Tai Tai or the Woman of Taste
"To be guilty of either crudeness of taste or seeming to be unused to luxury is tantamount to social suicide." |
by Karunanethy Kalaivani
Not quite the world's oldest profession but the profession, if it may be called such, of being a Tai Tai is not brand new either. Tai Tais, a Cantonese term, are wives or mistresses of wealthy businessmen, the occidental equivalent being ladies-of-leisure or, to put it less chivalrously, trophy wives. In the Asian context, they are a relatively recent phenomenon, arising from the East Asian economic resurgence of the past half-century, though they could trace their ancestry to the concubine traditions of Chinese history. Tai Tais are famed for their exquisitely groomed and attired persons made possible by their spouses' wealth. They often become fashion icons if they possess the requisite qualifications of taste, a model to be followed by other Tai Tais and Tai Tai wannabes. Being of widely disparate backgrounds, often there is little else other than their sartorial splendor to immediately distinguish them as a class. So it is very understandable that they seek to mould their identities on their consumption. However, as a consequence, it seems that they are themselves being classified as an object of taste by this ethos of using consumption to define the self. In this sense, Tai Tais have become commodities, objects of taste, which wealthy men acquire in order to classify their own tastes and by extrapolation, to establish their identities. As Collin Levey reports in her article for the Asian Wall Street Journal titled "Culture Clash: 21st Century Concubines" (W7), "a rich Hong Kong man is defined by the approved excesses of his Tai Tai and the youth of his mistress." The "approved excesses," socially legitimate economic behavior on the part of the Tai Tais, constitute the modus operandi of this ultimate branding enterprise.
Consumption is then the new form of behavior that is being used to determine one's station in the social hierarchy. The sociologist Annie Chan observed, during her study of the Hong Kong middle-class, that there are certain consumers (whom she terms consumerists) who tend to define "their identities in terms of individuality and style in consumption" (107) and who seek "social distinction through the display and practice of 'lifestyle'" (102). Tai Tais clearly exhibit this behavior. The Tai Tai lifestyle seems to be committed to continuous consumption. However, in the case of the Tai Tais it is not the "'conspicuous consumption'" of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Bourdieu defines the term to be behavior "which seeks distinction in the crude display of ill-mastered luxury" (31). On the contrary, Tai Tais, to be deserving of their title, need to distinguish themselves in their consumption in a much more fitting manner. To be guilty of either crudeness of taste or seeming to be unused to luxury is tantamount to social suicide.
Their consumption has to be informed by the most esoteric taste. As Bourdieu defines taste to be "the propensity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classifying objects or practices…" (173), they need to ensure that the objects, that is the brands they are consuming, are classifying them to be of the correct social strata. This is even more important upon considering that according to Chan, "a moral evaluation [is] made on the desirability of certain labels" (115). Her hypothesis can be used to explain the Tai Tais' marked preferences for certain brands such as Chanel; they, after all, form the majority of the customers of its boutiques in Hong Kong. There is an imperative need, therefore, to be careful about which classifying objects are consumed since, by their very classifying property, it becomes easy to lose one's place in the correct caste by something as seemingly trivial as a sartorial faux pas.
next: "In the elegant lounges of Hong Kong's multi-starred hotels..."