The Discriminating Eye

On what is lost when a culture stops telling things apart

A Statecraft pamphlet by Jacob Huibers

I. Two scenes

A woman of thirty walks into a Chanel boutique on the Rue Cambon and buys a 2.55 flap bag for the price of three months' rent. She does not know that 2.55 is a date, February 1955, the month Coco Chanel introduced the bag with its shoulder chain so that women could keep their hands free, a small mechanical statement of her view of modern womanhood. The buyer knows the bag is desirable. She does not know what the desire is for. The object has become a hieroglyph: a sign without its signified, working purely on price and recognition. She is not foolish. She is the inheritor of a transmission chain that broke somewhere upstream from her.

Across town, a young man with a hundred and twenty thousand TikTok followers films himself unboxing a Loro Piana baseball cap in his Paris hotel room. The caption reads quiet luxury haul. He explains, in a confidential tone, that the cap is a thousand euros and that the people who really matter recognise it without it shouting. He is performing quiet luxury at maximum volume. The opposite of a fashion has become a fashion. The ethic of not signalling has become the loudest signal in the room.

Both scenes share something the rest of this pamphlet will try to name. They are scenes of a culture that has lost its capacity to discriminate, in the proper sense of the word. Not discriminate on race, religion, gender, orientation, or any of the other protected categories that European law and decency rightly defend. Discriminate in the original Latin sense, from discriminare, to distinguish, to separate, to tell things apart. To know what is good from what merely looks good. To know what is craft from what is performance. To know what was made by hands and what was assembled by marketing. A culture that cannot make those distinctions cannot choose what to value, cannot value what to keep, and cannot keep what makes a civilisation continuous with its better past.

This pamphlet is a defence of that older, finer use of the word.

II. What discrimination means

Article 1 of the Dutch Constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, belief, political opinion, race, sex, or any other characteristic protected by treaty. The European Convention on Human Rights does the same in Article 14. These prohibitions are right and necessary, and nothing in what follows quarrels with them. Discrimination in that legal sense, the use of accidents of birth or conviction to deny equal standing, is the moral floor of a decent society.

But the word discrimination once meant something else, and that older meaning has been crowded out. To discriminate is to distinguish. A wine connoisseur with a discriminating palate is not a bigot; he is someone whose senses have been trained to register differences that the untrained palate misses. A discerning customer is one who can tell whether the suit on the rail was assembled in three minutes by a robotic arm or finished by hand by a tailor in his sixties. Discrimination in this sense is the cognitive operation by which a person separates good from poor, real from fake, durable from disposable, lived from staged. Without it, no choice is possible, because every choice depends on the prior act of telling things apart.

What has happened in the last forty years across Europe is a quiet and almost invisible collapse of this second meaning into the first. The legitimate prohibition on discriminating against persons has been allowed, by sloppy thought and lazy language, to colonise the entire semantic field. To say that one tailor cuts better than another, that one porcelain rings truer than another, that one baker still makes a real veal croquette while another sells filler in a breading, is now experienced as a kind of social aggression. The speaker is suspected of snobbery, of class signalling, of attempting to elevate himself above his peers. The conversation closes before the distinction can be made.

The damage is structural. A culture that loses its capacity to discriminate on what matters becomes a culture in which what matters is no longer transmitted, defended, or even noticed. It does not collapse dramatically. It thins. The thinning is hard to perceive from the inside, because the language for naming it has been deprecated along with the practice. This pamphlet is an attempt to reactivate that language.

III. The trajectory of the brand

Almost every heritage brand passes through a recognisable life cycle. Understanding this cycle is the first technical instrument of discrimination. There are five phases.

The workshop phase. A maker in a town establishes direct relations with a local clientele. The mark, where there is one, is small and serves identification rather than promotion. Bätz building organs in eighteenth-century Utrecht, a tailor inscribing his initials on the inside lining of a coat, a glassblower in Murano marking the foot of a goblet.

The reputation phase. The maker's name circulates within a craft community as shorthand for quality. Patrons commission objects on the strength of recommendations from those who can judge. The reputation is functional information among insiders, not a status code for outsiders. KPM in late eighteenth-century Berlin, Stradivari in Cremona, Steinway in nineteenth-century New York.

The scale phase. The workshop industrialises while attempting to preserve the disciplines that built the reputation. New techniques are absorbed, but the old benchmarks remain operative. Production grows, prices remain proportionate to material and labour, and the name still corresponds to the object. Most heritage marks were in this phase for the larger part of the twentieth century.

The conglomerate phase. A holding company acquires the brand, principally for the goodwill its reputation carries. Marketing budgets multiply, production investments do not. The brand lives for five to fifteen years on inherited goodwill while the underlying object slowly degrades. Rimowa under LVMH since 2016. Wedgwood, since 1986 a series of corporate parents and now part of Fiskars, with most production no longer in Stoke-on-Trent. Iittala, in the same Fiskars holding. Burberry, Bulgari, Loewe, in different stages of the same trajectory under their respective conglomerates.

The hieroglyph phase. The object becomes pure sign. Its material qualities are secondary or invisible. It functions as a price-marker and a recognition-marker, with the original craft content unreadable to most buyers. The thirty-year-old with the 2.55 inhabits this phase, as does the man with the Loro Piana cap. So do most of the watches sold for prices that bear no relation to their mechanical content. The brand has become a stamp, the object a vehicle for the stamp.

The naive view holds that there are good brands and bad brands. The accurate view is that there are brands at different stages of one trajectory. Wedgwood was real; it is now mostly a sign. Rimowa was real; it is now becoming a sign. KPM is still real, but the pressure of the trajectory pushes constantly downward. Even an Iittala glass, the kind a Dutch designer bought in 1985 because it was the honest Finnish answer to overdesigned tableware, now belongs to a holding whose primary discipline is brand management. Same name, different reality.

The first instrument of discrimination is therefore to ask, of any object considered for purchase: at which phase of the trajectory does this brand currently sit? The question cannot be answered by looking at the price tag. It can only be answered by looking at the object itself, the production geography behind it, the hands that touched it, and the relation between what is paid and what is received.

IV. The economics of quality

The most persistent objection to the entire argument of this pamphlet runs as follows: your taste is a luxury, and ordinary people cannot afford to live by your principles. This objection is wrong, and it is wrong on the economics, not on the morals.

Consider four cases.

A traveller buys a Rimowa trolley in 2007 and is still using it in 2026. Nineteen years of weekly trips, gates and conveyor belts, and the case still functions. Cost per year of use: roughly thirty-five euros at the original purchase price. A second traveller buys a budget trolley every three years over the same period: six trolleys at one hundred fifty euros each, frequently replaced when wheels collapse, handles snap, or zips fail. Total spend: nine hundred euros, divided over nineteen years, roughly forty-seven euros per year of use, with the additional cost of the inconvenience and the landfill of six discarded cases.

A man buys a tailored suit from an Almere tailor for seven hundred euros and wears it for fourteen years, having it altered twice as his body changes. Cost per year of use: fifty euros, with full retention of fit and condition. Another man buys an internationally branded suit every five years at sixteen hundred euros each. Over the same twenty years, four suits at sixteen hundred euros equals six thousand four hundred euros, three hundred twenty euros per year of use, six times more, and at the end of the period nothing wearable remains.

A household sets the table with KPM porcelain inherited from a grandmother, replacing only what occasionally breaks. The original cost has long since been amortised across two generations. Another household replaces its tableware every seven years as fashion changes and the discount-store earthenware chips, scratches, and discolours. Compare cost per place setting per decade. The inherited KPM is cheaper.

A driver buys a 1987 Volvo 240 for ten thousand euros in the early nineties and still drives it. Thirty-five years of service. Total cost including reasonable maintenance: perhaps thirty thousand euros. Cost per year of use: under nine hundred euros. A driver who buys a new family estate every six years at fifty thousand euros, replaced because of leasing cycles or because the warranty has expired, spends roughly eight thousand three hundred euros per year of use.

The pattern repeats across category after category. Quality is not the expensive choice; it is the calculating choice. The illusion that budget consumption is democratic is one of the cleverest fictions of the post-1990s consumer economy. It is democratic only at the moment of purchase. Across a lifetime, it is a transfer of wealth from the consumer to the holding companies that own the budget brands.

The same logic applies, perhaps more sharply, to food. A culture that eats well over decades pays less in healthcare than a culture that eats poorly. A bottle of honest Barbera enjoyed slowly over an evening costs less per pleasure than three bottles of supermarket Merlot drunk to forget that the wine is unpleasant. A small farmer's vegetable bought once a week sustains both the body and the local agricultural economy that, when it disappears, will not return.

Discrimination is not the privilege of the rich. It is the lever by which the not-rich can avoid being permanently relieved of their wages by industries whose business model is the manufacture of dissatisfaction.

V. The exceptions

Quality is not synonymous with expensive. This is the second technical instrument of discrimination, and it is essential, because without it the argument collapses into snobbery.

Consider the plastic Kaweco Sport. Made in Heidelberg since 1972 in its current form, the descendant of a 1911 design, it costs twenty-five euros and writes as well as fountain pens that cost twenty times more. The plastic body is honest plastic, the steel nib is properly made, the cap closes on the back of the barrel to extend it to a usable length. There is nothing to fake about it; it does what a fountain pen should do, and does it for a quarter of a century. The Sport is craft in plastic, and the plastic does not lie about being plastic.

Consider the BIC Cristal. Designed in 1950 by Marcel Bich, sold for less than a euro, and probably the most reliable writing instrument ever mass-produced. It writes for a year, the cap doubles as a clip, and when it runs out it has caused no environmental remorse and made no claim on social standing. Real engineers admire the BIC. The fakers despise it because it cannot be appropriated as a status object.

Consider the copper-bottomed pan from IKEA. Copper conducts heat instantly and evenly, which is why a copper pan handles risotto better than stainless steel. Whether the copper pan comes from an atelier in Villedieu-les-Poêles or from a Swedish flat-pack retailer, the physics is the same. To insist on Mauviel only because it is Mauviel is to play exactly the brand-fetish game this pamphlet rejects. A working copper pan is a working copper pan. Material discipline first, provenance second.

Consider the second-hand iPod Classic and the second-hand Bowers and Wilkins Zeppelin Mini. Apple discontinued the Classic in 2014. The Zeppelin was designed for the old thirty-pin Apple dock connector, which Apple itself rendered obsolete in 2012. Both objects are now available on the second-hand market for a fraction of their original price. Both still work, both still deliver music in a form that the streaming economy cannot match: a personal collection played in a personal order, on a device that does not surveil its user. Cost: less than a hundred euros for the two. Function: faultless. Cultural posture: unimpeachable.

The principle these examples share is that craft and integrity are not always wrapped in expense. The discriminating eye looks for honest manufacture, fitness for purpose, and material truthfulness, regardless of the price band. A plastic Kaweco is more deserving of respect than a Montblanc with diamonds in the cap. A BIC is more deserving of respect than a special-edition Meisterstück made for a private bank. The IKEA copper pan respects the cook more than a brass-handled shrine to a heritage cookware label whose factory is now in Vietnam.

The exception is structurally important to the argument. It demonstrates that discrimination is not about wealth, about taste in the sociological sense, or about cultivating a refined identity. It is about clear-sightedness in the presence of real objects.

VI. The inversion of quiet luxury

For most of European history, the very rich and the very tasteful had this in common: they did not advertise. The Rothschilds did not wear monogrammed shirts. The old Florentine families lived behind unmarked palazzo doors. The Dutch regents who governed seventeenth-century Amsterdam wore black, and the black was very good. Quiet luxury, as a description of a class behaviour, made sense because it was simply what you did if you had been raised among objects whose quality was a matter of internal recognition, not external display.

Since approximately 2022, quiet luxury has become a hashtag. The series Succession gave it a face, The Row gave it a price point, the algorithm gave it a feed. The discreet Loro Piana cap became the loudest item of clothing on Instagram. The argument that the people who really matter recognise it without it shouting mutated, with remarkable speed, into a marketing claim. The people who really matter were now defined by their ability to perform recognition for the camera.

The result is a particularly malignant form of cultural inversion. Real quiet was an absence, the absence of signalling. Performed quiet is a presence, the assertion of an absence. The two look identical from the outside, which is precisely the trick. Anyone genuinely committed to non-signalling now finds themselves involuntarily enrolled in a category whose meaning has been colonised by its opposite. To wear an unbranded jacket from a tailor whose name will never appear on a billboard is now indistinguishable, on the surface, from performing quiet luxury for an audience.

This matters because it forecloses a position that mattered in European life: the position of the person whose objects are good and whose social posture is silent. That position has historically been the seedbed of cultural transmission. The grandmother whose porcelain was excellent and who never spoke of it. The grandfather whose suits were tailored and who never compared them to anyone else's. The household where the Hasselblad sat on the shelf next to the Leica without anyone explaining why both were there. Children raised in such households developed an eye without ever being lectured to. The eye, once developed, lasted a lifetime.

The inversion of quiet luxury makes this position almost untenable for a public figure or an active professional. Anything you wear, drive, or display is now potentially readable as a performance. The only way to hold the position is to retreat from publication entirely, which is itself a form of loss, because the older households were never private about their objects; they were simply unselfconscious. They lived among them.

The hieroglyph phase of the heritage brand and the performance phase of quiet luxury are two faces of the same disease. In the first, the buyer has lost the knowledge of what the object is. In the second, the seller and the audience have lost the experience of what genuine modesty feels like. Both phenomena indicate that the chain of cultural transmission has been broken at multiple points. The pamphlet does not prescribe a return. It identifies the loss precisely.

VII. What an object is for

There is a Parker 51 mechanical pencil on my desk. My father bought it in the early 1960s, used it for thirty years, and at some point it migrated to me. I use it without thinking. The clutch still grips the lead with the same precision it had when my father first opened the box. The brass weight in the hand is exactly right. It writes well. There is nothing more to say about it.

Or there should be nothing more to say. In a culture that still understood objects as tools, that paragraph would close the matter. The pencil works, it is mine because it was my father's, it will go to my daughter because she will eventually need a pencil. The chain is uncomplicated. Inheritance is the ordinary mechanism by which objects find their next user.

But the culture in which I write is no longer that culture. Over the past thirty years, the design industry, the marketing industry, and the social-media platforms have collectively retrained the European mind to read objects not as tools but as expressions of self. The interior design press, beginning roughly with the rise of magazines like Wallpaper in the late 1990s and accelerating through Instagram and Pinterest, has reframed every object in a domestic setting as a signal of identity. The chair you sit on, the lamp you read by, the pen you write with: all are now extensions of your aesthetic, expressions of who you are, elements of your personal style. This is the language in which young adults are now taught to think about the objects around them, and the language is, almost completely, false.

A Parker 51 is not an extension of anyone's aesthetic. It is a mechanical instrument designed to deposit graphite on paper, manufactured to a standard that has not been improved upon, owned successively by people who needed to write things down. It does not express who I am, because it preceded me by a generation. It does not match my style, because I do not have a style; I have a hand and a desk. The whole framework of object-as-self-expression, applied to a tool of this kind, dissolves on contact with the actual function of the actual thing.

The threat this creates for inheritance is severe. My daughter, raised in the visual culture of her generation, may at some future moment look at this pencil and decide that it does not fit her aesthetic. The brass-and-grey colour scheme does not match her desk. The 1960s design language does not align with her self-presentation. She has been trained to ask, of every object, does this represent me, and the pencil, sixty years old, does not represent her. So the pencil ends in a drawer, then in a charity bag, then in a stranger's hand who recognises what it is and uses it for the next thirty years. The transmission breaks not because the object failed but because the cultural frame in which the receiver was educated has redefined what objects are.

This is the deepest form of the problem the pamphlet describes. The hieroglyph phase of the heritage brand and the performance phase of quiet luxury are visible inversions, easy to mock from the outside. The reframing of objects from tools to identity extensions is invisible because it is the air the entire culture now breathes. A young person rejecting an inherited Parker 51 is not being shallow; she is being culturally fluent in the language she was taught. The fault is in the language.

The recovery here is conceptual before it is practical. To use an object as a tool is a different cognitive operation than to use it as a sign. The first asks: does it work? The second asks: does it fit my image? The first is open to inheritance, second-hand purchase, mismatched assemblage, the gradual accretion of useful things. The second is closed to all of these, because nothing inherited, second-hand, or mismatched can fit a curated image. A discriminating eye, in the sense this pamphlet has been developing, is an eye trained to ask the first question and not the second. It looks at the Parker 51 and sees a working pencil. It looks at the inherited table and sees a surface to eat on. It looks at the tailored jacket and sees a covering for the body that lasts. The image is incidental. The function is the point.

Whether my daughter will accept the pencil is not, in the end, a question about her. It is a question about which language wins inside her. If the culture's frame holds, she rejects it. If she has been exposed, in her own household, to a different way of seeing, to the daily example of objects used for what they do rather than for what they signal, she will pick up the pencil one morning, put a lead in it, and write a sentence. The sentence will not be about the pencil. It will be about whatever she needed to write down. That is what success looks like in the recovery of this older relation to things. It is silent, ordinary, and entirely about the work the object performs.

VIII. How we got here

Four causal lines converge to produce the present condition.

The first is the financialisation of heritage. From the 1980s onward, conglomerates assembled portfolios of historic European brands at rates of acquisition unprecedented in commercial history. LVMH, Kering, Richemont, Fiskars, Authentic Brands Group, and others bought workshops whose reputations had been built over decades or centuries, refinanced them on capital structures that demanded marketing-led growth, and rationalised production accordingly. The acquisition price reflected accumulated reputation. The post-acquisition strategy harvested the reputation rather than reinvesting in it. Five to fifteen years of brand-driven revenue growth typically followed, after which the underlying degradation became visible to the trained eye, while the untrained eye continued to pay premium prices for steadily diminished products.

The second is the dismantling of the European craft middle. From the same period, the small workshops that produced honest objects at honest prices in every European city, the tailors, cobblers, bakers, instrument makers, silversmiths, dressmakers, tinsmiths, watchmakers, closed at an accelerating rate. The reasons were not principally about quality preferences. They were about real estate, regulatory burden, the transfer-tax regimes of inherited businesses, the disappearance of the apprenticeship system that produced their successors, and the inability of small workshops to compete with international chains in customer-acquisition cost. Italy and France resisted longer because of cultural infrastructure and active state policy. The Netherlands, lacking either, lost its workshops faster than most. The ordinary Dutchman now loses the possibility of having a jacket altered at the corner tailor for twenty euros, because the corner tailor is no longer there. This is not a problem of taste. This is a problem of urban economic ecology.

The third is the rupture in household transmission. The European propertied middle class that quietly used good objects and passed them on to their children was one of the great cultural transmission belts of the twentieth century. It is now largely broken. Multiple causes operate together. Inheritance taxes accelerated the dispersal of household contents. Geographic mobility separated children from the homes in which they had been raised. The self-help culture of the 1970s and 1980s encouraged the disposal of inherited objects as psychological liberation. The rise of fast furniture and rapid-replacement consumption habituated entire generations to disposability. The result is that the present generation in their forties and fifties, who in 1985 might have inherited a household register from their parents, today live in homes furnished from Scandinavian flat-pack retailers. Their children will have nothing to inherit from them either.

The fourth is the role of social media in the homogenisation of taste. The platforms reward visibility, which means they reward signalling, which means they reward objects that translate well into images. Quiet objects, by definition, photograph poorly. Loud objects photograph well. Over fifteen years, the algorithmic preference for the photogenic has reshaped the entire consumer economy, including segments that once explicitly defined themselves by their resistance to fashion. The luxury market did not domesticate social media; social media domesticated the luxury market. A Loro Piana cap in 2010 was a quiet object owned by a few hundred thousand people. A Loro Piana cap in 2025 is a content category with its own hashtag taxonomy.

These four lines do not conspire. They simply intersect. Their combined effect is the cultural condition this pamphlet describes.

IX. The counter-argument

Two objections deserve direct response.

The first is the elitism objection. Your taste is the taste of someone who can afford the best, and pretending it is universally available is dishonest. The objection is partially correct and largely beside the point. The argument here is not that everyone should buy KPM. It is that everyone should retain access to quality at his own scale, and that the ecology of workshops on which such access depends should not be allowed to disappear. The point is not the porcelain on the senior civil servant's table; it is the corner tailor who altered a jacket for twenty euros. The disappearance of the workshop ecosystem makes everyone poorer in real terms, because the bottom of the quality range disappears along with the top. When the corner tailor is gone, the ordinary Dutchman cannot have his suit altered at any price. When the small bakery is gone, the ordinary Dutchman cannot buy a real bread at any price. When the small workshop is gone, the ordinary Dutchman cannot have his shoes resoled at any price. The pamphlet's defence of discrimination is a defence of the ecological conditions for ordinary quality, not a celebration of high consumption.

The second is the historicist objection. Things change; the disappearance of one craft economy is the birth of another; you are mourning a moment that is gone and refusing the moment that is coming. This objection is the more sophisticated version of the first, and it has a kernel of truth. Cultures do change, and not every change is loss. Some new craft economies have emerged. The European specialty coffee movement is real. Small-batch baking has revived in many cities. Independent fashion has returned in pockets. None of this is denied here. What is denied is that the new economies replace, in scale or accessibility, what has been lost. The new artisanal coffee is not the corner tailor. It serves a different segment, addresses a different need, and operates on a much smaller economic footprint. The pamphlet's claim is that the net direction has been negative for two generations, and that the structural causes, financialisation, real estate pressure, regulatory burden, transmission rupture, social-media homogenisation, are not self-correcting. Without active counter-pressure, the trajectory continues downward.

X. Ten commandments for healthy discrimination

The pamphlet has avoided lists in its prose because the matter at hand resists prescription. But there is virtue in ending with a portable instrument, and a list is what carries best in the pocket. These are not commandments in the Mosaic sense. They are working principles for anyone who wishes to retrain his eye in a culture that has untrained it.

Discriminate on what matters, never on who someone is. The legal floor of Article 1 is non-negotiable. What is recovered here is the moral and aesthetic capacity that has been confused with the prohibition.
Ask, of every purchase, whether the price reflects material or marketing. The question is the most useful single instrument the discriminating consumer possesses. It cannot be answered from the price tag.
Locate any heritage brand on its trajectory. Workshop, reputation, scale, conglomerate, hieroglyph. The same name in different phases denotes different objects. KPM today is not Wedgwood today, even though both had similar histories.
Recognise the exception. The plastic Kaweco Sport, the BIC Cristal, the copper-bottomed pan from a Swedish flat-pack retailer, the second-hand iPod and Zeppelin. Quality is not a function of price. Material truthfulness and fitness for purpose can appear at any price band.
Use what is well made until it is finished. The 2007 Rimowa, the twenty-year-old Moscoviter suit, the inherited porcelain. The first ethical act of consumption is the long retention of what one has.
Buy second-hand without shame. The market for objects that the new economy has discarded is one of the few remaining ways to participate in genuine quality at honest prices. The 1990s Leica, the discontinued iPod, the auction-house silver, the vintage Volvo, the second-hand Rimowa beauty case for valuables.
Patronise the workshops still standing. The corner tailor, the still-living bakery, the local instrument repairer, the small bookshop. Their survival depends on patronage, and the patronage protects the broader ecology that makes ordinary quality available to everyone.
Make with your own hands what the market no longer makes well. The risotto, the croquette, the tagliatelle, the loaf of bread. Domestic craft is the last preserve of disciplines that have been industrialised out of the commercial circuit. The act of making restores the eye that judges what others make.
Distrust quiet luxury when it advertises itself. Genuine modesty does not perform. The hashtag is the inversion of the position it claims to occupy. If a brand is communicating its quietness, it is no longer quiet.
Use the object, do not perform it. A tool is not a sign. A pencil, a pan, an inherited jacket are functional things with work to do. The first question is whether they work, not whether they fit your image. Pass things on.

These ten are exhaustive enough to be useful, brief enough to be portable, and specific enough to resist the reflex of reading them as moral exhortation. They are technical instructions, in the same sense that the protocols of a craft are technical instructions. They produce results when applied. They produce nothing when admired.

XI. A short list of brands still worth attention

Brands change. The list below reflects the state of the trajectory in 2026. Several of these will move down their own life cycles in the next decade. Several others will sustain their disciplines. The list is offered not as canon but as orientation.

Porcelain and ceramics. KPM Berlin, still hand-finished in the original Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur tradition. Augarten in Vienna, similar standing. Selected Limoges houses. Several Japanese kilns whose discipline is functionally beyond European equivalents.

Silver. Koch & Bergfeld in Bremen. Christofle in France, in its higher product lines, with appropriate caveat about the conglomerate trajectory. Older Robbe & Berking silver in good condition.

Glass. Sophienwald in Bohemia. Zalto in Austria. Mark Thomas in Austria. Selected Murano ateliers operating on traditional techniques. Riedel in its older Sommeliers series, with caveats about the broader range.

Watches. This category requires the most caution because the luxury inversion is most advanced here. Older Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin, mostly on the second-hand market. Nomos Glashütte for honest contemporary work at proportionate prices. Smaller independent watchmakers whose names do not yet circulate.

Cameras and optics. Leica before 1986 and selected later models with appropriate caveats. Carl Zeiss optics from the Contax/Yashica era and from the Hasselblad medium-format era. Rollei 35 in good condition. Selected Voigtländer lenses.

Fountain pens and writing instruments. Kaweco in its honest models, including the plastic Sport. Older Montblanc Meisterstücks, particularly the unornamented 149 and 146. Pelikan Souverän. Pilot's professional range from Japan. Older Parker 51 fountain pens and pencils on the second-hand market, an industrial-design landmark from a period when American manufacturing still operated at this level.

Audio. Bowers and Wilkins in its older product lines before Sound United, on the second-hand market. Older McIntosh equipment. Selected Japanese audio from the 1970s and 1980s.

Tailoring. Working tailors with named workshops and direct relationships with their customers, regardless of city. Moscoviter in Almere as a Dutch reference point. Equivalent figures exist in every European capital and many provincial cities for those who look.

Bread and pastry. Working bakeries with named bakers, daily production, and short ingredient lists. The Bertinet bakery and school in Bath as a reference point. Equivalent figures in most European cities.

Pickles, preserved foods, charcuterie. Workshops with named producers and short ingredient lists. The list here is too local to generalise. The principle is to find the producer, taste the product, and patronise if both pass the test.

Cars. The trajectory of the automobile industry makes contemporary recommendations difficult. Older Volvos, particularly the 240 and 740 estate cars, remain functional. The BMW i8, produced from 2014 to 2020, is a genuine engineering achievement that the market did not reward in its time and which now, ten years on, can be acquired second-hand at proportionate prices. The 2014-2020 BMW i8 stands in something like the relation to its own era that the Citroën SM (1970-1975) stood to its era: a genuine technical statement that the surrounding market could not absorb, and which only the discriminating buyer in retrospect understood. The same principle applies to most of the genuinely interesting cars of the last fifty years.

The list is not exhaustive. It is exemplary. The principle, again, is that craft survives in pockets, that the pockets shift, and that the discriminating eye is the only reliable navigator.

XII. Closing

The case made in these pages is finally not about objects. Objects are only the most legible symptoms of a more general condition. A culture that has lost its capacity for discrimination, in the proper sense of the word, has lost its capacity to choose what to value. A culture that cannot choose what to value cannot keep what makes it continuous with its better past. A culture that cannot keep that continuity loses, in stages, its substrate: in its material life, in its taste, in its memory, in its inheritance.

The recovery of the capacity for discrimination is therefore not a matter of decoration. It is a civic operation. It begins, prosaically, at the table that is set each evening, in the choice of what is placed on it. Not as status display, not as luxury performance, not as nostalgic reconstruction. As exercise in distinction on what matters. Whoever performs this exercise, in his small daily way, is doing political work in the oldest sense of the word, the sense before parties and ideologies, the sense in which Aristotle understood the polis as what its citizens habitually do. He is not performing it because he expects to reverse the larger trajectory. He is performing it because the exercise itself is a form of citizenship that without exercise disappears.

The trajectory will not be reversed. The conglomerates will continue to harvest. The workshops will continue to close. The hieroglyph phase will absorb more brands. The performance of quiet luxury will continue to grow louder. None of this is at the disposal of the individual reader, or even of a generation of readers acting in concert.

What is at the disposal of each reader is whether, on this evening, he sets the table well. Whether the object in his hand is the object it claims to be. Whether the workshop down the street still has a customer this week. Whether the child in his household sees how an adult chooses, day after day, on what matters.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, in his notebooks, that it is not given to a man to determine whether his work bears fruit, only whether he does his work today. The line has carried two thousand years because it formulates, at the appropriate level of abstraction, the whole of an ethics of action under conditions of historical uncertainty. The pamphlet ends on it.

It is not given to us to determine whether the European capacity for discrimination, in its older and finer sense, will survive the present century. It is given to us only to make, today, the distinctions that matter. To set this table, to keep this object, to choose this workshop, to teach this child. The work, done today, is its own justification. Whether it bears fruit is not the worker's question.

The table is set. The light is on.

Jacob Huibers is a writer. His book De Richting van de Beweging is in preparation. Statecraft is his platform for analysis and commentary.

The Discriminating Eye: on what is lost when a culture stops telling things apart