The Cost(s) of Things

[This essay, and others, have been published on Medium.com here]

Umbrellas, much like the kind we use today, are very old. Like ancient. Like more than 4,400 years old. More ‘recent’ examples can be found painted on

Etruscan drinking cups from 300 BCE, in paintings from Italy in 1530 AD, becoming a must-have fashion accessory in France by the early 18th century, but still the province of the aristocracy. A century later they were becoming a necessary commodity; witness the increase in umbrella makers in Paris; 7 in 1808, 42 in 1813 and by 1848 there were 377 shops manufacturing them (and n.b., just one in NYC today). Before the end of the 19th century, they were essentially a mass-market item. That timeline mirrors the Thomas Brigg and Son’s shop in London, formed in 1836, and making umbrellas for the royal family by the end of that century.

After losing every umbrella I ever owned (mostly NYC-caught-in-the-rain-street-vendor-umbrellas) I decided to take another approach. If $2 umbrellas (before inflation, now closer to $5) were disposable, what was the cost threshold at which I did not afford to lose an umbrella?

I got to play out that experiment more than 30 years ago at Swaine Adeney Brigg, then 150 years old, in the land where rain is culture, St. James, London.

James Swaine made whips in London and was joined by his nephew Adeney in 1845. They merged with Brigg in the middle of WWII, and Swaine Adeney Brigg and Sons Ltd. was born. They don’t make telescoping umbrellas, or even automatic opening umbrellas (heaven forfend) or even ones with metal shafts, but they do make umbrellas for like of Mary Poppins and Gene Kelly while Singin’ in the Rain (really), along with whips for Indiana Jones (who else) and leather goods and hats, of nearly insane quality at utterly stratospheric prices. An umbrella can exceed $1,500, but that sounds pretty affordable after looking at their $10,000 leather cases.

While insanely expensive, these costs are not merely a test to see how much some idiot (or upper-class twit) would pay for an umbrella; they reflect the cost of making highly refined cultural markers. Think of all the black silk umbrellas in The City (which on rainy days are dried and pressed while the gents are at work) and you see how thoroughly the umbrella has become an artifact with meaning far beyond just shade or shedding rain. That may account for part of the inflated cost, but manufacturing by hand, in England, with the best materials and craft is an expensive venture. And the market, along with firm’s longevity, prove that there is a steady demand for the best possible version of a commodity.

The authenticity, and fustiness, of the place, attracted me even at a young(ish) age. While the most expensive umbrellas were close to the price suggested for an engagement ring (3 months salary) there were a number of simpler models made of less exotic woods and with nylon vs. silk that would still be the most I had (and still have) ever paid for an umbrella.
You can guess how that experiment turned out.

Since the loss of my cultural artifact, I have never willingly paid more than $15 for an umbrella, usually much less. When traveling in places where street vendors don’t hawk umbrellas I have been forced, on occasion, to buy a $30 Muji version, but I would rather be drenched than pay much more.

And I hate being drenched with rain, I’m practically phobic about it. When I watch a movie where the character (as often as not it’s John Cusack) is wandering in the soaking rain I usually feel both enormous empathy and creeping revulsion at the same time. And don’t even get me started on wartime movies with water-filled foxholes.

IRL, walking down Broadway in the rain, there are always the unprotected; sweatshirts sagging, shoes squishing, but looking not nearly as unhappy as I would be. I don’t get it, but I also don’t get the ‘wide-brimmed hat and trench coat’ version of water-shedding either, so I admit to being a bit OCD about it. Umbrellas are more than a passing fancy; for me, they are basic survival equipment.

In Hong Kong they are a different kind of survival equipment. As China oppresses the massive demonstrations there, umbrellas are both symbol and tool. They hide faces from surveillance cameras, help repel tear gas and rubber bullets, cover cameras, lock doors and create visual rivers of protest in photos of the millions in the streets. They are so effective as symbols of subversion that Alibaba and others will not send umbrellas purchased to Hong Kong! In Hong Kong umbrellas=resistance, just as surely as yellow vests do in Paris.

Like a slew of modern conveniences (watches, shoes, jewelry, and a long list of personal accessories including umbrellas) that have existed for centuries, or even millennia, there is an unimaginable range of costs from nearly nothing to the astronomical. When these accessories are functionally, and sometimes even visually, identical the difference in cost seems inexplicable.

Why, one might ask, would anyone spend $10,000 for a watch when an incredibly accurate (and often quite lovely) one can cost less than $10?

This may be syntactically inverted; I would ask how a watch can cost $10 when the materials alone should cost more. In college, I used to eat breakfast at a downtown diner nearly every day, where 2 eggs (any style), bacon, home fries, buttered toast, and all the coffee, milk, and sugar you could drink, cost 69 cents. My roommate and I would constantly marvel at a cooked meal, in a rented space with heat and lights, served by paid employees, that cost less than the price we would pay for even a fraction of the ingredients. ‘Market forces’ or ‘loss leader’ is not the whole answer.

Part of the answer is that the cost of things is often not the real cost of things. Manufacturers don’t pay, for example, the cost to dispose of their ridiculous over-packaging. Or to restore the environment they indirectly destroyed to obtain low-cost materials. Or to pay living wages to the workers who actually manufacture the goods. Or to pay for the economic subsidies offered to manufacturers to locate in a particular state. Or the road system to transport raw materials and finished goods.

There is a hidden cost to all things, and the less expensive the items the more significant the unpaid hidden costs tend to be.

Our addiction (and I include myself, obviously) to low-cost goods is subsidized by an entire economy that buries real costs and real consequences.

The umbrella we buy for $4 ($5 when it is raining) probably cost the vendor $2 or maybe $3, which means the distributor paid about a dollar and the manufacturer paid a fraction of a dollar to actually make the umbrella itself and turn around to sell it at a profit. Let’s say 25 cents, though it could be less, and it will have to travel halfway around the world to its market. Any single part of the umbrella, say the handle, or the sewn fabric, should cost more than that in an economy that acknowledges the real cost of things.

Swaine Adeney Brigg doesn’t have the advantage of nearly free labor or raw materials that don’t include the societal cost of, say, cleaning the water used to extract the gas needed to manufacture the steel, but does have the disadvantage of having to stand behind, and repair, every umbrella they make. The average life of an NYC street umbrella is between one and two rainfalls. The average life of a Swaine umbrella is probably measured in decades, though my experience might lower that average a tad.

Nearly 40 years ago the New York Times was already analyzing the state of umbrellas, with even Ralph Nader weighing in on the issue. Ralph, of course, never paid for his umbrella; he just used the one he found in some office he occupied. But he blamed Madison Ave. for the disposability of the street variety. It is aggrandizing our motivation a bit to believe that it took the massive engine of the advertising industry to point consumers to a low cost, disposable, ‘just in time’, functionally acceptable accessory; they kind of sell themselves.

It’s not just the cost that drives people to demand the lowest possible price; we don’t care to carry these things around but desperately need them at the point we need them. Plus we all know that being seen carrying an umbrella when it >em class="lb">might rain is a bit nerdy. I look around the subway (when I used to enter the subway) and feel a fool when a middle-aged nurse and I are the only ones carrying these personal protective devices.

The lore of the first gentleman to carry an umbrella in 18th century London is illustrative; he was jeered on the streets for carrying a French (read effeminate) device, had to dodge carriages that made more money in rainy weather (and tried to run him down), and was generally shamed for his sensibility. Not unlike wearing a mask at a Trump White House event…

Citibikes, Bird/Lime electric scooters and I guess the newish Revel electric mopeds, are all based on unscheduled availability/freedom from ownership/minimal cost; a pretty compelling combination.

In Amsterdam during the 1960s a social activist and industrial designer, Luud Schimmelpennink, painted a raft of bicycles white and left them out for free borrowing. Associating the plans with the Provo Counterculture movement in Holland (radical provocateurs) doomed the idea for half a century just as Timothy Leary had doomed LSD research around the same time. Luud later tried a similar scheme with tiny electric WitCars (white cars) for getting around town. 50 years before today’s car/scooter/bike-sharing services Schimmelpennink invented the field, but without the technology or capitalism that powers that world today.

Based on Schimmelpennink’s ideas we had a modest proposal to add Public Umbrellas to the NYC streetscape (note: ‘fear of rain’ above). I was skeptical that Public Umbrellas could work, but I was even more skeptical that bike-sharing would work in NYC and it has been an unqualified success. If you consider broken umbrellas stuffed in trash cans we might actually have an informal umbrella sharing/down-cycling program already!

The uncomfortable truth is that I am attracted to both the high and low of umbrellas. And watches. And shoes. And architecture. And just about everything. I will, in spite of the corrupt system my purchases support, continue to buy cheap umbrellas and lust after expensive ones. I own way too many watches, both the expensive, finely crafted Swiss kinds and the least expensive (but occasionally impressively designed) Timex sort.

When it comes to building and renovating I advise clients to occupy the ends of the spectrum; either do everything they really want (and spend more than they ever imagined) or do as little as possible to be marginally satisfied. Anything in between will be, in my view, the worst of both extremes; costing way too much and yet still not being everything they want.

We design projects with IKEA objects/kitchens/lighting, and others filled with the most expensive bespoke elements. And we love both (for different reasons) and understand that they each support (or enable) completely different economic communities. IKEA has what may be the most architectural and perfect toilet roll holder (Skogsviken) available for $2.99 and dline has another highly refined toilet roll holder for $385. I love them both and while I might specify the dline for clients I will almost certainly use IKEA for myself.

Extremely costly homes that exceed $3000/sf sound much more insane than a $1,500 Swaine Adeney Briggs umbrella, but both do more than they appear to do on the surface. They may look like a senseless extravagance but in fact support a viable industry of craft and trades that will, in the absence of such largesse, simply fade away. A world without fine cabinetmakers, custom ceramic tile artisans, stonemasons, plasterers, terrazzo, glass mosaic or hardware as well-machined as any Swiss watch, is a world that is losing its endangered species of skilled makers. And no $4 umbrella will ever replace those extinct skills.

I was partners with architect Theo Crosby at Pentagram for the last part of his tenure. Theo was a very odd, and charming, guy who started as a committed modernist and ended as a quirky iconoclast. Theo edited AD Magazine with Monica Pidgeon, brought the first Le Corbusier exhibition to the UK (and published early works by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, et al) and conceived the 1956 This is Tomorrow exhibition, ending his career with Shakepeare’s Globe theater. And he loved to argue.

I argued with him that style was not central to architecture, that only ideas mattered and could be rendered in a myriad of formal expressions. Theo argued, and it took a while but I eventually saw his point, that only style has the ability to promote and preserve craft. Once a craft is gone it rarely returns.

Street umbrellas may be the coin of the NYC realm, but by purchasing (and losing!) a Swaine Adeney Brigg umbrella I was doing more than wasting a few hundred dollars (though I was doing that too); I was supporting skills and craft that I hope will never die.

That’s worth the loss of an umbrella.