ABSTRACT

“Luxury has been a sign of prosperity, power and social status since ancient times (Kapferer and Basten, 2010) . Thus, luxury is a matter of seeing and being seen. “Seeing” as a search for the last distinctive signifiers that can be used to “be seen” in different distinctive group processes (Mortelmans, 2005) . Christopher J. Berry in his work The Idea of Luxury from 1994—one of the most interesting and comprehensive pieces on the concept of luxury, particularly its intellectual history—establishes that luxury has changed throughout time and that it reflects social norms and aspirations. Therefore, Chevalier and Mazzalovo (2008, p. 1) state, “There is no single definitive meaning, but rather a large number of alternatives from which to choose .” Hence luxury might be defined as an intimate perception and experience of things that turn them into something indispensable (Gardetti and Torres, 2014) .