As the field of luxury studies is expanding, the questions that lead contemporary research are distinguished by methodological innovation. The opportunity to ask a new question or to focus on one that had been articulated before by earlier scholars and re-shape it would not be as exciting today without the imagination and criticality that allows scholars to combine methods of research that stem from other disciplines. The journal LUXURY: History Culture Consumption is a platform that remains open to and actively seeks out the new voices in the study of luxury. Specifically, the journal encourages new approaches to academic inquiry and new ways to bridge theoretical conversations with practice, as well as academic breakthroughs with professional applications that make the field of luxury one of the most exciting places of work.
In this issue of LUXURY, scholars Mario D. Schultz and Peter Seele undertake a methodologically innovative study that combines netnography, qualitative interviews, and secondary research in the business literature as they focus on elucidating the role of luxury watches at work and their impact on the image of the organization. Netnography is a new method, the development of which coincides with the proliferation of social media platforms in the twenty-first century. Contrary to traditional ethnography, netnography describes the way scholars can access and observe information that is already publicly available on online platforms. These online media are documents that need no further qualification by the subjects that created them and, in that sense, allow for an objective measurement and interpretation of consumer behavior that can be validated contextually by other methodological means as well (i.e. interviews of similar groups of consumers). The systematic analysis of social meaning, status creation, and adopted norms of behavior vis à vis labor aesthetics led the scholars to theorize about rupture that takes place when an employee adopts an appearance that destabilizes the organizational gestalt. Schultz and Seele’s work demonstrates that both the employee and the organization lose their credibility when luxury consumption of the “wrong” kind takes place. Can a luxury watch be the “wrong” watch for your place of work? One can imagine several follow up questions that relate to generational divides as well.
Samuel André Alves Mateus, professor of Media Discourse Analysis in Madeira University, Portugal, works on a related question. He analyzes the methods by which luxury lifestyle magazines published online represent luxury while also actively contributing to the discursive structure through which consumers understand, appreciate, and desire luxury. The research presented in his paper led to the articulation of a new system, a “pentactic axis,” which, the author asserts, lures in luxury audiences through each one of the following pillars: Leisure, Hedonism, Carpe Diem, Singularity, and Escape. Finally, and precisely because the data analyzed was constructed to appeal to a contemporary audience, the learnings the reader derives from the paper have to do both with how information is disseminated in the first place and with how the audience is using their newly acquired knowledge about luxury in their personal lives.
The third paper of the present issue of LUXURY is a philosophical essay by John Armitage of the Winchester School of Art, University of Southhampton, UK. Armitage explores how Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), a modern French philosopher whose work offers a phenomenological interpretation of art, knowledge, and ontology, provides a theoretical way to approach the work of fine artists through the ages. Armitage contemplates the reasons why the concepts of luxury and voluptuousity are reluctantly and intermittently included in the oeuvre of fine artists and the writers who interpreted their work. Beginning with Jan Steen’s Beware of Luxury (1633) and Giovanni Segantini’s The Punishment of Luxury (1891), Armitage brings the reader to the present day and argues that while Levinas may pose thought provoking questions about the relationship between luxury and voluptuousity, between the abundant and the sensual, ultimately these two concepts are part of a continuum and practically hard to exist outside of each other.
The issue closes with “An Ueber to Take your Brand to the Next Level,” a stimulating interview between Pablo Lopez Zadicoff, an economist, and JP Kuehlwein, brand strategist and author. The interview is based on Kuehlwein’s latest book Brand Elevation: Lessons in Ueber Branding that he co-authored with Wolfgang Schaefer. This piece is peppered with plenty of provocation by Lopez Zadicoff and quick rebounds by Kuehlwein, who supports his theories through a long roster of examples from the marketplace, all brands that have shaped what we perceive as successful branding in the twenty-first century.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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Notes on contributors
Thomaï Serdari
Thomaï Serdari is Clinical Associate Professor of Marketing and Director of the Fashion & Luxury MBA at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. [email protected]