In 2024, Have We Really Separated Luxury From Class?

2023’s film offerings were top-tier – even amid what was a dramatic chapter in cinema history. Perhaps the most divisive, yet one whose applause has spilt over into 2024 and shows no signs of slowing down, is Emerald Fennell’s tragicomedy-thriller Saltburn.?

Not only did the film’s final scene return Sophie Ellis-Bexter’s 2001 homicidal disco masterpiece to its former glory, it raised just as many questions as it did eyebrows. Mainly surrounding modern manifestations of class – and, in turn, luxury. The two are historically intertwined, but in analysing Fennell’s expression of the early noughties’ ruling class, what can we gauge about twenty-first-century luxury? Count this as your spoiler warning.

Saltburn captures many things – though it’s primarily a story about envy; wanting desperately to be someone and what destruction desire can leave in its wake. From a slightly skewed vantage point, it’s about doing whatever it takes – and resolute perseverance is quite a romantic notion in any other context.?

Plenty of readings have cast Saltburn as cinema’s latest eat-the-rich satire: a designation that has been both complimentary and derogatory. “Grandiose”, “fearless”, “delightfully wicked”, “biting”, “a decadent fever dream of lust, betrayal and revenge” barely scratch the surface.?

Despite its “disturbing” distinctiveness, the film slots neatly into the contemporary anti-rich subgenre that is already filled with sharp cinematic critiques including The Menu, Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and sequel Glass Onion, Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness and Best Picture at the 2020 Academy Awards Parasite. Saltburn also has a place in the gothic tradition; portraying the ghoulish microcosm of the uber-wealthy and the outcast looking in.?

Opening at Oxford University – Fennell’s alma mater – the inconspicuous Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) attempts to find his footing among his prestigious classmates, almost immediately drawn in (like everyone else) by the beautiful, blue-blooded Felix Catton. Somehow, having ingratiated himself with the high-rollers despite his social casting as “a scholarship boy who buys his clothes from Oxfam”, Felix takes pity on Oliver after learning of his tragic upbringing and invites him to spend the summer at the sprawling Catton family estate that gives the film its name.

An unlikely duo, Felix and Oliver perform each side of the class spectrum – or so we’re led to believe. In actuality, it’s one side and a firm middle playing into the polarity. Summer at Saltburn is the epitome of the aristocratic tradition, a hot and hazy world punctuated with arcane customs, bizarre formalities and a culture of secrecy: the aura of we know something you don’t.?

The Cattons – Sir James (Richard E. Grant), Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), Venetia (Alison Oliver), Farleigh (Archie Madekwe) and Felix (Jacob Elordi) – are old money. Their world is all Palladian architecture, ancestral portraits of “dead rellies”, tailored dinner jackets and scandal spoken about with a monotone that is distinctly sinister, yet all too familiar.

Though popular imaginings of the landed gentry are often relegated to period dramas – which, for the record, Fennell asserts the 2006/2007-set Saltburn sits within – they continued to wield vast power in 2024. Activist and author Guy Shrubsole’s 2019 book Who Owns England? revealed less than one per cent of the population owns about half the country’s land. So despite a flattening (albeit mild) between the middle and working classes in Britain, our country’s archaic hierarchical system is yet to be dismantled.?

As a guest on The Run-Through with Vogue, Fennell unpacks her seemingly patriotic choice of setting: “Could it be set in the Hamptons? Could it be set in some sort of weird compound in Malibu? Because this film is about getting in – to something impossible to get into. But the British class system and aristocracy has been so effectively exported, as a kind of delicious entertainment, that all of us are internationally familiar with the rules.”

Though much of the emerging eat-the-rich canon mocks the upper classes’ devotion to obsolete formalities and defunct rituals, Saltburn’s parody of toffs is eccentrically British, thanks to the cast’s crisp, emotionally catatonic performances. Pike’s specifically has been widely praised; her line delivery flawless and, by satirically embodying the cold self-importance of the aristocracy, highlights the majority’s real-world preference for warmth, care, personality and connection.?

Acclaim for Fennell’s second feature film stood out in both highbrow reviews and mass-market. Being a huge commercial success didn’t stop Saltburn from currying favour with the more refined critics, nor did its mass appeal on TikTok – the social media platform snubbed by much of the luxury sector.?

In its statements on class, Saltburn says a lot about luxury. Half its beauty lies in the granular specificities of the good life and the other half in the stark charm of ambiguity. Modern luxury’s allure is similar: the details of craft, the story and soul of a thing paired with an irrational pull to a brand – too culturally embedded to explain – is the equation defining many of today’s most timeless brands.?

That formula has nothing to do with class warfare. But – at this precise moment in time, the one universally accepted barometer of luxury is price. And that, unanimously, is linked to wealth.?

In a more granular sense, the completely off-the-radar service in Saltburn is arguably true to life – just not the life of a normal person. The anonymity of the estate’s staff, Oliver’s suitcase silently unpacked, a shattered mirror repaired overnight – everything happens in the background. Imperceptible to the Cattons but deeply observed by Oliver who notes back at Oxford: “Only rich people can afford to be filthy”. It’s a sentiment that tracks, a collective disillusionment with the wealthily indifferent growing amid the many shadows of modern life. A world where silver service is the coveted luxury but the silver spoon has been categorically shunned.

One colleague found the twist of Oliver’s revealed middle-class background – his plight having been previously framed as working-class ambition – entirely authentic. His experience being that far more people of middling class aspire to be part of the old-fashioned elite, joining particular private members clubs and taking up certain traditions to become ‘one of them’. But famously, that kind of class can only be born into. ‘Nouveau-riche’ is a slur to many. Money can’t buy class, after all.

Whilst Saltburn depicts the highest echelons of the lives of the upper class, the vibe feels far from our ideas of luxury. The camera lens is yet another metaphorical window: us on the outside looking in – just like Oliver Quick. Unlike Quick though, to us the audience, the world we’re watching feels dusty, snobbish and an inexplicable faff. The Cattons are so unbelievably disconnected from the world we live in that all the murder might actually be a blessing.?

The frequent references to pop culture (Felix’s Harry Potter hardback and the family screening of Superbad) and inclusion of hugely commercial brand products like Coca-Cola & Red Bull cans or a jar of Nutella not only help to locate the film’s place in time but act as these weirdly jarring grounding pegs in what is otherwise an otherworldly domain to us as spectators.?

Saltburn’s visuals thoroughly capture our obsession with beauty and the fetishisation of stuff – the defining tenets of a kind of luxury that peaked in the 80s; one devoted to excess, opulence and grandeur. Today though, luxury objects and moments aren’t able to be gatekept by the “cold-blooded” elite, they’ve been woven into the daily lives of a far broader group, whether it’s the coffee they drink or the jewellery they wear.

Luxury in 2024, though underpinned by pricepoint, is about brands with a cultural IV drip – brands who see design and craft as a point of difference; who have intrinsic spirit but who are stretchy enough to hold onto relevance in a world that has moved well past the wiles of the elite. A world waiting for the one percenters to catch on.?