But quality isn’t solely about clothes. It should be in everything and everywhere you look, from your morning cup of coffee (it doesn’t have to be Jamaica Blue Mountain) to the bread for your toast (it doesn’t have to be from Poilâne in Paris) to the bouquet of wildflowers in your room to your well-made bed and goose-down duvet.
What does all this mean? Well, the world in all aspects is in for a retrenchment. No people captured this better recently than Roger Cohen of The New York Times and British Conservative Party leader David Cameron.
Cohen, in a column titled “America’s Limits,” told of a retired Merrill Lynch executive who took his money and bought a “modest cabin with breathtaking views of the aspen and pine forests rising toward the jagged peaks of the Rockies.” A former colleague, who had remained at Merrill and raked in the big bucks, visited him there, and the two men went for a walk.
As they looked at the mountains, the cabin owner said, “The difference between us is you have everything money can buy and I have everything money can’t buy.”
Cameron, who could be the next prime minister of Great Britain, put it even more succinctly: “It’s not just about the quantity of money, but the quality of life.”
