The Idea of Luxury: Revisited

Abstract

My book The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation was published in 1994 (still in print). While what follows is bound to be self-referential and also presumptuous in that it is premised on there being some interest in these reflections on the book a quarter of a century plus later. The partial defense is that the book has been extensively cited and widely acknowledged as an important and influential contribution. In the period since its publication I have written (often by invitation) some papers that take, sometimes tangential, aspects of the book’s discussion as their cue but have not revisited the book as a whole. This paper aims to take an, albeit still selective, overview of the book and reply to some of the criticisms to which it has been subject. I divide the paper into three sections. In Sections 1 and 2, I consider separately the two elements in the book’s sub-title before in Section 3 making some general remarks on the book’s implications for aspects of the contemporary study of luxury.