Chapter 1 The Concept of Luxury

      The word luxury has always been a source of discussion of what it is supposed to mean. This is the reason we added this chapter in the second edition of this book and have kept it since then. Since we are going to write about luxury along with text and diagrams, it only makes sense to explore the intricacies of what is meant by such a popular word. In this fourth edition we have added a section on the meaning of the expression new luxury, whose usage has been growing in the past few years.

A Problematic Definition

      What is luxury? At first glance, it seems that we can answer in simple terms and to distinguish between what is luxury and what does not fall into it. But we sense, on reflection, that not everyone will agree on this distinction: luxury to one is not necessarily luxury to another.

The concept of luxury incorporates an aesthetic dimension that refers to a major theme of Western philosophy: How to characterize the notion of beauty?¹ In the twentieth century, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno expressed the problem in these terms: “We cannot define the concept of beautiful nor give up its concept.”² We believe that it is the same for luxury: without wanting to confuse it with the beautiful, it turns out, upon examination, no less elusive, and, perhaps, not less indispensable.

      Therefore, it is probably unrealistic to seek a universal definition of luxury. But this reflection draws our attention to an initial important point: the definition of luxury has varied over time.

       A Fluctuating Notion

      What we commonly call luxury no longer has much to do with what was meant only a century ago; or, a little further back, in the years before the Industrial Revolution. We are not talking here about objects of luxury. A product like soap, for example, although a real luxury in the Middle Ages, has become largely democratic since then, and it has therefore ceased to be a luxury in our eyes. Today, the word has a very different meaning from how it was used, for example, in the seventeenth century. It connotes for us both positive and negative images; most of the negative images are derived from its historical heritage, while positive images are for the most of a recent introduction.

      As we will see, the term has experienced, particularly in the past two centuries, important semantic changes that reflect the construction of our modern consumer society. These transformations are of great interest for our subject: they had direct impact on the progressive segmentation of the global luxury market and on the current positioning of brands claiming this territory.

       The Paradox of Contemporary Luxury

Today's luxury market is based on a paradox. On the one hand, luxury operates as a social distinction; it is the sign of a practice reserved for the “happy few” and thus circumvents the masses. At the same time, contemporary luxury is promoted by the brands, and they remain linked to the logics of volume of production and distribution. How, therefore, can we reconcile exclusivity with the industrial and commercial logics of volume? Such is the dilemma for luxury brands, which each brand will try to solve by adjusting its positioning through innovative strategies of creation, communication, and distribution.

      Even though it may not necessarily appear as such at first glance, contemporary luxury, in fact, presents an extensive and highly contrasted landscape. In order to grasp this complexity, a step back is needed; this is a historical detour that will allow us to comprehend it.

Chronicle of a Semantic Evolution

      Luxury is a keyword whose use is becoming more frequent in our daily lives. We read it more often in all brand communication; we use it more often in our discourses (on the Internet, Google Trends shows that its use has increased by more than 30% on average between 2004 and 2020). There are two reasons for this increase:

      We live in a world where luxury reigns. But the word itself was not born yesterday—definitions have accumulated for centuries. Since Plato, Epicurus, Veblen, Rousseau, and Voltaire, up to today's opinion leaders, the production and use of signs of wealth have always intrigued the philosophers, sociologists, and observers of their time.

      The word luxury, as we understand it today, inherited this accumulation of proposals, sometimes with contradictory meanings. The acceleration of the number of definitions in the past 20 years comes to prove the growing current interest for the question.

       Modern Dispersion

      In order to measure this abundance of meanings, we may note the growing number of expressions that, today, use it. The term now needs articles and adjectives to clarify its meanings.

Here are a few modern examples: authentic luxury is quite frequent as an expression and we will discuss it further; luxury and grand luxury was advertised by the great car designer Battista Pininfarina (lusso e gran lusso) on a 1931 poster where a car was presented on a pedestal like in a museum. This is an interesting segmentation, where already lies the idea of a form of an affordable luxury suitable for all budgets. More recently, the economist Danielle Allérès extrapolated the common sense of Pininfarina suggesting a distinction between accessible, intermediate, and inaccessible luxuries. Even luxury yogurt is spreading in food marketing. We hear more and more in casual talks and in advertising the expression “my luxury”—which is not yours and has the defect of not constituting a market on its own.

      Ostentatious luxury or “bling-bling” has long been present in the media. It may evoke a traditional luxury that is opposed, of course, to the new luxury, and so on. Social or even academic trends regularly provide their lot of new expressions on the subject.

      Two relevant points can be detected in this diversity. The