opens an online lifestyle shop with what looks like an image on a tablecloth on Instagram and is apparently looking for a CEO. It has an absurd name – American Riviera Orchard – like a vague Satnav direction. Perhaps vagueness is the point. Lifestyle products are more style than life,
They speak to the socially insecure: to the yearning. That is why Fortnum & Mason can sell jam for £5.95 a pot. You’re not buying the jam. Or not just the jam. You’re buying proximity to the people you think buy the jam. It’s all a hoax designed to grift the middle classes.: there is even, in a glorious metaphor, a waiting list. And, like any common magician, she offers the ability to transform through the application of potions.
Mad monarchists are responsible for most royal woes – they read about them and insist on the intrusion that destroys them – so thosedo it too. If you browse the royal palaces online shop, and I do, you understand that the Royal Family is also selling a lifestyle brand, and not just in the tatty shops attached to their ancestral homes. They sell to the kingdom, the Commonwealth, the world.
The Windsors may be the ultimate lifestyle brand. You see it in the palace shop. It’s incoherent: a sea of tat. There are shower caps, a Corgi keyring , crown jewels chocolate, trinkets and more. I once found a chef’s outfit, a maid’s outfit, and a wooden spoon, but they may have been exiled on equality grounds.
Most of it speaks, though subconsciously, to the idea that the Royal Family are toys, and you can eat like them, smell like them, dress like them, and, when that pleasure is done, dispose of them.