Why is Lightweight Design Trending in Luxury?

The product designer Benoît Mintiens admits he gets tired of explaining why his latest watch, the Ressence Type 7, which has a full titanium case and bracelet, is quite so light. “People ask me if there is anything in it,” he chuckles. “Then again, they’ve usually just been looking at Rolexes. We’re used to associating weight with luxury or higher quality. But in design and manufacturing terms, weight is just a cheap way of suggesting that. The association doesn’t actually hold.”

Indeed, it’s an interrelation that is breaking down. The last year has seen the launch of a flurry of products claiming to be the world’s lightest, ranging from On’s Cloudboom running shoe to Lenovo’s AI laptop, from Samsonite’s suitcase to Scott’s road bike and Helly Hansen’s down jacket. In the few years prior, we’ve seen the McLaren Elva, the world’s lightest-ever road car, the Ultraleggera, the world’s lightest production chair and the Ming LW.01, the world’s lightest mechanical watch. Fellow watchmaker Richard Mille has emphasised that its watches are so lightweight that its long-term ambassador, Rafael Nadal, has been able to play tennis while wearing one.

Not for nothing are so many high-end products dubbed “air”, “lite”, “flyknit”, or something similar. It’s all apt for times in which, earlier this year, scientists at the University of Toronto unveiled the lightest and strongest nanomaterial yet devised. It can support a million times its own mass but also sit atop a soap bubble. All of this, in part, is a product of our increasingly mobile lifestyles — we not only travel more, but we also move homes more frequently.

“Maybe early nomadic humans were more aware of the value inherent in things being lightweight than we are today,” suggests industrial designer Ross Lovegrove, a pioneer in the use of super-light high-tech materials. “Of course, an object can be dematerialised to the point that its lack of weight becomes problematic. But look at nature [for design inspiration]; by definition, nothing is extraneous there either, yet the results are profound. I think lightness is becoming a way of defining progress.”

Perhaps necessarily, too. After all, less material in an object means that fewer resources are used and that transportation is less environmentally costly. According to Oskar Zięta, designer of the Ultraleggera — weighing just 1.66 kg yet with an incredible load-bearing capacity of 1.2 tons — reducing weight is a response to sustainability. “The future is ultralight because it is responsible,” he says. “It is influencing automotive design, logistics and fashion, as well as art and design. Much as ecological responsibility still comes at a premium, lightweight is a luxury attribute now. It’s a symbol of quality, recognised by those who seek to streamline and reduce, who understand the direction in which the world is evolving.”

They, however, may remain the few rather than the many, and unsurprisingly so. Since the heavyweight has long been equated with durability, we’re almost hardwired to think of the lightweight as more fragile — because historically, with natural materials and simpler making methods, it has been. In the English language, “lightweight” still has connotations of the ineffectual or unserious. Numerous psychological experiments have revealed how sensitive we are to this idea: reduce the weight of a container by 15 per cent and we barely notice; reduce it by 30 per cent, and suddenly we want to pay less for it.

Weight even influences how important we think a thing is. Put a CV on a heavier clipboard and we deem the candidate superior, for example. The theory — proposed by Nils Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam —  is that this is an effect of the cognitive work required in planning and the physical effort needed in moving a heavier object, along with the danger of it falling on us if mishandled. This leads us to consider it more carefully and so we think of it as being more important.

That’s why, in 1939, Henry Dreyfuss, one  of the greats of industrial design, found himself in the John Wanamaker department store in New York City, watching shoppers  and pondering why they would pick up the Westclox Big Ben Alarm Clock he’d designed and then choose a rival model. Because, they said, when he asked, the Big Ben felt too light. So he added an otherwise useless 85-gram weight to it. It became a bestseller.

Marek Reichman, the chief creative officer of Aston Martin, argues that our perspective has shifted since then, in line with both the growing availability of high-tech lightweight materials and also our exposure to them. “The likes of carbon fibre, for example, was once the preserve of industries such as aviation or Formula One, and now they can be found in everything from skis to pens,” he says, “and that has made us both more knowledgeable and appreciative of its value. There’s a kind of new performance-derived luxury.” 

But nor is this lightness being applied solely to products we need to work in a specific way — like sports equipment, which, thanks to materials science, has also lost weight without compromising its effectiveness. A professional tennis racket today weighs in at about 226 grams, roughly half what the likes of John McEnroe would have been used to. Sometimes it just looks cool. Nick Tidball, co-founder of Vollebak — maker of some of the most lightweight coats available — notes that sometimes highly technical materials have their own beauty and kudos, plus functionality.

A carbon fibre dashboard saves only a few kilograms on your Aston Martin compared to a more traditionally luxurious wooden one, yet over 90 per cent of customers now choose it. And then there is what lightness suggests… Two years ago, Telmont launched what it claimed was the world’s lightest Champagne bottle — there is some purpose behind this,  as a heavyweight bottle is usually required to counter the internal pressure resulting from all those bubbles. Last year, however, Johnnie Walker — after five years of research and development — also announced the world’s lightest whisky bottle. Now this may reduce the carbon footprint of its shipping to thirsty Americans.

However, since whisky bottles have long been noticeably heavyweight too — often featuring large stoppers, intricate cut-glass designs, and for that all-important shelf appeal — this most strikingly suggests a fundamental change of mindset for its own sake. To be lightweight, simply put, is to be modern. 

But does this mean that the heavyweight, in contrast, is forever destined to be considered positively antediluvian? The designer Marcel Wanders — who has experimented with weight through his one-off 800-gram Carbon Balloon Chair, made by forming carbon epoxy around inflated party balloons — argues otherwise.

While lightweight materials are often easier to use and less energy-intensive in manufacture — “it’s much easier to drill a hole through a  thin material than a thick one,” as he puts it — both light and heavyweight materials need to be appraised on their own merits. Indeed, for all that there’s a movement towards the lighter weight, he says, the internet — and the way it can connect low-volume, high-craft producers with sufficient customers — has also allowed for the revival of a whole world of artsy products that use heavy materials, such as stone, oak, and raw concrete, to express their beauty.

“Quality isn’t just linear to weight anymore,” Wanders adds. “Each material has its own power. Something really solid, like an onyx bathtub, still punches you in the face with its presence, right? It’s poetic, wonderful and eternal. In contrast, you can also pick up something extremely light and be touched in a different way. That lightweight design still needs to be intelligent; otherwise, it’s usually just cheap. But the fact is that luxury exists at the extremes of weight like this now. Why? Because producing extremes is expensive.”