be “creators,” such as designers, dressmakers, cooks, antique dealers, hairdressers, collectors, exhibit organizers, and so on, or “personalities,” noteworthy in themselves, who associate their names and images with these exceptional items (this is the case for example with the “inspirers” of haute couture or perfumes). All of these “actors” behind “fashion, culture, and taste” are mentioned very frequently and depicted in portraits in which they rub shoulders with artists in the classic sense of the term, such as painters or sculptors. Attention is thus drawn directly toward a relatively heteroclite set of objects treated as though they occupied the same plane (a “plane of immanence,” as Deleuze might say): these can be items of apparel, furniture, decorative objects, vintage items, or works of ancient or contemporary art.
The kind of profound mutation at issue here is embodied in a single building in Turin. A big Fiat factory opened in the Lingotto district there in 1922; it closed in 1982. Since then, the building has been converted into galleries featuring shops, hotels, restaurants, and a conference center. As the high point of what was one of the emblematic sites in the world of labor, the Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli was inaugurated in 2002, designed by the star Italian architect Renzo Piano, who already had many museums to his credit, including the Pompidou Center in Paris. In the white raised gallery of the Pinacoteca, viewers now crowd around to admire works from the collection of paintings of a former leader of Italy. How have we come from mass production of standard automobiles and the heated workers’ struggles associated with the site to the silent and respectful contemplation of works of art acquired by the CEO?
The rise of luxury
The luxury industry lies at the heart of this nebulous phenomenon. In France, organized around a very dynamic professional association (the Comité Colbert), the industry experienced particularly strong growth in the early 2000s, especially in exports, with increases ranging from 6 percent to 20 percent per year depending on the product.18 Worldwide exports of high-end consumer goods virtually doubled between 2000 and 2011; threequarters of these originated in Western Europe, especially in France and Italy (where clothing, leather goods, and shoes account for at least one-third of high-end exports). Jewelry and fine watches came especially from Switzerland, while luxury automobiles were sold under German brand names (they won 19 percent to 29 percent of market share during the 2000s before the drop in luxury auto sales after the 2008 financial crisis). France, the leader in this sector, held 11.2 percent of the world market in luxury goods (with an annual growth rate of 9.8 percent).19 These exports are oriented chiefly toward the developed countries (70 percent), which include the highest proportion of wealthy individuals, but the emergent countries (China in particular) are also important markets where consumption has greatly increased, from 21 percent in 2000 to 39 percent in 2011.20 Along with the Gulf states, the emergent countries are now the chief importers.21
These luxury products include, among others, great wines and spirits or brand-name clothing,22 perfumes, and cosmetics. Increasingly, some of these goods are produced in part offshore, in countries with cheap labor, but they are generally assembled and labeled in the country from which they purport to come;23 the gap between the country of manufacture and the country of labeling and display, generally kept secret so as to avoid devaluing the exceptional object and allowing it to be categorized as just another ordinary product, is marked at most by the distinction between “made in” and “made by” or “designed in.”24 These “made in X” goods can then be sold under a brand name whose marketing emphasizes a national identity; this gives them added value and also often plays on the supposedly artisanal, “old-style” character of their manufacture, which is intended to single them out and support their claim to exceptionality. But in a period during which outsourcing and its role in increased domestic unemployment have been subject to numerous critiques, the label “made in France” can also invoke “ethical commitment and social responsibility on the part of the luxury firms,”25 and these qualities too can boost the value added to the product.
The luxury industry also supports the contemporary art market, privileging connections between famous artists and brand-name items treated as “one of a kind” handmade objects (Hermès handbags, for instance, or Vuitton luggage). The history of the Kering group (which includes such brands as Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen) offers a good example of the way one firm has flourished since the 2000s by relinquishing the industrial products to which it had been devoted earlier in favor of embracing the luxury sector.26 Displacement effects of this sort have repercussions even in elite French graduate schools such as HEC (an international business school) or Sciences Po (a research university specializing in political science), many of whose graduates gravitate toward management or marketing and incorporate training in contemporary art into their programs. The director of one of these schools justifies its success by noting that “the students see very clearly that luxury brands are associated with contemporary art, that people such as Pinault or Arnault invest in artworks, that the major executives of the period are philanthropists. Now, those brands are their future employers.”27
In this high-end universe, “gastronomic luxury” is doing exceptionally well: according to the geographer Vincent Marcilhac, this domain “represents several hundred thousand jobs and several tens of billions of euros in profits. It constitutes one of France’s strong points on the level of commercial profits, and it plays an important role in France’s image or ‘brand’ on the international level.”28 From the last third of the nineteenth century to roughly the middle of the twentieth, statements by producers’ organizations or public authorities concerning food products were oriented mainly toward homogenizing and certifying them, while at the same time combating fraud through a series of measures addressing issues of hygiene and food safety (especially regarding milk and wine, two products about which doctors had particularly strong health and safety concerns).29 Over the last few decades, however, the search for improvement in product quality has taken a new tack, placing more and more emphasis on “authenticity.”30 As part of this change, the meaning of the term “quality” has shifted: initially applied to products deemed stable, homogeneous, and safe – and whose improvement depended on the application of norms that implied standardization or even industrialization, thus implying lower prices as well – the term has come to designate foods deemed exceptional, unquestionably non-standard, and significantly more expensive.
This tendency is particularly evident in the case of wine, which has been studied in detail by Marie-France Garcia-Parpet. The southern and southwestern regions of France in particular have seen a shift away from massive production, in “wine factories,” of inexpensive red table wine destined for domestic consumption by a broad public; instead, production began to be focused on “original” products with “character,” associated with a high level of oenological culture and destined for export. This transformation has proceeded in parallel with the highlighting of terroirs – zones whose soil is defined not only by specific mineral properties and climatic conditions but also by reactivated or invented traditions (such as the “Confrérie de Chinon”), by the creation of labels, and by the use of historical references to famous people who purportedly lived in proximity to certain vineyards (such as Rabelais for the wines of the Loire Valley), and also by administrative measures intended to limit and regulate production.31 One result of these maneuvers has clearly been to create effects of scarcity that can be invoked to justify price increases.
More generally, the “production of local cultural singularities” has made it possible to constitute “monopoly revenues”;32 the process of localization around terroirs, which we have seen in relation to wines, has been imitated for a large number of other products of more or less local origins, such as truffles, certain mushrooms (cèpes), beef (from Aubrac), or fowl (capons or pullets from Bresse), but also for products that are made from imported raw materials (such as chocolate) but that supposedly benefit from a form of processing associated with a local tradition. The deep roots of tradition are called upon in particular in response to economic or moral critiques, as in the case
