dimension, with a hint of extravagance—as with the famous Icelandic Ice Hotel, entirely carved in ice, or even tropical palaces of the luxury chain Aman Resorts, where staff feed fish reefs by hand. But we can add all the arts and crafts, and brands that rely on outstanding craftsmanship, such as the Hermès (Puiforcat, John Lobb, Saint-Louis) group.
The referential. The authors mean evocations of other contexts, historical in general, that serve as a benchmark for their clients; for example, the golden age of Roman Dolce Vita. The differential in this case is temporal: the concept of luxury is emerging out of a contrast between the present and the mythical period with which the brand wants to associate, in order to make us dream. This period will be suggested by an iconic object or a historical figure. The glamour of Ferragamo is built around international divas of the 1960s or 1970s (Audrey Hepburn, Sofia Loren, Anna Magnani), while Tod's seeks representatives among a certain Anglo-Saxon elegance: Steve McQueen, Sigourney Weaver. Other brands will put forward their association with an aristocrat, an artist, or a legendary athlete of the time. This so-called sponsorship from beyond the grave is a source of legitimacy more easily used by traditional historical brands. New entrants must use more recent or less-explicit references, often with lesser success.
The authority. Authority is understood as an ability to influence others based on a humanist cause. This resource is used by brands calling upon the values of solidarity, ecology, fair trade, and so on. So far, luxury has used these themes only anecdotally. Obviously, brands are careful to communicate all their social initiatives, but only a few luxury brands base their identity on these themes. There is, indeed, little correlation between luxury and ecology. The first cultivates rarity, exclusivity, and distinction, while the second reasons in terms of environment and mass phenomena. The value of selectivity places luxury at odds with any mass logic: if luxury has the means to pay its handicraft suppliers decently, it remains suspicious of environmental recklessness by its taste for rare materials.
New Luxury
The following is an extract from a Pierre Bergé New York Times interview in 2015.
First, I want to say this: The time of Chanel, Balenciaga, Dior and, of course, Yves (Saint Laurent), well, that time is over. Second, so too is the era of haute couture. Completely over, gone. This is why what we call luxe today is just ridiculous. To me, that whole industry now—all money and marketing—is all something like a lie. But people's perception of what luxury is has changed in such an extraordinary way. Their conception of what is fashion is so different now from the sort of fashion that Yves created—that I created with him. That no longer exists. A handbag that a woman takes with her all over the place—to a grocery store, through the airport—I cannot imagine how that can be considered luxury. That is not luxury.22
Coming from someone who has been one of the major actors of the luxury industry for 40 years, this is quite an unexpected but extremely relevant statement. Pierre Bergé, co-founder of the brand Yves Saint Laurent, was only reflecting what a lot of luxury consumers are feeling too: weariness and perplexity in front of the existential paradox of most of the self-called luxury brands that propose industrial products manufactured and distributed in great volume and marketed as luxury products in terms of communication and price.
Product and Experience Luxuries
Specific trends are showing that some parts of the market have started to escape from the most traditional acceptance of luxury toward a more accessible, more experiential, and maybe more moral attitude toward it. In fact, we have been observing for more than 20 years the emergence of a luxury of experience in parallel to what we could call the luxury of products. Besides the ownership of products, such as watches, clothes, jewelry, accessories, fragrances, and beauty products, has grown the desire and therefore the markets for adventurous or luxury travel (Mont Blanc and Everest have never seen so many visitors), space trips, haute cuisine, spas, extraordinary shows (opera, concerts, sports events), and so on. The phenomenon goes beyond the emergence of new industries proposing luxury experiences like the ones we just liste, but also the experiences built around the products including physical environment, planned consumer path (pre- and post-purchase), associations to other themes than the product itself, and so on.
The change is not a banality as it has a lot of management implications for the brands that want to be competitive in this field and, frankly, none of the traditional luxury brands can afford not to consider this new dimension. After all, retail distribution always has had an experiential dimension, fragrances too. The advent of the Internet renders pre- and after-sales services even more important. Moreover, all service brands were already involved in experiential management. It is not a major discontinuity of the consumption process because, as we saw earlier in Figure 1.4., the product purchase has to do with the personal satisfaction of ownership but also with the experience of being socially involved in association with the products (“Have they seen me with my new Rolex?”). It is a shift at the microeconomic level with product brands paying more attention to the surrounding context in terms of place and time, and the purchase process of the products, as well as a shift at the macroeconomic level, with new industries and services defining a new kind of luxury.
Most of the managerial issues raised by experiential luxury are related to creation in general. How do you create these unforgettable, exceptional, intense moments in a better way than your competitors? Designing ambiances, atmospheres, and contexts is more complex and broad than just designing a product and often requires different skills. Event management, where ambiance, atmospheres, and contexts need to be created, is becoming crucial in the luxury field.
The Vaporization of Luxury
Yves Michaud introduces an interesting metaphor in characterizing the change of focus from product to experience luxury as a vaporization of luxury.23
As experience takes precedence over product, the objects tend to dissolve themselves into a vaster and composite multisensory space. This ethereal condition that characterizes a gaseous state like vapor finds its natural place into the trend of semantization of consumption initially highlighted by Barthes when he introduces the notion of “universal semantization of usage”24 and by Baudrillard, who states that objects have become signs belonging themselves to larger systems of meaning where symbolization, virtualization, miniaturization, and transparence are becoming characteristics of the products we purchase.25
We find also a correspondence between the notion of product vaporization and the concept of aura introduced by Walter Benjamin, which he defines as being what makes an art piece authentic and unique, that is, “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”26 We may extrapolate that some consumption objects are so exceptional that they can generate emotional shocks, and that they can qualify as having a genuine aura (an engagement ring, a vintage collection car, a famous precious stone), a sort of halo, which transfigurates them, makes them distant, apparently unapproachable—although proximate because they are accessible through purchase. This could be a definition of luxury, where the power of an object reaches beyond its functional purpose and forces the customer into a different world, due to the apparent inaccessibility, exceptionality, intensity, and, sometimes, strangeness of the product.
Exclusive versus Exceptional Luxuries
Rather than being constant and predictable, as we highlighted at the beginning of the chapter, the evolution of the connotation of the word luxury and its related perception of the phenomenon continues these days. As shown in Figure 1.7, the perception of luxury and its associated values changes according to the cultural and historical contexts.
