Check Out This Envy-Inducing Luxury Brand Content For Your Procrastination Needs

There’s a certain brutality to the first weeks after Labor Day weekend. You might not have another long weekend until Thanksgiving. The lulls of August suddenly turned into a manic race to catch up on everything at the office, making you wonder why you let everything pile up over the summer, anyway.

The Strategist is here to help you procrastinate. Mostly because we were, too. As part of our ongoing, ahem, “research” into the world of brand-created content, we found ourselves thoroughly sucked into the brand content designed for people for whom Labor Day just means ski season is impending. That’s right — luxury brand publishers. Our guilty pleasure.

Some luxury brand content is actually rather tough to get one’s hands on — take American Express’ Centurion magazine, which is only mailed to holders of the famed invite-only black AmEx card — but a handful of companies have comprehensive online publishing arms that are readily available to the proletariat.

Here are a few of The Strategist‘s favorites. Because you weren’t going to get anything else done today, right?

1stdibs’ Introspective

High-end auction site 1stdibs — think everything from vintage watches to Cubist sculptures to townhouses in Paris — does print a magazine, but also publishes a sizable amount of content online. Most of it, in accordance with 1stdibs’ brand, pertains to the art or auction world.

Introspective features “shoppable stories” in which the items featured can actually be purchased — oh, you know, like a cliffside villa in Laguna Beach with a spiral staircase twirling up the center of the house. Shoppable. Yes.

This is your life, right? (Credit: Veuve Clicquot

Veuve Clicquot’s Insight and Wish You Were Here

Of course champagne label Veuve has two envy-triggering online content hubs, both decked out in the brand’s signature yellow. And of course one of them is called “Wish You Were Here.” It’s a sun-soaked, Pinterest-like collage of party photos from everywhere that Veuve pops its corks — polo matches, beaches in Brazil, parties in Singapore, and other places that are very very far from your desk at the office.

Veuve’s long-form content brand Insight is a little more highbrow, with travel recommendations (“Shanghai’s best pizzeria”) and interviews with artists and architects. Though it’s available to the masses, it can only be accessed as part of an iOS app, clearly because “Android” has too many letters in common with “Andre.”

Ralph Lauren’s RL Magazine

The iconic fashion line publishes an impressively well-designed lifestyle magazine that features a content lineup catering to the more traditionally-minded of the 1% — an excellent article about falconry; a travel guide to the old-money enclave of Newport, Rhode Island; and plenty of material for auto enthusiasts. (Disclosure: Your author occasionally contributes to RL Magazine about outdoors and adventure pursuits.)

ASmallWorld’s Globalist

Perhaps the most over-the-top luxury brand content we were able to find on the entire internet comes from ASmallWorld, a members-only networking community that recently relaunched after a hiatus. Most of its site is behind a login (with an annual fee), but its content hub, The Globalist, is publicly available.

Much of the content is more intellectual than ASmallWorld’s models-and-bottles reputation would have you think — like one thought-provoking essay by a hijab-wearing Muslim woman about how she’s treated in different countries around the world. But there are some shameless goodies, too, like “The Do’s And Don’ts Of Yacht Hopping“: “DON’T climb up to the top deck and yell, ‘I’m on a boat, muthafucka!’ You are not T-Pain.”

That’s right. You are not T-Pain. Remember that.