The Visual Luxury Consumer: Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Maison Schiaparelli

Abstract

The luxury consumer is one of the most celebrated concepts in what is known as luxury brand management. However, this study of the associations between the visual, luxury, and the consumer offers new possibilities for thinking about the contemporary visual culture of luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Hermès, and Maison Schiaparelli. The article guides readers through issues at the heart of work on the luxury consumer, including the visual luxury consumer as practitioner, as an expert who uses their visual knowledge as part of their luxury consumption. What becomes apparent is that work on the luxury consumer is impossible to ignore for anybody who is serious about contemporary visual culture, and this investigation provides an ideal critical introduction to a wide variety of texts and topics related to luxury and consumption.

Keywords:

• Visual luxury
• consumer
• Louis Vuitton
• Hermès
• Maison Schiaparelli

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Batat, “Digital Luxury: Transforming Brands and Consumer Experiences;” Turunen, “Interpretations of Luxury: Exploring the Consumer Perspective.”.

2 Armitage, “Luxury and Visual Culture.”.

3 Armitage and Roberts, “Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media,”; Clark and Lezama, “Canadian Critical Luxury Studies: Decentring Luxury.”.

4 Batat, “Digital Luxury: Transforming Brands and Consumer Experiences;” Turunen, “Interpretations of Luxury: Exploring the Consumer Perspective.”.

5 Armitage, “Luxury and Visual Culture.”.

6 Armitage and Roberts, “Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media,”; Clark and Lezama, “Canadian Critical Luxury Studies: Decentring Luxury.”.

7 Armitage, “Luxury and Visual Culture,” 77.

8 Armitage, “Luxury and Visual Culture,” 89.

9 Armitage, “The Pursuit of Luxury as an Act of Transgression: Bataille, Sovereignty, Desire,” 343-358.

10 Armitage and Roberts, “The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion: The Case of Gucci,” 227-246.

11 Armitage, “Luxury and Visual Culture,” 37-38.

12 Schroeder, “Visual Consumption.”.

13 Carson Pajaczkowska, “Feminist Visual Culture”; Cherry, “Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture,” Jones, “The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader.”.

14 Armitage, “The Pursuit of Luxury as an Act of Transgression: Bataille, Sovereignty, Desire,” 343-358.

15 Armitage, “Luxury and Visual Culture,” 38-39; Armitage, “Golden Places, Aesthetic Spaces: An Introduction to the Cultural Politics of Luxury,” 51–54.

16 Berg, “Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain”; Trentmann, “Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first”; Ilmakunnas and Stobart, “A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe.”.

17 Armitage and Roberts, “The Globalisation of Luxury Fashion: The Case of Gucci,” 227-246.

18 Merleau-Ponty, “The Visible and the Invisible.”.

19 Charbin and Canepari, “Hermès: Heavenly Days.”.

20 Dion, “How to Manage Heritage Brands: The Case of Sleeping Beauties Revival,” 273-286.

21 Armitage, “Rethinking Haute Couture: Julian Fournié in the Virtual Worlds of the Metaverse,” 129-146.

22 Schiaparelli, “Shocking Life: The Autobiography of Elsa Schiaparelli.”.

23 Berger, “Ways of Seeing.”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Armitage

John Armitage is Emeritus Professor of Media Arts at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. He is the co-editor, with Joanne Roberts, of The Third Realm of Luxury: Connecting Real Places and Imaginary Spaces (Bloomsbury 2020) and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture. [email protected]