Socio-semiotic analysis of print advertisements for luxury products

Abstract

'Luxury' is very commonly used in everyday speech. In a positive sense, it often refers to some super-added value. Cars become luxury vehicles when they are equipped with the newest high-tech electronics or upholstered with the finest leather. Clothing becomes 'luxury' when designed by a well-known couturier. Nearly every consumer good can be turned into its own luxury version by investing it with an 'extra', with an additional material or immaterial characteristic. On the other hand, luxury often has a negative undertone. In this sense, it is being used to refer to the useless, the redundant. As such, luxury can be looked upon as the antonym of comfort (Muhlman 1975: 302). Both are involved in a search for material well-being on top of what is considered to be the social minimum or the social necessity. 'Luxury', in this sense, is the search for positive pleasure, the possession of goods without which one can live perfectly well. 'Comfort', on the other hand, relates more to the avoidance of annoyances occurring in daily life. I am, however, not interested in tracing the exact linguistic meaning of the word 'luxury'. My research tries to go beyond this meaning in order to define it in a sociological way. Sociology has shown hardly any interest in a society's upper layer of consumer goods. When it has, it has been mostly in an economic way.1 I want to divert the attention from the economic sphere towards the cultural and the sociological. This article will be a first attempt to define the luxurious. I will examine print advertisements as visual data from deeply layered cultural conceptions. Luxury will be looked upon as a cultural connotation added to material artifacts. As a connotative material, luxury is hard to define precisely. I will use advertisements as keys to the most recurring connotative constructions. This article contains three main parts. First, a general definition will be proposed, starting from a somewhat different interpretation of the denotation-connotation distinction. This conceptual pair has always been at the center of classic semiotic studies. It tries to deal with the polysemic