Quiet Luxury Isn't What I Thought It Was
- Vanessa Marquez-Kramme
- Jul 15
- 4 min read
Luxury.
When we think about luxury, we immediately conjure images of the unattainable and aspirational; the brands that live behind velvet ropes and price tags with too many zeros. Chanel. Hermès. We mortals usually admire it from a distance and maybe, if we’re lucky, get close enough to touch it at least once in our lives. Luxury, in the conventional marketing sense, is exclusive by design; it derives its value precisely from the fact that not everyone can have it.
At NYU Paris, as part of a study away experience with NYU SPS, I went down a rabbit hole as Professor David Klingbeil was explaining the etymology of the word. The word luxury traces back to two Latin roots: luxus, meaning excess, and lux, meaning light—the thing that shines, the spotlight. And those two definitions, if you let them sink in, create a tension: Excess is about accumulation. Light is about transparency and focus.
Since I can’t fully separate my marketing brain from my coaching brain (and I’ve stopped trying), from where I sit, luxury isn’t really about excess—it’s about contrast. It’s the frame of reference that allows you to see desire clearly.
We can’t know we love to travel until we’ve traveled and come back. We can’t miss an experience without also knowing its absence.
Desire requires tension. Luxury is both the distance and the light. The gap between where you are and what you want—and the thing that makes you finally see it’s there.
Which brings me to Paris, which feels like presence.
Not in a woo-woo way.
In a literal, sensory, what-is-happening-to-my-nervous-system way. The city is quieter than I expected. Simmering, not boiling.
People are taking their time eating at cafés, going about their days, taking their time in a way that doesn’t feel performative or lazy; rather, it feels like a city that has found its rhythm.
Even in the most touristy spots, even in the metro during what should be rush hour, it doesn’t feel like a city on steroids. In Paris, you can have the energy, the culture, and the stimulation of a metropolis without sacrificing the quality of life of the people who actually live there.
Coming into this trip, I had New York as a baseline; after all, that’s been home for the better part of my adult life, and earlier this semester I participated in a marketing challenge in which the main media was out-of-home. The goal was to design campaigns that stop people in their tracks (pun intended) in the NYC subway; the brief was built around the assumption that you are competing for attention in an environment that never stops competing for it.
Paris broke that baseline almost immediately with its deliberate, unhurried rhythm.
The out-of-home inside the metro stations was mostly traditional: print billboards, mostly top-of-funnel, no strong CTA, QR code, or attempts to reduce friction and convert on the spot. I saw a few screens (literally, I can count the digital OOH stations with my hand), but even then, all of the above still applies.—The ads are just there, for you to encounter or not. And these trains have full internet service underground, the entire ride. In the U.S., we would capitalize on every second of that captive attention. Paris has the same infrastructure and simply doesn’t.
The metro also had many themed stops. For example, one called Argentine is pretty much a small museum exhibit on Argentina. Another stop near the Tuileries is covered in flower wallpaper. The Musée du Louvre stop has little replicas of the sculptures you’ll find upstairs. None of it feels like selling anything because the call to action is not screaming at you.
Overall, there were fewer ads in the transportation network, and once I noticed that, I started noticing it above ground as well; everything felt… quieter.
Then there’s Versailles.
Different wings, different sponsors, all examples of quiet luxury.
This is quiet luxury (although at first glance it seems it screams).
Walking through, you’ll find watches and clocks that have been beautifully restored and maintained; and beside them, a small plaque: restored courtesy of Rolex.
Different wings, different sponsors, all quiet. Just a name next to a piece of history.
In a city where marketing whispers this softly, nothing signals quality and luxury more than caring for a fourteenth-century clock.
And then there are the restaurants. A menu by the door. A waiter inside. If you want to come in, you come in. If you don’t, you don’t. No one is chasing you; there’s no big bright open sign- only people, tables, and 2-3 hours of your time. It’s not that Paris isn’t trying to attract you—it absolutely is. It’s that the city has figured out how to stay lively and draw you in with charm instead of volume.
Which lands me back at the thesis: contrast is what makes any of this visible.
The “restraint” in Paris’s marketing isn’t legible in a vacuum; it’s legible because the whole environment supports it. The quiet makes the quiet have meaning.
This week, luxury looked like traveling internationally for something other than paperwork for the first time in over ten years. Like coming back to Europe through a city I wouldn’t have chosen for myself—and being completely humbled by it. Like getting to attend one of the most important tech conferences as someone who is very much not in tech. Like walking through a city and thinking, genuinely, that Jonathan (my husband) and I could maybe build a life here one day—which is a BIG thing, because he likes the quiet and green suburban spaces and I want the city. Paris somehow feels like it could satisfy both.
None of this came in an orange box. None of it had red soles. But coming from a city that never sleeps, and stepping into one that doesn’t rush? That’s worth every dollar I don’t quite have yet.
To my marketer-slash-life-coach brain, that’s true luxury. Nuanced, personal, and developing IRL through the contrast of where you are and where you could be—made possible by a tiny, fleeting glimpse of that fantasy.
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