Is Luxury a Rational or Emotional Behavior? A Reading of the Concept of Luxury through the book Eternal Luxury

Abstract

This research aims to present Gilles Lipovetsky and  Elyette Roux’s book Eternal Luxury : From the Era of Brands to the Era of Consumption whose idea is based on the major transformations that the field of luxury is witnessing in light of the involvement of our contemporary societies in a complex network of relationships of influence, conflict, and domination. In this book, I focused on two approaches to luxury: An anthropological approach through which Gilles Lipovetsky attempted to chronicle the circulation of the concept in some ancient societies and highlight its symbolic and emotional dimensions through the analysis of a number of practices and representations associated with it, and another form that chronicles the new birth of the concept with the French researcher Eliette Roux from a semiotic and economic angle in which she highlights the impact of brands on the development of the market of luxury products. In analyzing and discussing the two approaches, I concluded that, in light of the number of interpretations that this field has produced concerning the transformations of capitalism in the West and the competition of companies for internal and external markets, the concept of luxury appears in a state that requires further understanding, interpretation, and repositioning, not only from a unilateral angle, but from a multidimensional perspective (integrative framework), as a field in which the physical dimensions intersect with those of the symbolic, emotional, affective, psychological, etc. In the face of this complexity, it is important to single out studies for each of these dimensions separately.