like hers. And you may not be able to afford the River Cottage or the River Cottage lifestyle, but a little pot of River Cottage Blackcurrant-on-the-Bottom Yoghurt will take you there.

Which should be enough, actually. Even if those pictured are not trying to flog you something, they are still selling something – their own success. It’s not the whole story. It’s a photo shoot. And in this sense, lifestyle porn is as close to reality as film porn, and just as fictitious.

There may be a nuclear plant or a pile of slurry just out of shot (and we secretly pray that there is), but the viewer will never get the reassurance of seeing it.

Times recommends

• Jamie Oliver's boiling over
• Family homes for the 21st century
• What makes men commit?