Timelessness is one of the most coveted qualities for luxury brands. Across high fashion and fine watches, hotels, restaurants and jewellery, the ability to draw on a brand’s heritage, established through traditions of quality and craftsmanship – and which endures passing fashions and cultural moments – can give the edge in a highly competitive market. And yet timelessness is not something that can be bought or manufactured; it has to be earned through years of dedication to a brand’s values.

To dig deeper into what makes a brand truly timeless, MR PORTER sought out the expertise of two companies that embody timelessness in different ways. Bowmore, founded in 1779, is the oldest whisky distillery on Islay, the Scottish island renowned for its distinctive and complex peat-smoked whisky and is built on 240 years of traditions and expertise. Aston Martin, on the other hand, demonstrates how an automative brand established more than a century ago can evolve through time, continually renewing a heritage established through success on and off the road, in each new model.

Together with Mr Olie Arnold, MR PORTER’s Style Director, Bowmore’s senior whisky specialist, Mr David Miles, and the chief creative officer at Aston Martin, Mr Marek Reichman, we sat down for a fireside chat to set out a blueprint for timelessness.

“You can’t just declare yourself to be timeless,” Mr Miles says, as we begin our conversation by attempting to define timelessness. “You need to first be of a time and offer something of a particular quality. If you maintain that quality you can become timeless, but it has to grow from that initial moment.”

Mr Reichman agrees. “Though,” he adds, “I have a slightly different experience of timelessness.” Indeed, while Bowmore’s reputation has been aggregated slowly over centuries, Aston Martin has had to innovate while remaining true to a much-loved heritage. It’s what has seen the brand grow from the pre-war, cigar-shaped cars, raced at Le Mans, to the iconic elegance of DB5 and – under Mr Reichman – the contemporary DB11 and the company’s first SUV, the DBX.

“You have to look at the past,” Mr Reichman explains, discussing designing with timelessness in mind. “But I’m creating an object for today, and for the future, so I’m always trying to create a car that will be timeless from the point of inception. The DB5 is timeless, but it is also defined by the technology of the day – the halogen light bulb, for example, when today we use LEDs. So what defines timelessness for Aston Martin is beauty.”

Mr Reichman gives the example of putting a cover over a car; how it can be difficult to identify the period the car is from when you can only see its form rather than the technology, and how when it is recognisable, you know it’s a truly timeless design. It’s an idea – that there is a universal appeal to timeless qualities – echoed by Mr Miles, who explains that Bowmore whisky is still made in exactly the same way as it was when it was founded. “Somebody who was there in 1779 could walk into the distillery now and would understand what was happening,” he says. “They would still be able to make whisky.” The quality of the whisky has stood the test of time.

But if a continuity of traditions and the quality of a product defines timelessness, how can you ensure that it is maintained? As Mr Arnold observes, it can be easy to lose touch with heritage. “Working with so many fantastic luxury brands with such rich history, you get an in-depth understanding as to the importance of maintaining it. Staying true to who you are can be the difference between success and failure in a challenging market place.”

Over the course of our conversation, the importance of the artisanal – in maintaining skilled, human involvement in the process, rather than automatisation – was a key aspect in maintaining a connection with the heritage of a brand. For Bowmore, this means the expertise of the master distillers. “The initial stage of the production process,” Mr Miles explains. “The barley arriving at the distillery, the fermentation and distillation – this is science, it’s measurable. Then you put it into an oak barrel and you lose control. It becomes a kind of alchemy. There’s a very select band of men and women who can nose something in the cask and judge whether to leave it for 30, 40, 50 years, or whether it is better to drink it now.”

It’s a level of human skill that remains completely integral to the whisky-making process and, curiously – despite being at the cutting edge of a technologically advanced industry – also to the production of Aston Martin’s cars. With the exception of two robots, which lift the heavy chassis onto the production line and precisely apply glue, the cars are still assembled by hand. It’s an intensive process, taking around 200 hours for each car, but, as Mr Reichman says, it is vital. “In August, after 107 years, we’ll make our hundred thousandth car. It takes some manufacturers days to make that many, but none of them are made by hand. That authenticity, the artisanal production, the natural materials we use – machined aluminium, natural woven cotton thread instead of nylon – is very much part of the quality of the finished product.”

Finding that balance, however, between moving with the times and technology and preserving traditions and heritage of the brand is a delicate process.

“The fun of being a designer is in finding new and unique ways of maintaining that relevance,” Mr Reichman says. “In traditional markets around the world, the median age is about 50, and about 95 per cent male. If you look at China, it’s about 50/50 male/female and 35 as a median age. If we only made products for that 50 year old man, we wouldn’t have a future. People want our cars because of our history. You have to have that thread to the past, the authenticity of the materials, but you also have to be cognisant of what people want.”

For Bowmore, maintaining a continuity with the past goes as far as carefully recreating the dents and bumps accumulated by old stills when they are replaced, in case it influenced the flavour of the whisky. But the company also has an eye on the future. Change for Bowmore, as Mr Miles explains, comes in influencing people’s approach to whisky: “We want to appeal to a broader audience – we need to appeal to them on their terms.”

It’s a notion that recalls an earlier moment in the conversation, as we discussed the importance of style over fashion. Enabling the consumer to express themselves, rather than dictating how to interact with a product, emerged throughout our conversation as a consistent marker for the longevity of a brand, allowing it evolve while maintaining its sense of timelessness. Just as you should feel free to prefer the 18-year-old Bowmore over the 50-year-old, as Mr Miles says, or enjoy driving an Aston Martin at 20 miles an hour, the consumer’s experience should be focused around being given the opportunity to articulate themselves through the product.

It’s likely that, as technology becomes an ever greater part of our daily lives, timelessness, and especially the experience of timelessness, will become ever more important. For the car, as Mr Reichman observes, the development of autonomous technologies will mean vehicles will become more homogenised in their design in order to aid efficient operation, which provokes an interesting question for the future direction of the luxury automotive industry.

“Sports cars are like horses,” Mr Reichman says. “Today, more people are buying horses for pleasure than in the 1890s, even though horses were used every single day in the 1800s as transportation, to plow the fields, to bring the barrels to the distillery. I think that’s where we have our future – it becomes less about direct transportation, it’s about pleasure.”

“It’s going to be much more about the experience,” agrees Mr Miles. “Rather than possessing an object imbued with a sense of timelessness, true timelessness will come down to what you do.”

And it’s a shift that ties in with wider issues affecting the consumer landscape, with the emphasis on products that are built to last – where the focus is on the relationship you create with them, rather than their acquisition – offering an answer to issues around sustainability and environmental responsibility. “I think we are at the moment where many brands need to be making crucial decisions in term of their output and impact on the planet,” Mr Arnold says. “The idea of reusing, or savouring, rather than constantly consuming, is really important.”

From our conversation, it’s clear that for both Messrs Miles and Reichman, timelessness is a particularly important aspect in their understanding of Bowmore and Aston Martin, as well as a critically defining factor across luxury that will only grow in significance, despite being difficult to acquire. Like Bowmore’s whisky, sitting in Scotland’s oldest maturation house for decades, slowly establishing itself, timelessness is a quality that has to be carefully cultivated over time. Yet, as our conversation winds down, Mr Reichman suggests that young brands can still aspire to timelessness: “It’s the same whether you’ve been going for 10 years or 100 years – you can’t forget who you are and what you stand for. You have to believe in what you’re doing.”

“If your goal is timelessness,” Mr Miles adds, “you won't achieve it. You have to strive for excellence.”

Discover more from Bowmore Whisky here