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:
1 Brands have realized that this (sometimes only apparent) positioning adds to their competitiveness.
2 On the other hand, a majority of consumers have developed a positive attitude toward the products, services, or experiences connoted by this feature.
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 first is that to each his own luxury: the concept has ceased to mark a boundary between opulence and economic discomfort—it is now a sign that needs additional specific attributes to perform its function of distinction in a human group. This ability of luxury to indefinitely segment the markets shows us how it has been able to blend, by transforming itself, in our modern civilization of mass consumption.
The second point is that this modern luxury appears to carry rather positive connotations. Obviously, it also has its excesses, its indecency; however, the fact that we can now speak of luxury in positive terms already certifies a remarkable semantic evolution. In order to measure this evolution, we must return to the etymology.
Etymology and Transformations
The word luxury comes from the Latin luxus, which means “grow askew, excess.” Its root is an old Indo-European word that meant “twist.” In the same family, we find “luxuriant” (yielding abundantly) and “luxation” (dislocation). In short, the term originally refers to something of the order of aberration: it is almost devoid of any positive connotation.
We have used the dictionary Le trésor de la langue française informatisé, which offers a brief overview of two centuries of use.
1607: “way of life characterized by large expenditures to make shows of elegance and refinement”
1661: “character of which is expensive, refined,” luxury clothing
1797: “expensive and superfluous object, pleasure”
1801: “excessive quantity,” a luxury of vegetation
1802: “which is superfluous, unnecessary”
Little by little, the notion of guilty excess disappears, while the ideas of distinction and refinement gain in strength. In the Classical Age, luxury is already full of ambiguities: speaking of women's toilette, La Fontaine relates the “instruments of luxury” to everything “which contributes not only to cleanness, but also to delicateness.” This does not prevent him from condemning, moralistically, “these women who have found the secret to become old at twenty years, and seem young at sixty.”3 Around the same time, the grammarian Pierre Nicole wishes that “great people,” by their example, deter us from “luxury, blasphemy, debauchery, gambling, libertinage.”4 In sum, the luxury already connotes sophistication, but it remains morally suspect.
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the connotation of superfluous—which is not motivated by economic and utilitarian logic—begins consolidating. It becomes more nuanced with the advent of mass consumption and the civilization of leisure. The superfluous is not debauchery; it is beyond the commercial sphere, but it can also mark the promotion of a certain quality of life.
As for the price dimension, it appears very early and remains virtually unchanged over the years: luxury is something that is to be paid for.
From the same French dictionary, we see that current usages of the word “luxury” show evolutionary meanings: the original meanings are enriched by others, introducing the word into the sphere of day-to-day experience (“little luxuries”) while affirming the notion of a pleasure without complex (“innocent luxury”):
1 Social
