Joel and I liked a certain style of living and we shopped and ate and did things a certain way. Giorgio seemed to fit right in with what we did.
I'm still reading The United States of Arugula (I'm devouring it, really, but it's got so much detail that I'm reading very slowly). It continues to kill me, I think it's so great.
This quote, which I just read last night, fits in with an overall theme in the surrounding chapters - the emergence of "lifestyle" as a marketing tool and frame of reference. In retrospect, I suppose it's obvious that at some point, marketers and journalists were going to latch on to this idea of "how you live", and it also makes sense that people weren't always defined by their lifestyles. Even thinking in terms of lifestyle is really a luxury afforded only to those who feel relatively safe and are beyond subsistence living. Even in the US, that's still a relatively new phenomenon.
But from my perspective - not only was I born in the mid-70's, as the lifestyle train gathered steam, but I'm also in marketing - it is kind of hard to image the world before Dean & DeLuca peddled uber-expensive olives to rich city people, knowing that even if they didn't like olives, their aspirational approach to life would encourage them to buy.
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