Polish Without Substance

'Luxury' is a word that used to mean something. It spoke of care taken, of refinement, of a kind of thoughtfulness that was neither rushed nor showy. It suggested that someone had anticipated your needs and arranged the world, just slightly, to meet them.

Today, it is mostly a surface. The design is elegant, the lighting perfect, and the welcome rehearsed. The team has been trained, not in judgement or intuition, but in phrasing and posture. Everything gleams, yet nothing quite lands. The service is there, but it is not attentive. It is polished, but it is not present.

This is not a crisis of incompetence. It is something more cultural. What we are seeing, quietly, steadily, is the withdrawal of elegance from the world. Not just in hotels and restaurants, but in the way we think about time, effort, and care. In the way formality is now seen as oppressive. In the way, even the crisp white tablecloth, once a marker of civility, is vanishing.

We live, increasingly, in a convenience culture. Everything is designed to be fast, frictionless, and unchallenging. But true elegance was never easy. It required time. It required noticing. And above all, it required people to take their work seriously, not as a performance, but as a craft.

Too often, luxury is now performed rather than lived. A silver tray is presented, but the person holding it is already thinking about the next guest. A room is turned down, but the detail is off. The work is technically correct but spiritually absent. No one is watching closely. No one is really seeing.

I do not believe this is always the fault of the individual. It is systemic. It stems from training that rewards uniformity over discernment. It stems from management that values metrics over moments. It stems from a world that confuses being served with being processed.

The best service I have ever received has not always been grand. It has been subtle.

Someone noticing that I never drink still water. Someone adjusting the air conditioning without being asked. Someone placing a bookmark in a half-read book without comment. These are gestures that come not from training manuals but from cultural fluency and pride in one’s role.

And yes, these things are rarer now. The people who once understood them are retiring. The institutions that once upheld them are being redesigned to appeal to newer sensibilities. The younger staff are capable and often charming, but they have not experienced the older world. They have never worked in it, and so they do not know what has been lost.

I do not write this to complain but to observe. We are living through a moment where certain kinds of grace are falling out of fashion. The tablecloth is vanishing, and with it, a certain kind of memory about how things might be done, not extravagantly, but properly.

Luxury, at its best, was never just about money. It was about restraint, attention, and a sense of proportion. It was about making the guest feel seen without needing to be watched. It was about offering more than what was expected, but doing so without announcement.

That spirit still exists. You can sometimes find it in the quiet confidence of older staff. Or in the rare places where culture has not been diluted by standardisation. But you have to look for it. It no longer arrives as standard.

And that, I think, is the real loss. Not the decline of comfort, but the disappearance of care.