Introduction

Excerpt

A conventional understanding of luxury is based on its opposition to necessity: indulgence and excess versus survival and self-control. This is the framework we have inherited from the European Enlightenment, particularly from the writings of Rousseau and other civic republicans: luxury, which is associated with extravagance and corruption, risks undermining equality and virtue. But as Arthur Asa Berger has observed, the reality in society today is rather a continuum than an opposition. Luxury consumption is being democratized. For an ever larger segment of the population, consumption is a “sign” which one uses to “brand” the self. Luxury has become inseparable from how ordinary people construe their identity in everyday life.¹ …