ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews how scholars have historically conceptualized luxury and luxury consumers. It explores how, against the backdrop of a changing marketscape, academics redefined who could be considered a luxury consumer by creating consumer segments based on consumers' perceptions of luxury brands and extrinsic and intrinsic motives. The chapter explores how more recent technological disruptions and consumer movements—such as demands for sustainability, the rise of social media and prosumption, and the transition of luxury to experiences vested in a sharing economy—are shifting luxury from a system based on clearly delineated socioeconomic levels to a system built around desired lifestyles and sociocultural preferences. To identify social structures or the agency of consumers as it relates to luxury, academics have pulled from literature on social comparison theory, symbolic interactionism, and the multiplicity of possible selves. Studies on counterfeits distinguish them as inauthentic luxury-branded goods that are used to obtain social group affiliation within reference groups.
