2020FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 54–68

SPECIAL SECTION
GLOBALIZATION OF LUXURY

“A mad exuberance”
The globalization of luxury
Marc A B É L È S , École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

The issue of the circulation of luxury commodities and of the evolution through which it is going becomes fully meaningful when
addressed within the context of an anthropology of globalization that analyzes the nature and impact of flows on contemporary
societies. In this article, I explore the ways in which globalization not only affects the luxury economy but also reshapes its cultural
and political dimensions. The first part of this essay examines the definition of luxury and its close link with such notions as scar-
city, superfluity, and expenditure, and reviews the theoretical debate on luxury and the development of capitalism. The second part
is focused on the global expansion of the luxury market, especially its opening to Chinese consumers. A consequence of this ap-
propriation of luxury goods on a large scale is the permanent threat of banalization in a domain in which scarcity and exception-
ality are so essential. In this context, the close connection between luxury firms and contemporary art can be interpreted as an
antidote against this process of banalization.
Keywords: China, Italy, luxury, globalization, value, contemporary art

Luxury is a topic that has mobilized relatively little re-
search in the social sciences. Of course, in the 1960s, in
the wake of discussions of consumerist society, reflec-
tions on luxury appeared, heir to Thorstein Veblen’s
work ([1899] 1994) on conspicuous consumption. But
following this, with the introduction of Pierre Bour-
dieu’s ([1979] 1987) concept of distinction, the prevail-
ing orientation, with its central theme of the modalities
of domination, has dealt primarily with elements be-
longing to popular culture. There is little room for the-
matizing luxury in a sociological approach focused on
the middle and lower classes. If poverty seems like a “le-
gitimate” object for the social sciences, studying some-
thing having to do with wealth seems more problematic.
When we present a program on the topic of luxury, we
can see the barely disguised reticence of our colleagues.
There is, without a doubt, an implicit axiology that con-
ditions the choice of certain subjects as more pertinent
than others. Isn’t working on luxury somehow showing
complicity with the privileged? Social scientists never
explicitly articulate this axiology, but it implicitly deter-
mines the ways in which certain social phenomena are
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 10, number 1. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/708668
© 2020 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2020/1001-0008$10.00
relegated to marginal status without regard to their sig-
nificance or their impact. An overview of studies and re-
search on luxury over the last half century reveals that
they have been pursued above all in two academic do-
mains: history (Adshead 1997; Burke 1993; Chaudhuri
1990; Fromer 2008; Pomeranz 2000) and aesthetics
(Assouly 2008; Lipovetsky and Roux 2003; Michaud
2013). There is also an entire literature on the theme
in the field of marketing, dealing with products, clien-
tele, and communication strategies. Moreover, we can-
not ignore the space allotted to luxury by the media—
be it in newspapers, magazines, and specialized journals
or on television and the internet. This is not surprising
in countries like France, which presents an image that
is increasingly associated with two sectors: culture and
heritage, on the one hand, and luxury, on the other. In-
ternational luxury sales grew 4 percent in the first three
months of 2017 as compared with the same period the
prior year, corresponding to the demand for these prod-
ucts in emerging-market countries (Paton 2017). China,
for instance, has become the second-largest market in
the world for luxury products, with almost a third of

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55
the share of the global market. The country is particu-
larly eager for European products in the luxury sector,
which is why, from an economic point of view, this type
of commerce bears strategic interest. Today, luxury com-
merce generates impressive profits, having witnessed
exponential growth in the last twenty years. Its driving
dynamic is inseparable from the rising strength of the
so-called developing countries and reflects the transfor-
mation of the rapport between the West and countries
like Russia and China, which began to embrace capital-
ism in the 1980s. This is due to the fact that at the end of
the twentieth century, luxury, along with other sectors,
went through a double process of concentration and
financialization. The large firms saw remarkable results:
sales by Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton SE (LVMH),
which includes seventy brands such as Louis Vuitton,
Dior, and Givenchy, reached more than 53.7 billion eu-
ros in 2019. In the same year, sales by the Kering group
(formerly PPR), which includes brands like Gucci, Yves
Saint Laurent, Boucheron, Balenciaga, Stella McCart-
ney, reached 15.8 billion euros in 2019. Meanwhile,
the Swiss conglomerate Richemont, which now encom-
passes numerous brands, including Van Cleef & Arpels,
Piaget, Montblanc, and Chloé, saw 13.9 billion euros in
sales.
It might seem surprising that I should focus my re-
flection on a domain that appears frivolous in a certain
sense and concerns something so inessential. But I can-
not help thinking of the way Roland Barthes responded
to a question about his book The fashion system ([1967]
1990) concerning his choice of objects that are “insig-
nificant, futile, or modest”: “The fashion system can also
be thought of as a poetic project, one that consists pre-
cisely in building an intellectual object out of nothing. . . .
one can say (this would have been the ideal, had the book
worked): in the beginning, there was nothing; fashion
clothing does not exist, or it is something extremely futile
and unimportant; and in the end, there is this new object
that exists, and the analysis is what brought it into exis-
tence. It is in this sense that we can speak of a truly poetic
project, that is, one that creates an object” (Barthes 1994:
472–73).
I would add that through luxury, we have direct ac-
cess to the transformations linked to the triumph of
capitalism, a consequence of which has been the emer-
gence of a new elite of nouveaux riches eager to obtain
new forms of leisure and new pleasures and to exhibit
their success. By taking the objects of consumption as a
starting point, we can grasp these transformations. A
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THE GLOBALIZATION OF LUXURY
further objective is to account for the reconfiguration
of cultural, economic, and political relations connected
to the circulation of merchandise between East and West
in a globalized world. Cultural confrontations, reinven-
tions of identity, new modes of consumption, redefini-
tions of the relations between luxury products and art—
these are some of the questions we encounter through
the topic of luxury.
What is luxury?
When attempting to define luxury, we are confronted
with the ambivalence of the Latin word luxus, which
has two meanings: on the one hand, it has to do with
pomp, splendor, sumptuousness, plenty; on the other
hand, it refers to debauchery, intemperance, softness, re-
lated to the verb luxare: to dislocate, undo, disconnect.
We must keep in mind this genealogy, which harbors
the idea of deviance, a gap that is perpetuated in the
noun luxure, which means “lust” in French. At the start-
ing point of luxury, there is always luxure, which must
never be forgotten.
But let us return to our object. In order to address
it, we have to specify what we mean by luxury. When
we think of “luxury,” we think of precious goods, ones
that are accessible only to a privileged minority and
do not correspond to any necessity. This is expressed
in the familiar idea that luxury is somehow “price-
less”—which is paradoxical, since luxury products are
particularly pricey. When we say that something is
priceless, we are evoking the idea that luxury is pro-
jected into a realm beyond value. Luxury transcends
the universe of necessity: it implies that we are projecting
ourselves into the domain of the incommensurable.
This is why only extreme wealth allows access to luxury
in its purest form. On the opposite end, luxury can be
considered to belong to everyone insofar as it allows
anyone to elevate him- or herself above the realm of
pure necessity. As Sombart ([1913] 1967: 59) remarked,
“Luxury is any expenditure in excess of the necessary.”
What we are dealing with here is a process of sub-
jectivation that does not require taking into account
the exchange value of the goods in question, nor does
it require that we focus on objects or merchandise. Lux-
ury so conceived correlates to a horizon of inaccessibil-
ity, something beyond everyday experience: people say
“luxury for me is sitting in the sun and having a coffee,”
“enjoying a quiet spot,” and the like. Sociologists and
 Marc ABÉLÈS
historians have shown yet another paradox of luxury:
products considered to be exceptional and inaccessible
rarely remain the exclusive reserve of a minority. We
can see this in the past with an example such as tea,
which was first consumed only by the British aristocracy,
later becoming the drink of the working classes. The
same has happened today with brands: a Louis Vuitton
bag, for instance, has become accessible to the middle
class. Luxury is threatened by trivialization—leading to
a loss of class status—so it must constantly be rein-
vented. I insist on the aspect of luxury being an “inven-
tion,” since the luxury industry is, above all, a space of
creativity. The permanent tension between elitism and
banalization is the motor of the constant reinvention
that is so characteristic of luxury.
Luxury and need
Every object is both a thing and a sign. The importance
of the signifying nature of objects is linked to the idea
that the opposition between the necessary and the super-
fluous, the gratuitous and the indispensable, is an arti-
ficial one (Baudrillard 1996). Against theories that ground
consumption in a naturalistic idea of need and look for
some anthropological minimum, in reality, human so-
ciety transcends the universe of needs. As Marshall
Sahlins (1974) has shown, even groups with limited re-
sources do not limit themselves to activities that merely
satisfy their immediate needs; rather, they devote signif-
icant time to ritual and playful activities. Humans are
signifying animals whose relation to objects is rarely re-
stricted to brute consumption. What Sahlins (1976) calls
culture is the process that contributes to our projecting
ourselves beyond our immediate needs.
Luxury projects us from the universe of needs into the
universe of signs: they are “goods whose principal use is
rhetorical and social, goods that are simply incarnated
signs” (Appadurai 1986: 38). They require a “semiotic vir-
tuosity,” that is, the ability to emit complex social mes-
sages, a knowledge of certain codes for their appropriate
consumption: hence the value of fashion, which plays
with these codes while stabilizing them at the same time.
Luxury illustrates this human ability to emancipate one-
self from the narrow sphere of necessity. This is why lux-
ury is a universal phenomenon and why we find evi-
dence of it as early as the Neolithic period.
Luxury, scarcity, superfluity
The societies we study may differ, but we find common
characteristics among them beyond geographic and his-
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56
torical differences. In particular, luxury implies scarcity.
This scarcity can reflect an objective situation or it can
be artificially produced. What is essential is that not
everyone has access to luxury goods. In contemporary
popular culture, characterized by a strong tendency to-
ward homogenization, an essential criterion, as we shall
see, is authenticity. Many scarves may copy the Hermès
scarf, but luxury consists in having an authentic one. A
Burgundy wine from La Romanée Conti is particularly
sought after because the annual production is very lim-
ited (since the area of cultivated land is small). It is
not enough to merely have sufficient money to pay for
something: one has to be among the “chosen” consum-
ers, and this is where sociological and cultural criteria
of distinction enter.
The organization of scarcity contributes to the ex-
pensiveness of luxury goods as well as to their over-
valuation. Luxury is indissociable from the market, but
it escapes the normal mechanisms of the production
of value. A certain number of attributes—authenticity,
tradition, the limited number of units in circulation—
are associated with this type of product. These attributes
lead to the overvaluation of luxury. In 2016, the Jaguar
car company decided to produce a car that was identical
to its 1957 Jaguar XKSS model and priced at over a mil-
lion pounds sterling. We already know that the number
of potential buyers was far greater than the number of
cars produced; the vehicles involved in this reconstruc-
tion, fifty-nine years after the original model, at Jaguar
were meant only for a highly select group of collectors.
Contrary to what we might think, workers in the lux-
ury sector are the first to believe that the value of the
product does not depend on the exceptional quality of
their work. In her study about the workers who make
Vuitton bags, Monique Jeudy-Ballini notes:
Fundamentally, the brand image is answerable to the
quality of the work rather than the inverse. Among the
workers, this representation of things seems to partici-
pate in a vision that transcends individual opinions.
To appropriate this vision is to place oneself in a logic
of the image and to justify, for example, the minute-
ness of one’s work by explaining that “you have to put
yourself in the customer’s place”—instead of putting
oneself in one’s own place, which is that of the worker.
(Jeudy-Ballini 2000: para. 54)
This is also why luxury produces its counterpoint as a
permanent by-product, what is usually called semilux-
ury, goods that, without attaining the status of luxury,
57
are nevertheless of great value. In the same way, coun-
terfeit goods contribute to the overvaluing of luxury
goods, a phenomenon observed even in antiquity. Con-
cerning first-century Rome, Eva Dubois-Pelerin speaks
of “a sort of generalization of the appearance of lux-
ury,” a “popularization” of luxury by means of industries
that imitated luxurious materials and objects (2008: 242):
molten glass imitates precious stones, ceramic imitates
glass or bronze, and so on. By means of cheap substitutes
of expensive objects, it becomes possible to imitate the
wealthier social classes. Scarcity is thus, in a certain
sense, the backdrop of luxury.
The other essential characteristic of luxury is super-
fluity. This has provoked controversies since ancient
times among those who condemn luxury as immoral
and unhealthy, a theme that has fed critical discourse
for centuries. For economists and philosophers of the
eighteenth century, the question of luxury is inseparable
from a reflection on morals. Not only does luxury serve
no purpose, it reflects a form of disorder that is damag-
ing to society. Maurice Block sums up this point: “Lux-
ury is a moral rather than an economic matter; indeed,
the economists will tend to be in agreement on this
topic, whereas the moralists will be in disagreement”
(1890: 524).
In his Fable of the bees, Bernard Mandeville praises
prodigality in opposition to those who advocate frugal-
ity instead of luxury and the forms of depravity it incites:
Frugality is like honesty, a mean starving virtue, that
is only fit for small societies of good peaceable men,
who are contented to be poor so they may be easy; but
in a large stirring nation you may have soon enough
of it. . . . Prodigality has a thousand inventions to keep
people from sitting still, that frugality would never
think of. (Mandeville [1714] 1989: 105–6)
Prodigality and luxury are extraordinary stimulants
of industry and a vector of civilization. David Hume,
in his essay entitled “Of refinement in the arts” (first
published as “On luxury” in 1752), shows that lux-
ury creates close associations among industry, knowl-
edge, and humanity, which “render the government as
great and flourishing as they make individuals happy
and prosperous” ([1777] 1994: 272). Anthony Brewer
(1998) shows how Adam Smith, despite his antipathy
toward luxury, was influenced by Hume’s argument that
luxury is a stimulant for economic development. Among
French philosophers, the controversy between Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire reveals two radically op-
posed viewpoints. Rousseau thought that luxury repre-
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THE GLOBALIZATION OF LUXURY
sented decadence and the corruption of taste: “Our
souls have been corrupted in proportion to the advance-
ment of our Sciences and Arts to perfection” (Rousseau
[1750] 1992: 7). It is synonymous with the enervation
of society and only reinforces inequalities. Conversely,
for Voltaire, luxury is an essential component of civili-
zation, since it enriches culture, encourages creation,
and stimulates industry. Voltaire insists on the fact that
luxury often links different cultures and traditions. He
refers implicitly to the penetration of the French mar-
ket by Chinese products (silk, porcelain, etc.) in the
eighteenth century. In his poem “Le mondain,” Vol-
taire writes of “the superfluous, that necessary thing”
([1736] 1961). At the core of this controversy over lux-
ury is the notion of superfluity. Jean-Baptiste Say notes
that “immoral consumption is far more common where
great opulence meets great poverty” (1841: 451–52) and
that the latter “always follows upon luxury.” He de-
fends commodity luxury, attacks conspicuous luxury,
and proposes to levy heavy taxes on these kinds of ex-
penditures (Say 1828–29: 428).
Luxury and the development of capitalism
It is difficult to avoid a normative attitude when ap-
proaching the topic of luxury. In my opinion, the very
different points of view of Max Weber and Werner
Sombart on the issue can be attributed to real axiologi-
cal choices. For Weber, it is inconceivable that luxury
played even the slightest positive role in the history of
Western economies. For Sombart ([1913] 1967), the
pursuit of luxury was of cardinal importance for the de-
velopment of capitalism. Sombart concentrates on the
eighteenth century, since it was during this period that
luxury underwent great expansion and was increasingly
sought out by the ruling classes. According to him, the
pursuit of luxury was an essential factor in putting the
capitalist system and the division of labor into place,
which led to the appearance of new markets and capital-
ist accumulation. Sombart formulates the following hy-
pothesis: the development of courtly society and the
feminization of taste, which reached their peak in the
eighteenth century, stimulated a remarkable growth in
the consumption of luxury objects. The other reason
for this extraordinary growth, he argues, was due to
the “emergence of the homo novus” ([1913] 1967: 81),
members of the bourgeoisie who, in a hierarchical soci-
ety, had to assert themselves in opposition to aristocrats
by exhibiting a high degree of luxury. This is the reason
why demand for luxuries grew so much and resulted,
 Marc ABÉLÈS
according to Sombart, in the creation of new markets
that boosted the economy: since the desire for luxuries
was growing enormously, it gave these industries an un-
precedented dynamic—for example, through the emer-
gence of independent workshops possessing their own
capital.
The most intriguing aspect of Sombart’s analysis is
the connection he makes between luxury and sexuality.
An essential element for him was found in the secular-
ization of love and the hedonistic conception of rela-
tions between the genders, which emerged at the end
of the Middle Ages, expressed through the exaltation
of the female body. Seduction and the quest for plea-
sure were at the heart of this society. Illicit love affairs
allowed for every indulgence; later on, bourgeois so-
ciety would make space for the “mistress.” Luxuriant
spending, jewelry, fabrics, perfumes—nothing was too
beautiful to give to the women whom rich men kept
and supported. Luxury was the “rich man’s executioner,”
according to Louis-Sébastien Mercier in his Tableau de
Paris ([1783] 1994). All of this was inseparable from
the intensification of luxury, a process that Sombart
sums up in one phrase: “Luxury, then, itself a legitimate
child of illicit love—as we have seen—gave birth to cap-
italism” ([1913] 1967: 171).
Sombart’s thesis, which associates the development
of capitalism and the growth of luxury consumption,
is opposed to Weber’s interpretation. For Weber ([1905]
1958), capitalism is intimately linked to the Protestant
ethic and to Calvinism. Leisure, the pursuit of luxury
or pleasure, is incompatible with this ethic. Money made
must be reinvested in an enterprise, involving the for-
mation of capital by ascetic obligation. The essential
elements are calculation and rationality; in this world
view, the idea of the superfluous makes no sense. For
Weber, luxury cannot be an engine of economic devel-
opment. Today, we can see that he was wrong on this
point and that Sombart’s hypothesis accounts better
for the expansion of capitalism and the development of
modern forms of consumption.
Luxury and conspicuous consumption
Luxury is often associated with a form of consumption
that Veblen ([1899] 1994) calls conspicuous consump-
tion. People acquire goods for reasons other than their
usefulness. Notably, Veblen refers to the potlatch prac-
tices of the Kwakiutl as a form of conspicuous con-
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58
sumption, since they acquire their goods for reasons of
competition—the search for status. Conspicuous con-
sumption implies that we consume goods that an ob-
server might perceive as luxury goods. However, for
Veblen, this consumption has a precise goal: the main-
tenance of social status. What motivates luxury is not
the pursuit of scarcity in itself; rather, what is at stake
is distinction; its function is social. In traditional socie-
ties, ornaments and personal accessories are inseparable
from the reassertion of hierarchies. In modern societies,
this falls within the domain of what Erving Goffman
(1959) calls “the presentation of self.”
Luxury, in other words, is inseparable from power
and the assertion of class domination. It is nothing more
than the exhibition by the elite of their superior status.
Luxury is synonymous with a “strategy of distinction,”
to use Bourdieu’s ([1979] 1987) expression. No incom-
patibility exists between the ideas of superfluity and
conspicuousness. If there is a strategy to conspicuous
consumption, it is all the more effective when it displays
the pure gratuitousness of expense.
Luxury, expense, excess
Many studies on luxury insist on the gratuitous charac-
ter of expense, but the danger lies in preferring a reduc-
tionist interpretation by paying exclusive attention to
social strategies. This interpretation reclaims the theme
of superfluity and deals with it from a functionalist per-
spective. But what escapes this ultimately utilitarian vi-
sion of luxury is excess, immoderation, pure expense,
what Georges Bataille (1976) calls “consumation,” un-
derlining the negativity inherent in this type of con-
sumption. In fact, Bataille associates luxury and conspic-
uousness with sumptuous expense. He refers to Marcel
Mauss’s The gift ([1925] 2016), which was itself influ-
enced by Bronisław Malinowski’s ([1935] 2014) ethno-
graphic research on the kula of the Trobriand Islanders,
which centered on the circulation of precious goods
(necklaces and bracelets). Mauss compared kula goods
to the jewels of the great European families, his goal
being to reconstitute the meaning of prestige objects and
to highlight the symbolic and political stakes at play
in their circulation. But it was Mauss’s analyses of the
Northwest Coast potlatch, a well-known reference for
anthropologists, concerning sumptuary expense, rivalry
in magnificence and generous spending, and the con-
sumation of wealth that left the greatest impression
59
on Bataille. He uses it to construct his own theory of
economy, emphasizing that the entire universe is deter-
mined by expense: “I insist on the fact that there is gen-
erally no growth but only a luxurious squandering of
energy in every form” (Bataille, quoted in Botting and
Wilson 1997: 192). For him, luxuriance and exuberance
are the points of departure. This is the opposite of utili-
tarian logic, since expense is always fundamentally un-
productive. It is this point of view, derived from the “gen-
eral economy,” that Bataille opposes to the productivist
and rationalist conceptions dominant in capitalist soci-
ety, which he attributes to the “restricted economy.”
The theses he develops in The accursed share are
grounded in the primacy of expense linked to the very
nature of the cosmos: “The history of life on earth is
mainly the effect of a mad exuberance; the dominant
event is the development of luxury, the production of
increasingly burdensome forms of life” (Bataille, quoted
in Botting and Wilson 1997: 192). Luxury is the quintes-
sence of the consumating impulse. It is a universal
phenomenon found in different forms in diverse civili-
zations, but “the potlatch is the specific manifestation,
the meaningful form.”
The chasm that separates this theory from the soci-
ology of distinction is obvious. If we follow Bataille, it
is clear that luxury is not reducible to its usefulness as
an emblem of domination. On the contrary, luxury is
attached completely to the arbitrary nature of expense,
finding its full expression in unproductive expense, in
dilapidation. “The meaning of this profound freedom
is given in destruction, whose essence is to consume
without profit that which could have remained in the
chain of useful works” (Bataille 1976: 63).
Against the superficial reading that reduced his anal-
ysis of the potlatch to the pure function of conspicuous
distinction, Bataille seeks the essence of luxury in what
he calls “mad exuberance,” “the luxurious dilapidation
of energy.” Potlatch puts this dilapidation on display.
It implies a “full contempt for wealth.” The context of
this analysis is what he calls the general economy, in
opposition to the restricted economy that is circum-
scribed by the total power of the market and the capital-
ist imperative to accumulate. This is why Bataille mocks
bourgeois luxury: “The comic element in expenditure is
associated with the bourgeoisie” (1976: 225). Bourgeois
luxury is counterfeiting elevated to the level of norma-
tivity; it mimics the practices of luxury but without aban-
doning utilitarianism; here, consummation never wins
out over consumption. For Bataille, true luxury leads to
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THE GLOBALIZATION OF LUXURY
the “complete contempt for riches” (Botting and Wilson
1997: 208). The true figure of its embodiment is not the
person who works but, rather, the one “who refuses
work and makes an infinitely ruined splendor of his
life” (1997: 208). Ultimately, authentic luxury is avail-
able to those who have broken with the logic of capital-
ism. What interests us here is Bataille’s idea that luxury
carries within itself the potential for transgression.
Whereas the majority of philosophical and sociological
approaches are part of a consumerist and hedonist view
of luxury, Bataille, by contrast, emphasizes its “consum-
matory” dimension, the excessive and arbitrary nature
of expense.
For authors like Gilles Lipovetsky and Elyette Roux
(2003) and Yves Michaud (2013), consumer society is
not merely an instrument of manipulation and capital-
ist control: it is the basis of the individualization of re-
lations to the world, which affects the family, politics,
religion, culture, and leisure. In their view, we have en-
tered the age of the individualization of luxury, which
represents in many ways a break with the logic of social
distinction theorized by Veblen and adopted by Bour-
dieu, for whom the consumption of luxury expresses
hierarchical distance and social rank. The age of hyper-
individualism sees the affirmation of a “luxury for the
self,” less oriented toward the search for the other’s
admiration than toward the search for the sensory, to-
ward exceptional aesthetic and emotional pleasures.
Luxury is no longer an object of social standing or a rich
material. It is also something that flatters the body and
creates enjoyment: a beautiful voyage, a great restaurant,
an exceptional moment, a work of art. Luxury is now
more in the service of a personal image than of a class
image. One looks for aesthetic emotions, one displays
wealth, one seeks to feel moments of enjoyment. This
is an egotistical conception of luxury in which the indi-
vidual is turned toward him- or herself. What is now
being sought is a lifestyle. Lipovetsky and Roux analyze
luxury as a form of experience that valorizes and distin-
guishes the individual in his or her singularity rather
than as a member of a collective. Luxury is synonymous
with the unexpected, the mythical, the experience of
the highest quality.
Luxury and emancipation
Is luxury an elaborate form of alienation? Does luxury
emancipate? How should we think about hedonism?
For Lipovetsky and Roux (2003) and Michaud (2013),
 Marc ABÉLÈS
luxury is the culminating point of the individual as con-
sumer. First, they do not raise the question of the mode
of production of luxury and its flourishing in the context
of the global capitalist model. Second, they do not in-
vestigate the issue of those deprived of luxury. Luxury
seems to be a synonym for some sort of fulfillment.
Mass luxury and brands are the alpha and the omega
of an experience in sync with hypermodernity.
In opposition to these ideas, I would like to propose
another view of luxury that I think fits well with Ba-
taille’s approach and breaks with the bourgeois notion
of luxury that he never stopped mocking. It is this
view that is found, unexpectedly, in the Manifeste pub-
lished in April 1871 by the Fédération des artistes dur-
ing the Paris Commune. There it is written, “We will
work cooperatively toward our regeneration, the birth
of communal luxury, future splendors and the Univer-
sal Republic” (Ross 2015: 58). Eugène Pottier, the main
inspiration of this text, aimed to counter the images of
the abject poverty of Parisian life under the Commune
spread by Versailles in its propaganda against the par-
tageux, the “sharers” of the Commune. “Communal
luxury” responded to the idea of sharing poverty, where
everyone would have their share of the best (Ross 2015:
64–65). It was a matter of transforming the aesthetic
orientation of the entire community. The Communards
called for “public art” at a municipal level: “The Com-
mittee invites any citizen to communicate any propo-
sition, project, thesis or opinion whose aim is artistic
progress, the moral or intellectual emancipation of art-
ists, or the material amelioration of their condition”
(2015: 70). Gustave Courbet, who (like Jules Dalou,
Alexandre Falguière, and Eugène Pottier) participated
in writing the Manifeste, was a painter of the people
(Un enterrement à Ornans) as well as of transgression
(L’Origine du monde, Le Sommeil ). What was at stake
was not the idea of a little bit of beauty as an ornament
but the idea of beauty as emancipation. Through lux-
ury, it was possible to exit the universe of necessity
and enter a universe of gratuity by directly accessing
an experience that was previously reserved only for the
rich.
If luxury is something that is constituted at the limits
of the market economy, beyond exchange value, it
seems logical that the movement for the abolition of
market society should seek to appropriate it. Henri
Baudrillart, one of the best analysts of luxury in the
nineteenth century, underscored the crucial role of lux-
ury in utopian visions of his era:
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60
In the same way, the place to look for this concern with
luxury and with refined pleasures is in the socialist uto-
pias of our time. I only mean the most honest and the
most serious of them, the least stained with violence.
Listen, for example, to the famous utopian Charles Fou-
rier, whose system makes enormous space for luxury
and sensuality. This tendency is even more visible in
Saint-Simon’s utopia, which is so friendly to pleasure,
celebrations, and feasting, in conformity with its project
of rehabilitating the flesh. (Baudrillart 1880: 665)
If Baudrillart devoted his 1866 course at the Collège de
France on economic history to the issue of luxury, it
was because the luxury industry was going through tre-
mendous growth and because, at a time of exacerbated
contradictions between workers and capitalists, the fas-
cination with wealth and the spectacle of opulence had
convinced him of the necessity to reflect on the rela-
tionship between economics and morals. Taking as his
point of departure the idea that luxury is a “primitive in-
stinct” that precedes society, Baudrillart described the
successive forms of expression it took throughout the
ages and the ways that civilizations reconciled luxury
and social life. He insisted on the need to distinguish
between good and bad luxury, neutralizing the latter
as much as possible: good luxury contributes to progress
and civilization, while bad luxury is perverse and dan-
gerous insofar as it merely exacerbates tensions between
the rich and the poor.
Today, luxury is going through a development sim-
ilar to the one it underwent during the Second Empire.
This is undoubtedly the reason why questions concern-
ing the values that luxury brings are arising again in ex-
tremely diverse contexts. Luxury is sometimes treated
as a kind of limit-experience of the forms of individu-
alism borne by our “post-” or “hypermodern” societies.
In emerging-market countries, the obsession with lux-
ury is becoming a major political problem that seems
to reflect the moral deterioration of the elite. The anti-
corruption campaign underway in China cannot be read
simply as a struggle among factions: it testifies to in-
creasing awareness on the part of those in power of the
potentially subversive nature of luxury. But at this point,
nothing can stop the dynamics of this industry. As
opposed to what happened in the nineteenth century,
exports of Western luxury goods have increased, but
there is no guarantee that the West will maintain its he-
gemony in this domain for long.
If the issue of moralizing luxury comes back over and
over again, this is because luxury carries in its very
61
excess a subversive charge that must be defused. It must
be domesticated, as it were, an operation to which the
current age lends itself well. Luxury is increasingly ab-
sorbed by market mechanisms. The opposite of dilap-
idation, luxury becomes a veritable investment. Con-
sider, for example, all of the finery and accessories of
entertainment stars, which serve to promote brand im-
ages and increase sales. Here, luxury no longer has to do
with gratuitousness; it has become, rather, an essential
stimulant to the market. Hedonistic individualism of-
fers a revealing narrative of this movement, in perma-
nent denial of the process of commodification with
which subjects are associated. In reality, the production
of a subject of luxury is synonymous with its appropri-
ation by the reign of merchandise. We enter a vicious
cycle in which the expansion of the luxury market is
being counteracted not by moralism but by a fear of
banalization and loss of class status. In this context,
the idea that luxury can be reappropriated to the ends
of emancipation is disqualified, even though it does in-
deed constitute an alternative process of subjectivation.
Luxury, China, globalization
Luxury, finally, has always been associated with alterity.
Sahlins shows the significance that the appropriation of
foreign objects, to which deadly powers are attributed,
can take in the process of the accumulation of wealth
(2013: 174). It is not an accident that luxury has always
been characterized by the quest for precious objects
from other parts of the world. The idea of the faraway
inspires reverie, and since antiquity the circulation of
luxury objects between East and West has been of fun-
damental economic and cultural importance. For a long
time, the routes of luxury went from China to the West.
Even throughout the twentieth century, the demand for
Chinese luxury products by Europe’s wealthy classes
was highly developed, but Chinese elites showed abso-
lutely no interest in Western forms of luxury.
In 1793, the ambassador of King George III pre-
sented a collection of gifts representing all the refine-
ments and sophistication that British industry was
capable of producing. The idea was to convince the
Emperor to open the Chinese market to England.
The disappointment was great when the Emperor
Ch’ien Lung replied to George III by messenger that
the gifts did not interest him. “The virtue and power
of the Celestial Dynasty has penetrated afar to the myr-
iad kingdoms, which have come to render homage, and
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THE GLOBALIZATION OF LUXURY
so all kinds of precious things have been collected
here. . . . Nonetheless we have never valued ingenious
articles, nor do we have the slightest need for your
country’s manufactures” (Sahlins 2000: 422). The mes-
sage Lord Macartney received clearly stated that the
Emperor, by reason of his sacramental functions and
his wisdom, was the only mediator between humanity
and the heavenly source of earthly well-being. All he
could accept was homage and tribute from barbarian
peoples.
In his commentary, Sahlins uncovers the fundamen-
tal misunderstanding at work. The British approach was
above all commercial. The gifts were meant as com-
mercial samples that were intended to illustrate the cre-
ativity of the industrial sector and thus to attract new
customers. This representation of the gift was totally out
of tune with the Chinese imperial representation, which
identified any gift as tribute. What was expected from
barbarians was something rare, exceptional, strange,
or exotic, for example, an elephant as small as a monkey
and as ferocious as a lion. Such gifts also signaled the
barbarians’ recognition of their subordination to the
Emperor. What the English were proposing was an ex-
change relation that was by definition egalitarian and
horizontal. They came up against the indifference of
the Emperor and the mandarins. The Opium War that
followed was thus waged as a way to impose Western
domination by force.
Today, China has become one of the principal im-
porters of Western luxury products. Chinese consum-
ers purchase three out of ten luxury items in the world.
After the Chinese, Americans come in second place,
with 24 percent of purchases in the luxury sector, fol-
lowed by Europeans, with 18 percent. Nevertheless, there
is an important nuance: 20 percent of Chinese purchases
of luxury products happen in China, whereas the major-
ity of exchanges in this sector happen in the European
market. The growing attraction of shopping tourism
and the motivating role played by new technologies in
its growth assure that the sector’s growth will be consol-
idated in the coming years.
Today, the attraction that rich Chinese people have
for all things related to European luxury (fashion, wine,
etc.) is extremely strong. Moreover, the number of rich
people there is growing exponentially. In 2013, China
had 1.2 million millionaires (while the US had 7 million)
and about 200 billionaires (the US had 535). The number
of Chinese millionaires is expected to be 7 million in
2025, but this represents only a very small percentage
 Marc ABÉLÈS
of the Chinese population, where the wealth of the ma-
jority of the population is less than $10,000.
Even though the gap between the very rich and others
in China is growing, recent decades have also seen the
development of a real middle class, which has become
an essential player in the country’s economic transfor-
mation. If we attempt a contrast with India, another pop-
ulous country, the contrast is striking: India accounts
for only 4 percent of the world’s middle class, while
China accounts for a third of it.
I have emphasized the political dimension of the
penetration of luxury goods into China, but we cannot
underestimate its cultural dimension. Given the expo-
nential growth of large fortunes, the rapid development
of an upper-middle class, and the growth of consump-
tion, the demand for luxury products has intensified.
This demand has focused on the large prestigious West-
ern brands. China now attracts every business dedicated
to luxury, whether in fashion, jewelry, or wine. For a
long time, China was considered to be an attractive re-
serve of low-cost labor. Today, it is China’s rich clien-
tele that is being pursued, with a view to quick high
profits. Marketing specialists have flocked to China (see
Badaró, this issue), while international companies have
implanted their luxury boutiques in the large cities.
In China, after decades of living in austerity, access
to brands and Western luxury represents a violent break
with the Communist order. Still in an early phase, nouveau-
riche behavior has predominated, driven by a desire for
conspicuous ostentation. Luxury is synonymous with
the exhibition of one’s social status, but the newly rich
betray a misunderstanding of the system of signs that
characterize luxury. It involves a brutal appropriation
that is ignorant of the main codes. Luxury firms have
to educate their customers, who need to acquire the ap-
propriate “semiotic virtuosity” and “specialized knowl-
edge,” as Arjun Appadurai demonstrates (1986). Hence,
specialized salespeople are trained in China and the
West, with a proliferation of agencies whose role is to
“adapt” Western products and methods to China.
In her study of the penetration of Italian high fash-
ion into China, Sylvia Yanagisako (2013) shows that
one problem for Western brands is the need to train,
as it were, Chinese tastes for the refinement of Italian
craftsmanship. With their ethnocentrism, the directors
of Italy’s fashion houses think that the Chinese must
“evolve” and that it will take at least a generation for
them to adapt to so-called modern fashion. For exam-
ple, they believe Chinese men have a hard time appre-
ciating nuances and style and are still attached to dark-
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62
colored suits or even vulgar track suits. Above all, the
Italians insist on the need to entrust the management
of their boutiques in China to Italians, considering the
Chinese to be unable yet to present a collection prop-
erly, that is, to display its style and its coherence. The
Chinese nouveaux riches try not to lose face or make
too many errors of bad taste. They want their consump-
tion of luxury to be conspicuous, but this is not easy
to accomplish. Hence, the demand for education in lux-
ury arises, with the appearance of specialized services to
satisfy it. Their relationship to Western luxury products
is not without anxiety. John Osburg (this issue) cites
an incident that is indicative of the mistrust of foreign
imported luxury. In 2002, Wuhan was the site of an in-
cident that attracted international media attention. A
Mercedes vehicle that had been bought by a wealthy
resident for its price in gold turned out to be defective.
Despite five successive repairs, it still did not work, so
the owner asked the German company to replace it. In
the face of the latter’s refusal, he reacted by organizing
a large protest march during which the Mercedes was
dragged through the streets of Wuhan by a river buffalo
before being struck with clubs by security forces and
completely demolished. Pictures of this scene appeared
in Chinese media. This incident is still notorious, a case
that international companies study to learn from its er-
rors. From the point of view of Chinese authorities, the
arrogance of foreign luxury industries, which do not hes-
itate to export defective products and refuse to replace
them, represents an intolerable humiliation. China’s in-
ternational image is at stake. The kind of expiatory ritual
enacted with the Mercedes is a reminder that global lux-
ury is not exempt from nationalist reactions.
Banalization and cultural homogenization
From an anthropological point of view, the circulation
of luxury products poses the problem of the encounter
between radically different cultural traditions in the
context of globalization. This confrontation between
distinct representations generates stereotypes and mis-
understandings. However, we also see demand being
transformed. Such a question must be approached from
the point of view of circulation, since this transformation
has an impact in both directions: not only from West to
East but also from East to West. In reality, the route
taken by luxury is a process that creates complex effects
that are sometimes difficult to control. It puts the very
notion of luxury in danger. Luxury always implies some
63
form of exceptionality, so its appropriation on a huge
scale risks being synonymous with banalization. If all
these millionaires (and even the upper-middle-class
elites) can buy high fashion, then how is its overall triv-
ialization to be avoided? The risk is made even greater
if we consider how counterfeiting accentuates the pro-
cess of banalization even further.
I would like to emphasize two problems: the first has
to do with the cultural homogenization of the luxury
market, or its actors’ ability to invent new forms of iden-
tity and creativity; the second concerns the banaliza-
tion and saturation of luxury brands, or what has been
called “logo fatigue.” It has been observed that the sales
growth of prominent brands, notably Gucci, Prada, and
Louis Vuitton, has been slowing down. Until recently,
it was thought that what primarily motivated consum-
ers was the name (the brand) and the price (with ex-
pensiveness being a guarantee of superior quality). Lux-
ury boutiques proliferated everywhere on the planet. In
2013, LVMH, including all its brands, had a total of
3,384 stores worldwide: their number had doubled in
a decade. But this has as a corollary a certain form of
frustration, since the consumer in search of sophisti-
cation is sometimes disappointed to find the same thing
everywhere.
This inflation in the number of retail locations con-
tributes de facto to the banalization of the brand’s im-
age, generating negative reactions to what is perceived
as massification. A new model of luxury has therefore
emerged. This can be seen among wealthy Chinese who
refuse to buy certain goods in their own country and in-
stead make sure to get their wines in France or their
clothes in Italy. They feel that what is being sold to them
at home is deprived of an aura (Benjamin [1935] 1968),
an immaterial value that constitutes luxury. Today, we
observe that what counts the most for the consumers
of luxury is the authenticity of the savoir faire behind
a product, its relationship to a territory where the prod-
uct has been made for a long time. Hence, we see this
new focus on environment and heritage and the exalta-
tion of permanent things and the durable, of territory
and transmission.
Contemporary art and luxury
When we study the accelerated circulation of luxury
goods, we are in fact asking the broader question of the
economic, cultural, and political consequences of glob-
alization. The regime of signs that was imposed to dis-
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THE GLOBALIZATION OF LUXURY
tinguish this type of commodity from other products
is going through a transformation. This can be observed
in areas as diverse as fashion and wine. The hegemony
of brands that seemed apparent at the end of the twen-
tieth century is no longer sufficient.
To avoid banalization, to recover the values charac-
teristic of luxury—the superfluous, the exceptional—we
have to come back to an essential element: authentic-
ity. Roots are glorified; a narrative is created that some-
times resembles fiction. The generalized circulation of
commodities has blurred the message. Luxury is not cos-
mopolitan; it is the fruit of a unique, incomparable tra-
dition (a terroir in France, a small town in Italy). The
value of a luxury commodity is not only material; it re-
fers to a history, of which it is a sign. It is, moreover, in-
separable from the brand’s image.
This is why the large luxury firms today are looking
to associate their images with philanthropic and aes-
thetic initiatives. The result consists in a veritable com-
petition in the department of cultural heritage projects.
In Italy, Tod’s, a group famous for its loafers, invested
25 million euros in the restoration of the Colosseum;
Fendi gave 2 million euros for the restoration of the
Trevi Fountain; Versace contributed to the restoration
of the Vittorio Emanuele II Gallery in Milan; Ferra-
gamo donated to the renovation of the Uffizi in Flor-
ence. Companies in the luxury sector are looking to re-
inforce their aristocratic image, hence they seek to link
their names with artistic masterpieces. This association
ennobles their image, which they hope will increase
their attractiveness.
It is not surprising, then, that most major luxury
brands associate artists with their production. They
create contemporary art foundations or subsidize this
sector. François Pinault, the head of Kering, has a foun-
dation in Venice; Cartier and Prada also have their own
foundations. They employ curators who come from the
most prominent international museums. Hermès, Cha-
nel, Boucheron, and Rolex all support numerous art-
ists’ projects. The ties between luxury commerce and
contemporary art have become very close. In Paris, the
contemporary art museum at the Palais de Tokyo put
on an exhibition in 2013 on Chanel N7 5 perfume. In
2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles
displayed handbags designed by Japanese artist Taka-
shi Murakami for Louis Vuitton in a boutique inside
the museum.
Similarly in China, an exhibition about the Chris-
tian Dior brand was organized in 2008 at the 798 Art
District in Beijing, in which twenty-two Chinese artists
 Marc ABÉLÈS
participated (Abélès 2011). Zhan Huan presented a fig-
ure of Christian Dior that he had created with incense
ashes collected from sanctuaries. Zhang Dali, another
fashionable artist, created a portrait of John Galliano,
superimposing a multitude of AK-47 rifles (the well-
known Kalashnikovs) on it to symbolize the violence
being done to Beijing by developers who demolish en-
tire neighborhoods. At the exhibition, visitors could
also admire a photographic reinterpretation of the Last
Supper by Wang Qingsong, using Chinese models as
the apostles in dresses by Dior against the backdrop of
a destroyed hospital. Most of the works of the Chinese
artists focused on the excesses and violence of consump-
tion and wealth. The opening was also an opportunity to
present glamorous ambassadors of fashion and cinema;
Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron, Eva Green, and Mag-
gie Cheung posed next to John Galliano and Bernard
Arnault. It was a memorable event that marked at once
the impact of LVMH—the flower of the luxury indus-
try—on the Asian market. The artistic presentation con-
tributed to the hagiography of this famous brand.
For a large number of businesses in the luxury sec-
tor, contemporary art allows them to increase their in-
ternational fame and reinforce their legitimacy and
credibility in cultural circles. The link with fine art be-
stows a symbolic dimension on luxury firms and allows
them to assert their identity and develop a strategy of
distinction. For example, Prada set up a coherent and
efficient promotional project based on supporting con-
temporary art in diverse forms. One manifestation is
found in Prada’s boutiques, which, more than being
simple retail spaces, are veritable works of art. The house
decided to call upon the world’s most well-known archi-
tects (Rem Koolhaas in New York and Los Angeles,
Herzog and De Meuron in Tokyo) to create what it calls
“Epicenters”; these are conceptual and experimental bou-
tiques that represent a new type of retail center, where
fashion and business are combined with architecture
and new technologies. When customers buy a product
in these boutiques, what they are actually buying is par-
ticipation in a certain lifestyle. More than a simple store,
the Epicenter is a space where one can come into con-
tact with new ideas and experiment with new languages.
Prada’s aim has been to develop a new conception of
the boutique, involving a superimposition between the
world of art and the world of consumerism, all the while
giving life to a structure that reinforces the brand and
enriches shopping with a new cultural dimension.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton was inaugurated in
October 2014 in Paris, reflecting a new strategy devel-
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64
oped by its founder Bernard Arnault. Architect Frank
Gehry designed this building of glass and steel in the
image of the Guggenheim Museum he had built in Bil-
bao. Here, the goal was essentially to give the public an
image of extraordinary refinement by associating what
is most valorized in art today with the LVMH brand.
Arnault, who had been seen as a rapacious capitalist,
reconsidered his strategy. He continues to buy luxury
brands, but now he understands, thanks to his advi-
sors, that his stiff image was harming his conglomerate.
Luxury is not an industry like others, so Arnault has
cultivated his image as a patron of the arts (Friedmann
2014).
The mad exuberance of luxury today is indeed a
market exuberance. Far from excess and dilapidation,
it has more to do with speculation. Luxury must be
analyzed from the point of view of circulation. What
characterizes the sphere of luxury within globalization
is its great expansion, with the opening to commerce
of an immense space that had long been closed for po-
litical and ideological reasons. It is illustrated by the
flowering of market spaces completely devoted to sell-
ing luxury goods: shopping malls where emblematic
products are put on sale and displayed to a large public
audience over thousands of square meters. Traditionally,
luxury stores were conceived as being for a very small
number of customers, with a muffled atmosphere, a
sophisticated presentation, salespeople attentive to the
customer’s every need, and a certain idea of good taste.
In the case of the Nanjing Road shopping mall in Shang-
hai, what we now see is a space that is literally open and
exposed. A vast number of people from the general pub-
lic circulate through its different floors. Each major label
has its own store. It boasts big escalators and balconies
from which visitors can view all the stores. There is even
a Cova bakery, a luxury Italian pasticceria. Although
few people are wealthy enough to buy the branded goods
being marketed, such as Prada, Versace, Dior, or Her-
mès, what matters is that the crowds stroll through the
mall. The luxury product is meant to seduce; it offers
a horizon to the middle classes. In China, one can see
how it contributes to social cohesion by defining what
it means to succeed. These are zones of the ephemeral
and of dreams.
Thus, this circulation is materialized in the scenogra-
phy presented in the shopping malls. It also appears in
contemporary art, where the concept of the art fair has
become the epitome of cultural events. The beginning
of the twenty-first century has been marked in this
domain by the proliferation of these large gatherings
65
where collectors, gallerists, and art dealers converge,
as well as attracting a large general public. These occur
in places all around the world: the International Con-
temporary Art Fair (FIAC) in Paris, Frieze in London
and New York, and many other art fairs in Italy, Ger-
many, India, and elsewhere. The Art Basel Fair is the
one that perhaps best reflects the globalization of the
art world. It is deployed on three continents in Europe,
America, and Asia. My observation bears on three
places (Basel, Miami, and Hong Kong), where I again
find these moments of intense circulation, in the literal
sense, that I observe in luxury shopping centers. The
visitors to these fairs walk to and fro for several hours:
to the aesthetic pleasure is added the pleasure of the
flâneur, of meeting people, of seeing others and of being
seen. Those who are actually involved as buyers or sell-
ers do their business in one day. For them, the rest of the
time is devoted to social interactions and networking.
The VIPs don’t really mix with the masses. In the case
of Art Basel, what is presented is not the same in the
three places but corresponds to distinct geocultural ex-
pectations: in Miami, one finds American art from the
north and the south, whereas in Hong Kong, Asian art
is omnipresent. The goal of the galleries is to enlarge
their markets; in this respect, the creation of the 2013
fair met with considerable success. The system functions
not simply in a closed circuit for initiates; it also offers a
dream horizon to the masses. What we have here is an
immense “arcade” in the Benjaminian sense (Benjamin
[1927] 2002). I calculated that in one day, some eight
thousand visitors were present in the immense Conven-
tion and Exhibition Centre in Hong Kong. Rather than
being a nonplace, the arcade is a place rich in signs,
which allows visitors to see a certain state of the beauti-
ful. It is a stage where, far from being passive, everyone
is a protagonist in their own way, far less constrained
than they would be in a commercial establishment like
a gallery. Here, they can have fun taking selfies in front
of the embalmed bodies of Lenin, Mao Zedong, Fidel
Castro, Hô Chi Min, and Kim Il-sung, represented by
Chinese artist Shen Shaomin in his installation entitled
The G5 Summit.
Conclusion
In this universe of generalized circulation, the porous-
ness between the universes of art and of luxury is en-
abled by the exuberant explosion of a market that is of-
fered up to be seen by an exponential public audience
whose ideals it creates. Luxury commerce needs art,
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THE GLOBALIZATION OF LUXURY
but the very same dynamic that protects luxury from
trivialization has a tendency to destabilize artistic value.
Today, it is not technical reproducibility (Benjamin
[1935] 1968) that is threatening the latter—no more
than counterfeiting threatens the large luxury brands.
The circulation of artworks—and, in a parallel way,
of luxury products—exudes its own negation. The anal-
ysis of the globalization of the art and luxury markets
lays out a challenge to the notion of the economy
through the categories of value and scarcity. We come
back to the ambivalence of the term “priceless.” That
which is priceless has long been seen as that which the
wealthy can afford, that which costs a lot of money,
and that which, for this very reason, is infinitely scarce.
Today, however, we observe a decoupling of what is
infinitely scarce and what is excessively expensive due
to the increasing number of ultrarich people. Conse-
quently, what becomes essential is the immaterial di-
mension of the infinitely scarce.
We might say that an analysis that would identify
luxury goods with their exchange value stricto sensu
would not take into account their specificity, what makes
them different from other types of commodities. To
better understand the nature of luxury, we have to “de-
familiarize capitalist commodities” (Tsing 2013: 22). Ac-
cording to David Graeber’s observations on value, it
is clear that luxury refers simultaneously to value and
values. “The study of value, then, invariably takes us
beyond what we normally refer to as ‘economics,’ for
it leads us into moral, aesthetic, and symbolic territory
that is very hard to reduce to rational calculation and
science” (Graeber 2005: 452–53). That is why Adam Smith
dealt with the issue of luxury in terms of moral philos-
ophy and not simply as a matter of economics. Luxury
could be an efficient incentive for the growth of indus-
try, while its consumption could be considered as mor-
ally reprehensible (Brewer 1998). When pointing out
the specificity of an anthropological approach of value,
Graeber seems to rediscover the holistic and integrative
vision that Louis Dumont ([1966] 1980) developed in
his theory of hierarchy. However, this essentially static
theory—maybe the more sophisticated fulfillment of
the structural-functionalism doctrine—does not afford
any new perspective on the luxury process, especially
on its creative properties. Following Georges Bataille,
we can consider luxury to be the part of what he calls
the “general economy” that is focused on unproductive
expenditures, which allows us to better understand that
what creates, literally, the price of luxury is its capacity
to create and to renew its own values.
 Marc ABÉLÈS
Today, luxury is becoming increasingly embedded in
a vast rhetoric of images and stereotypes that identifies
luxury with the exceptional nature of a certain type of
experience rather than with the market value of a cer-
tain type of product. We are at the limits of the econ-
omy, at the point where the symbolic dimension melds
with the economic. The problem of the globalization
of luxury may be interpreted in terms of a tension be-
tween the process of increasing uniformity and the re-
emergence of diversity expressed in terms of heritage,
identity, authenticity, and savoir faire. What is at stake
concerns the politics of wealth, which opposes cosmo-
politanism to national roots, on the one hand, and the
ideas of liberalization to regulation in the market sphere,
on the other. In analyzing the paradoxes of luxury and
wealth in contemporary societies, it appears that, be-
yond its intrinsic interest, this sphere of market circula-
tion is a theater for contradictory dynamics. A bit like
the way in which the potlatch of the Kwakiutl opened
new perspectives on a noncapitalist economy and the
notions of exchange and giving, luxury and contempo-
rary art can enlighten us regarding the transformations
of capitalism today.
The contributions gathered in this section stem from
two workshops that were held in Paris (January 2015,
June 2017) at the Collège d’Études Mondiales, Fonda-
tion Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH). Three
of them focus on the penetration of luxury goods in
China, while one is dedicated to luxury spaces in São
Paulo. They raise the issues of value, scarcity, superflu-
ity, and authenticity in contemporaneous contexts and
shedding light on the new forms of wealth and their
“mad exuberance.”
John Osburg’s article analyzes the political and moral
ambivalences around wealth and luxury consumption
in China today. The author demonstrates how, as many
sectors of Chinese society increasingly perceive the con-
sumption of foreign luxury goods as the expression of
the lack of moral values, personal authenticity, and pa-
triotism, some wealthy individuals have turned their at-
tention to the accumulation of spiritual wealth through
the monetary patronage of Tibetan Buddhism. This case
shows something that we find in other articles in this
special section: the search for luxury as the search for
authenticity and moral values. Osburg observes that
many wealthy Chinese believe that these attributes can
be found in ethnic others, whether they are foreign or
an officially recognized ethnic minority.
The association of the sources of value to otherness
can also be found in Máximo Badaró’s article, in which
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66
he analyzes the ideas and practices of marketing profes-
sionals based in China, mainly foreigners, in relation to
the consumption of foreign luxury goods. His article
shows that the marketing of foreign luxury in China
by such professionals is transformed into a political ped-
agogy of value that, using different marketing strategies,
attempts to protect the image of foreign luxury as a source
of power and value, which also means to protect the very
idea that, in China, value always comes from abroad.
What happens when a nation becomes a global lux-
ury commodity? Lynda Dematteo’s article answers this
question through an analysis of the branding strategies
of Italian businesspeople and diplomats in the Shang-
hai Expo in 2010 and the Milan Expo in 2015. These
fairs are opportunities to put on performances for Chi-
nese consumers by presenting the image of Italy as a
country of luxury, refinement, beauty, authenticity, and
quality of life. But this strategy also raises historically
rooted concerns in many sectors of Italian society about
the risks of commodification and banalization of a sup-
posed Italian cultural identity, which they tend to con-
ceive in essentialized, almost biological terms.
The last contribution in this special issue, written by
Viviane Riegel, analyzes the contemporaneous scenog-
raphy of luxury with the creation of specific spaces in
the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Luxury shopping cen-
ters offer a place restricted to consumers belonging to
the upper social classes. One of these consumers prop-
erly describes this space as “a perfect island in the mess
of the city,” a small paradise for the conspicuous con-
sumption of luxury goods. Riegel shows how the appro-
priation of global luxury spaces by upper-class consumers
was recently challenged by impoverished young people
who organized huge gatherings in these elite shopping
centers. Popular groups are attracted by luxury, and
the dimension of pleasure transcends social inequalities.
In this context, new forms of resistance can be observed
against the elitist image of the cosmopolitan city.
The essays gathered in this section illustrate the mul-
tivocality of luxury as a concept and the theoretical,
political, and moral dimensions at stake in their ethno-
graphic approaches. Due to the complexity of this do-
main, there is no doubt that further work needs to be
undertaken. It will open up original perspectives on cer-
tain classical issues of anthropology, such as value, ex-
pense, and consumption. Finally, we hope that this sec-
tion will provoke more reflection in order to question
luxury, taking into account the diversity of its concrete
realizations, and that it will incite anthropologists to
pursue new fieldwork on these matters.
67
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Marc ABÉLÈS is Professor of Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. His
research and teaching are primarily in the area of politics and institutions in transnational and global contexts, with
fieldwork on the European Commission and the World Trade Organization. His most recent book is Thinking beyond
the state (Cornell University Press, 2017).
Marc Abélès
EHESS
54 bd Raspail
75006 Paris
France
marc.abeles@ehess.fr

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