Luxury consumption and the temporal-spatial subjectivity of Hong Kong men

ABSTRACT

Extending critical luxury studies to a non-Western context, this article, using Burberry and other Western brands as examples, theorises how the temporal-spatial luxury subjectivity of homosexual Hong Kong male consumers is constituted through the intersections of British colonial history, nostalgia, the media, their personal and professional background, gender, social class, and emotional experiences. Using a consumer-focused anthropological perspective, we analyse how subjective, context-specific, and interwoven experiences of time and space co-constitute one’s perception of luxury and recurring luxury consumption practices alongside the forces of social structure and individual preferences. Dissecting consumers’ habitual and intimate relations to their wardrobes in the Hong Kong context, this article challenges and refines existing Eurocentric concepts of luxury, and helps clarify how (far) abstract macro-structural forces are consistently materialised into the normative outlook of luxury and micro-individual consumption practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Luxury fashion
• Hong Kong
• male consumers
• homosexual consumers
• temporal-spatial subjectivity
• wardrobe study

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Ling-Tung Tsang, Ho Ming Bryan Choi, Lok See Rosalyn Yu, Wai Kwan Winnie Suen, Raffaele Di Tria, and Ching Yin Lee for their research assistance. They also thank Paul Cox and Marcus Lam for their professional photography during the wardrobe study interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Hong Kong under the HKU Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research “De-Westernising Fashion: An Ex-centric Perspective on Creativity, Authenticity, Cultural Mediation, and Consumer Agency along Chinese-African Fashion Value Chains” [Project number: 201910159043].