‘Quiet Luxury’ Finds a Loud Debate

If you want to know about “quiet luxury," the fashion trend of clothing that wears its steep price tag discreetly, you go to a star from the show that helped mint this movement: HBO’s “Succession."

“Some of it is really nice," said Alexander Skarsgård, the lank Swede who played Lukas Matsson, the show’s scheming oft-barefoot tech billionaire, during an interview after Fendi’s latest runway show outside Florence last week.

Still, he said, “the kind of stupidly expensive cashmere sweaters that the characters are wearing" doesn’t appeal to him personally. “In real life, I like to be comfortable, and I don’t purchase a lot of stuff."

When Skarsgård appeared on screen as Matsson for the first time, the actor said he wore his own Adidas pool slides and a $20 T-shirt. (For the record, as we spoke during a cocktail party on the rooftop of the luxury label’s leatherworks factory, he wore a breezy beige polo with tan trousers—all Fendi.)

Quiet luxury is too conformist for chameleon Skarsgård, who admired his character’s chutzpah in wearing a Liberace-level gold jacket during one of the series’ closing episodes. (He wouldn’t buy that for himself, “unless I’m very, very drunk.")

“This notion that if you’re part of this group, if you’re part of this tier in society you have to dress a certain way, I find ridiculous," he said.

As a term, “quiet luxury" has been inescapable in the fashion world. It can feel as if everyone suddenly agreed their style icon was Kendall Roy, flailing through the boardroom in his white Tom Ford sneakers and a sandy Loro Piana cashmere jacket.

The influence of HBO’s financial backstab-fest has also elevated the show’s cast to be the sudden darlings of the men’s fashion world, reaping brand ambassadorships and front-row seats at fashion shows.

Kieran Culkin, who played the sensitive potty-mouth Roman Roy, is a face of Zegna’s billionaire-favorite Triple Stitch sneaker and is set to host an event with the brand in the Hamptons later this month. On Saturday night in Milan, at the center of that city’s men’s fashion week, Loro Piana and GQ co-hosted a dinner with Jeremy Strong. Strong, who played Kendall Roy, wore plenty of subtle but supremely expensive Loro Piana clothes on the show.

Yet last week at Florence’s Pitti Uomo, the largest trade show of men’s fashion in the world, buyers and brand representatives were hotly split on just how genuine this trend really is beyond the confines of HBO.

“The U.S. is not immune from this mega trend that is coming toward us: a quiet way of consuming [with] more subtle details," said Piero Braga, CEO of Slowear, a cluster of Italian fashion labels best known for crisp Incotex dress chinos.

As Braga sees it, there is a genuine clutch of shoppers that “have the means to enjoy the many beautiful things in life," but opt not to dress like a logo-covered traffic hazard.

Just a few booths away, Simon Golby, the menswear director for CD Network, a sales and distribution agency, pooh-poohed the whisper-wealth talk. “Everyone wants to say that quiet luxury is a trend, but there is no such thing as quiet luxury," he said. Yes, people have pulled back on wearing, say, sweaters and pool slides emblazoned with Balenciaga brand marks. But not everyone with money is now wearing Loro Piana cashmere hats and suede Open Walk shoes like a would-be Jeff Bezos climbing aboard a Cessna.

As evidence, he pointed to the success of one of his brands, Italy’s Moon Boot, whose bouffant boots literally have the brand’s name printed across the top. “This winter when everybody was saying ‘quiet luxury, quiet luxury’, Moon Boot was on fire, we couldn’t keep it in stock," said Golby.

“There’s plenty of rich people who like to really be showy," concurred Nick Wooster, a menswear industry veteran who has worked at Neiman Marcus and JCPenney and first came to Pitti Uomo 34 years ago.

At the same time, Wooster said, department stores have never stopped tossing 24-ply cashmere chum at affluent but bashful shoppers. “There’s always been a very quiet consumer or a very understated consumer, and it’s just that now it’s their time," he said.

What happened was a two-step process: Logo-fatigued shoppers slid toward gear like Zegna princely suede bombers or Brunello Cucinelli’s white jeans. In turn, retailers began boosting the muted-money look to get shoppers—critically those who previously plopped down money on say, Gucci’s gaudy printed tops—to shop again. (Feverish media coverage of “Succession" and its costumes no doubt amplified the trend.)

In this way, the debate over quiet luxury is just a reprise of a longtime animating anxiety of the apparel world: What exactly do the rich want to buy?

Brunello Cucinelli, Italy’s cashmere king, knows better than most. America is his brand’s largest market, accounting for around 35% of revenue, and the country’s billionaire class is particularly committed to Cucinelli (known customers include Bezos, Salesforce co-founder and chief executive Marc Benioff and Instagram co-founder and former CEO Kevin Systrom).

Yet the vigorous collection he showed would not adequately be described as stealth wealth—even if there were some wool baseball caps on hand. Models ambled about the booth in shirts with ’70s disco collars and bravura pinstripe suits.

Cucinelli said he was particularly preoccupied with how men might be getting back into suits again. “It’s been five, six years that you didn’t want to wear a suit—and now you do want a suit but you don’t want to wear an outdated version of it," he said. In a concession to these more casual climes, he styled his suits with both full ties and gauzy knits.

Across the fair, the lapel was muscling its way back onto racks. “I’m seeing more tailored jackets than I have in the last couple of years, three or four years," said Wooster. With a cloudy economic forecast over the Tuscan sun, one could sense that brands were turning to easy-to-grasp staples that sell for functionality, not faddishness.

Braga of Slowear said that Incotex recently “crossed the barrier" to produce a suit for the first time, while dressed-down brands like Harris Wharf toed a middle-ground between the sofa and the cubicle with slouchy, knit blazers.

Wooster was particularly won over by AMC, a Japanese-made brand by designer Aldo Maria Camillo that specializes in sophisticated, laissez-faire suits. To Wooster’s eyes, AMC’s unstructured tailoring recalled the minimalist suits that made Giorgio Armani famous, which were the 1990s form of that very 2023 term: quiet luxury.