Commentary: Luxury mooncakes and the battle of the alpha consumers

SINGAPORE: If you have not already noticed, the Mid-Autumn Festival, or colloquially, the “mooncake festival” is upon us. In Singapore, pre-orders for mooncakes started weeks, if not months ago, even before the start of the preceding Hungry Ghost Festival.
Each year, there’s a flurry of marketing on the most extravagant, ostentatious, over-the-top flavour of mooncake and mooncake packaging. Each year, hotels and other luxury establishments compete fiercely, employing a plethora of designers and advertisers to outdo each other.
I wonder if, one day, such mooncakes will converge with streetwear fashion (if they have not already), given the similarity of their creative copywriting. Anyone for a slice of forest morning mist or peach mountain grain crust? Obviously, I made that up, but you did pause to think if it existed, didn’t you?
There are myriad reasons for mooncakes and packaging being the way they are, and this has been well discussed over the years. These include opportunity – mooncakes are used as corporate gifts, hence the ability of companies to pay for more expensive-looking packages, similar to Christmas hampers in the 1980s.
Branding is another possibility – any business with a food and beverage interest (cafes, hotels, restaurants, etc) see this as a chance to diversify their offerings. Hotels with their focus on hospitality and (in some cases) luxury experiences will naturally gravitate towards making mooncakes part of their overall brand identity.
In other words, there are both supply and demand reasons for what appears to be some kind of “mooncake race” – who can make the fanciest, and sometimes, the most expensive mooncake or mooncake packaging around. Companies make them because consumers want them. Partly, consumers also want them because companies advertise well.
As consumers, we appear drawn to notions of aspirational consumption – as in, the belief that buying something will make our lives and position in society better. And by “better”, I mean “better” than the next person.
If anything, the “mooncake race” seems to be emblematic of society’s capacity and demand for relentless one-upmanship through material and symbolic actions. Material in the sense of objects, symbolic in the sense of owning, gifting and receiving such objects.
One only needs to watch the roads in Singapore to see this. Where once the most expensive car was a Mercedes-Benz or a BMW, the game of one-upmanship shows itself through a proliferation of Maseratis, Ferraris and Range Rovers.
As the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen noted, once one group aspires to and acquires what another group owns, the latter will seek to differentiate themselves in other, usually more expensive ways.
This raises a broader, more existential question. Why do we in Singapore continue to be drawn to such aspirational goods? And why do we continue to think that newer and more fancy is always better?
Sociologically, I can think of a few reasons. Despite exhortations from the philosophers and happiness experts that a simple life can be good, we also live in circumstances where we exist and consume in close comparison to each other. That closeness is both physical (small country, close living arrangements) as well as social, given the pervasiveness of social media and its ability to force comparisons with others.
As such, we are placed, and place ourselves, in “hierarchies of visibility” – situations where we persistently feel the need to do more, do better, consume more, consume better. It is as if our mantra follows that of the sitcom character Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother, “New is always better.”
So many things in Singapore embrace newness over durability. Of course, sometimes things and places reach their natural end and need renewal and replacement, but I think that we do sometimes take things to their extremes. From replacing perfectly functioning cars, to quick-fix fast fashion, to relentless renovation. Is this a case of just buying and not thinking?
And does this drive for one-upmanship also mean we lose people, places and things that are not as “fancy” but nonetheless valuable to the fabric of society? In a few years, I dread to think there will be no more bakeries making simple, cost-effective mooncakes and other pastries, because we no longer want to eat them.
Some news outlets are reporting that conspicuous consumption is now becoming less prevalent. Luxury brands known for their ostentatious labelling are reporting difficult sales in key markets around the world. The buzzword amongst Gen Z now appears to be “quiet luxury”, made popular by TV shows like Succession.
Quiet luxury eschews the showiness of brands with an apparent focus on simple designs and understated colours. One might think that embracing a trend like quiet luxury suggests that we have matured as a society and are striving towards “stealth-wealth”.
I do not think this is the case, because while the showiness becomes more muted, the hierarchies of visibility I mentioned previously simply become hierarchies of invisibility – that is, hierarchies still exist and one-upmanship continues unabated, albeit in the shadows. The desire to acquire new things for the sake of newness persists.
Instead, perhaps what we need is to question the desire to make everything newer and whether we are seeking luxury for the sake of luxury. Are we, as the saying goes, spending money that we don’t have to buy things we don’t want to impress the people we don’t like?
This is the greatest challenge in a world saturated by advertising, media and messages that revolve around the acquisition and performative consumption of goods and brands, which in itself becomes a strain on the earth’s already limited resources.
The mooncake race is simply symptomatic and symbolic of this wider issue, one that has important consequences for the individual, society and the environment.
Terence Heng is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. His new co-edited book, Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives in a Global City (Routledge 2024) documents, maps and theorises Chinese death practices in Singapore.