(silk, let us say), you are buying not just a piece of material but a little bit of
China as well – a luxury product comes along with a small fragment of its
native soil.
you have to mentain the quality of original product through equal level of creativity and quality,,,only then can we claim the high price
luxury is the visible result of higher social status,stratification
What has not disappeared, on the other hand, is humankind’s need for
some form of social stratification, which is vital; without it, a person, a
social being by nature, is unable to escape social chaos and imitative
disorder born of undifferentiation (as French philosopher René Girard
showed most ably). We need to know our place in society.
Luxury, then, has a fundamental function of recreating this social stratification.
What is more, it does it in a democratic manner, meaning that
everyone can recreate (up to a certain point) their strata according to their
dreams
in addition to quality, which you have a right to expect from
a top-of-the-range brand, you would want something extra from a luxury
brand – some sociological advice, an instruction even: ‘This is exactly the
product you need to buy for yourself or somebody else
Luxury is qualitative and not quantitative: the number of diamonds in a
necklace is an indication of its opulence but says nothing about the taste of
the wearer.
Luxury has to be multisensory: it is not only the appearance of a Porsche
that matters but also the sound of it, not only the scent of a perfume but
also the beauty of the bottle it comes in. It is multisensory compression
Let us take that a little further: one of the most significant aspects of our
society is that not only have we monetized the relationship to time (interest
rates), but also created from it a basis for managing it (forecast return on an
investment, discount rates); time, like money, being a one-dimensional variable,
this invasion of measured, quantified, time makes for a one-dimensional
society – time is no longer ‘the form of inner sense’ in human experience, as
Kant put it, but becomes an objective external variable, eventually being integrated
as a single dimension of the four-dimensional universe of General
Relativity, where Man no longer has any place. We shall be dealing in greater
detail with this one-dimensionality, this representation of the universe, in the
section on luxury and money below.
Finally, as we saw earlier, the role of luxury is to recreate social stratification;
however, social stratification has a time dimension; consequently
luxury, in contrast to fashion, should not be the slave of time but stand aloof
from time, or at the very least it should not be dominated by it, and hence
the second contradiction of luxury: a luxury item is both timeless and of the
here and now. Put another way, a luxury item has to appear both perfectly
modern to the society of the day and at the same time laden with history; one
of the conventional ways of dealing with this contradiction is for the brand to
Conversely, luxury being primarily social in nature, and society being made
up of human beings, every luxury product should bear a person’s imprint. We
shall be reverting to this point at greater length in Chapter 8 on the luxury
product, but we can cite here the German sociologist Georg Simmel: ‘A
product has the less soul, the more people participate in its manufacture.’
If the standard consumer product is a product mass-manufactured by
machine and sold in self-convenience stores and department stores, through
catalogues or on the internet, a luxury product on the other hand is hand-made and sold by one individual to another individual. You could scarcely find a
greater contrast!
The desire for luxury is based on hedonism and the aesthetic, not on
overindulgence leading to saturation and revulsion.
• The key word when it comes to luxury is dream, not envy.
• Luxury is about being, for oneself and for others, not about having.
Seen in these terms, luxury is therefore not the category above the top-ofthe-
range: luxury and upper range are not on the same trajectory. Their
criteria are not the same: upper range will be judged on its polyvalence, its
comfort, its boot space, its manoeuvrability, its comfort, all criteria defined by
clients... upper-range clients. In luxury, it is the creator who defines the
criteria; there is a reversal of the relationship to the client. The objective of
luxury, automobile or otherwise, is thought of and created not according to an
order (as was the case with the artisans of old: the silk weavers, the lacemakers,
etc) or a request (as is the case in marketing), but according to an inspiration, a
challenge to which the media, those modern trumpets of fame, are summoned.
(the CEO of
Porsche is generally credited with the statement: ‘When I see two Porsches
in the same street, I begin to worry’);
Luxury is superlative, not comparative. Comparisons must be
avoided at all costs