Revenge Partying And The Escapist Appeal of a $500 Pasta Dinner

In upscale restaurants and clubs across major cities like Singapore and London, people are seeking out hedonistic experiences such as dinners served by waiters dressed in togas while sitting under statues of winged lions and Greek Gods. This "marble-carved middle finger to restraint," is just one example of a "revenge partying" destination, where people seek out excess in a quest to make up for lost experiences during the pandemic. JWT describes this trend as "Operatic Escapism," writing about how people now want over the top experiences like this precisely because they are so extreme.

In a related topic, I've written before about pointless luxury and how sometimes supposedly high-end experiences focus on the wrong things, while missing the larger point about the experience we truly crave.

The bottom line is, sometimes luxury can come in the form of a gaudy bacchanalian feast. Other times it might include a concerto that possibly induced a full body orgasm. But it definitely doesn't come from making a hotel room light switch impossible to find. Luxury isn't about making an experience seem more expensive. It's about delighting your customers.