Contemporary Consumer Society Research Articles

Religion as Atmosphere: The Material Mediation and Aesthetical Ambiguity of a Contemporary Night Church Atmosphere

ABSTRACT In this article, I offer an ethnographic exploration of how Fatboys (a type of bean bag chair) and visuals co-constitute the atmosphere and religion inside a Copenhagen Night Church. By exploring the atmosphere as a distribution of agency – primarily from the visitors’ perspective – I focus on how the Fatboys and visuals help constitute the atmosphere as an affective force by mediating visitors’ engagement. Moreover, I claim that the Fatboys and visuals also contribute to an aesthetic of ambiguity that emphasises the role of visitors as producers and consumers of an affective religious atmosphere. Closely related to the cultural emphasis on individuality that pervades contemporary consumer society, this aesthetic of ambiguity enables different conceptual frames to inform visitors’ atmospheric experiences and thus amplifies the existence of multiple atmospheres inside the Night Church. In this sense, religion is not only materially mediated but also co-created and carried out by the visitors.

E. Durkheim’s critique of the eudemonistic and hedonistic causality of the division of labor in the perspective of contemporary consumerism

The article aims at revising Durkheim’s pejorative assessment of utilitarianhedonistic impulses as the reasons for the differentiation of labor in the consumerism perspective. The author considers Durkheim’s criticism of economism and utilitarianism through his theory of social solidarity as having moral rather than utilitarian foundations and shows the transformation of Durkheim’s concept of solidarism and the idea of division of labor based on it in social practices of the contemporary consumer society. Thus, the concentration of morality in the rules (according to Durkheim) that regulate social behavior proves that the rules and morality of the consumer society are determined by consumerist values and make every individual play the consumer role. The inconsistency of solidarism under consumerism is expressed in the fact that, despite the high degree of social integration which demands that as an organic part of the social we have to ‘sacrifice’ ourselves to this whole, in the consumer society, there is a reverse trend - the dominance of consumer values, attitudes and stereotypes which determine models of social behavior based on selfishness. In the second part of the article, the author considers utilitarian-hedonistic needs multiplied by consumerism as one of the key reasons for the progress and differentiation of labor. Hedonistic intentions manifested in consumer practices should be considered not as mental or psychological (according to Durkheim) but as social facts. The author argues that Durkheim’s concept of social solidarity, which seeks to overcome economism and utilitarianism in the interpretation of the progress of labor, may be of scientific interest as an alternative (moral) approach. However, it ignores the potential of the permanent desire for pleasure in the social-cultural environment of consumerism; therefore, in the consumer society with appropriate morality, this approach loses to the utilitarianeconomic interpretation of the progress of labor. One of Durkheim’s main arguments in the critique of the hedonistic and eudemonistic causality of the progress of labor is that if the differentiation of labor aimed at increasing happiness and pleasure, then this progress would have reached its limits long ago, but the contemporary consumer society proves the opposite.

Современный афроамериканский исторический роман

The paper discusses the works of African American writers of the end of the 1960s — the end of the 2010s that address the historical past of African Americans and explores the traumatic experience of slavery and its consequences. The tragedy of people subjected to slavery as well as their masters who challenged the moral and ethical norms has remained the topical issue of contemporary African American historical novel. Pivotal for the development of the genre of African American historical novel were Jubilee by the outstanding writer and poet Margaret Walker and the non-fiction novel Roots by Alex Haley. African American authors reconsider the past from today’s perspective making use of both the newly discovered documents and the peculiarities of contemporary literary techniques and showing a versatility of genre experiments, paying attention to the ambiguity of American consciousness in relation to the past. Toni Morrison combines the sacred and the profane, reality and magic while Ishmael Reed conjugates thematic topicality and a bright literary experiment connecting history with the problems of contemporary consumer society; Charles Johnson problematizes history in a philosophic tragicomedy. Edward P. Jones reconsiders the history of slavery in a broad context as his novel’s setting is across the whole country on a broad span of time. The younger generation of African American writers represented by C. Baker, A. Randall, C. Whitehead, J. Ward and other authors touches on the issues of African American history in order to understand whether the tragic past has finally been done with. Contemporary African American historical novel relies on documents, new facts, elements of fictional biography, traditions of slave narratives and in its range makes use of peculiarities of family saga, bildungsroman, political novel, popular novel enriching it with various elements of magic realism, parodying existing canons and sharp satire.

Emancipatory Politics at its Limits? An Introduction

Emancipatory politics and the very idea of emancipation have come under pressure. Feminist and post-colonial critiques, the appropriation of emancipatory ideals by right-wing populists and the crises triggered by the transgression of planetary boundaries all expose emancipatory paradoxes and raise questions about the further suitability of emancipation as a regulative ideal guiding any socio-ecological transformation of contemporary consumer societies. With this article, which introduces a Special Issue entitled The Dialectic of Emancipation - Transgressing Boundaries and the Boundaries of Transgression, we are working toward a research agenda that acknowledges the current impasse of emancipatory politics and explores its ambivalences and further potentials. Following an outline of the emancipatory paradox and a review of how emancipatory movements have continuously contested – and redrawn – restrictive boundaries, we scan sedimented understandings of the two key terms, emancipation and dialectic, feeding into the concept that we are suggesting as an analytical lens for investigating the current impasse and future prospects of emancipatory politics: the dialectic of emancipation. We preview how the contributors to this Special Issue make use of these terms as they are engaging with this research agenda and conclude by reflecting on the dangers and pitfalls associated with the concept dialectic of emancipation.

Striving to strengthen the ecosocial framework in social work in Finland

AbstractThere is no economic or social sustainability without ecological sustainability, yet the latter can hardly be achieved without the other forms of sustainability. While contemporary consumer societies are still today fundamentally unsustainable, advancing the overall sustainability transition as well as mitigating and preventing the ecological crisis should be high on the social work and community development agendas. On one hand, this is because the ecological crisis both causes and increases social inequality and vulnerability. On the other hand, aspiring sustainability requires profound social and cultural changes, bringing about which belongs to social work and community work’s areas of expertise.Asking how to respond to the socio-environmental crisis and its ramifications in social work education, this article focuses on the currently evolving ecosocial framework in Finnish social work education and practice, paying special attention to the opportunities and hindrances in its realization. The inquiry is based on thematic analysis of advanced level social work students’ views on these issues, as presented on a 5 ECTS (credits as per the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System) course Social Work in Ecosocial Transition, part of the University of Jyväskylä’s social work master’s degree curriculum. In countries like Finland, where community development has a marginal role, adoption of the ecosocial framework would inherently strengthen the community based and political orientation in social work.

Liberation and limitation: Emancipatory politics, socio-ecological transformation and the grammar of the autocratic-authoritarian turn

Despite decades of emancipatory mobilization, there is no realistic prospect for any profound socio-ecological transformation of contemporary consumer societies. Instead, social inequality and ecological destruction are on the rise and an autocratic-authoritarian turn is reshaping even the most established liberal democracies. In explaining these phenomena, the struggle for autonomy and emancipation is an important parameter that has not received sufficient attention so far. This article investigates these phenomena through the lens of the dialectic of emancipation – a concept that I have suggested elsewhere and that I here further elaborate, placing particular emphasis on the relationship between the rule-transgressing and the rule-setting capacities of the emancipatory project. The article specifies constitutive dimensions of the emancipatory project, explores their ongoing reinterpretation and reconfiguration and thus explains how the emancipatory logic itself has come to obstruct the socio-ecological transformation and to nurture new forms of authoritarian governance.

FASHION AS SIGN AND SYMBOLIC CONDITIONALITY: PHILOSOPHICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL ASPECTS

The article is dedicated to revealing the specific features of fashion as a system of cultural and aesthetic values, as well as a contradictory social phenomenon which plays an important role as a symbolic regulator of mass society. The purpose of this article is to study the mechanism of creation of the sign and symbolic world of fashion, new models and patterns of behavior, evident and hidden functions of fashion in the era of globalization. Attention is focused on the fact that fashion, as one of the central phenomenon of the modern world, has become an industry based on the principle of rationality, for the production of original trends, in line with the trends and challenges of modern times. It reflects social reality, and people who actively contribute to changing its fashion patterns set in motion models of social reality. It is the sociological study of fashion that can contribute to its most adequate description and explanation. This is due to the fact that the process of spreading and changing fashion patterns is characterized by the value attitude of people both to things and to other people. The result of such an attitude is the social division of people into groups. A fashionable thing, which is desirable for a person, at the same time becomes for him a desirable image of the social status and interpersonal relations to which a person aspires. The article analyzes modern fashion in terms of symbolic conditionality and symbolic reality characterized by features of sociality, temporality, ambivalence and spectacularity. The main attention of authors of the study is devoted to the analysis of the specific behavior of a human-consumer, for whom the sign and symbolic world of fashion is not only a means of self-expression, but also an opportunity to fill the spiritual vacuum and feel a lost sense of stability. Attention is also focused on the importance of solving the problem of ethics of responsibility of modern fashion, which is the determinants of all relations in the sphere of contemporary consumer society.

Voluntary Simplicity as an Aesthetics of Existence

What becomes of moral and ethical discourse and practice if the search for a universal moral code is given up? The substantive part of this paper begins exploring this question by turning primarily to the later works of Michel Foucault – the texts of his so-called ‘ethical’ turn. It is in these texts where Foucault develops his notion of ethics as ‘an aesthetics of existence,’ which he presents as an alternative mode of ethical practice that can be taken up, by default, one might say, in the absence of a knowable and universalizable morality. Foucault argues that our identities are socially constructed entities, and that we lack a transcendental or purely rational ‘self.’ But he nevertheless carves out and secures a certain, albeit limited, degree of space within which our socially constructed identities can act upon themselves for the purpose of ‘self-fashioning.’ We may not get to choose the raw material of which our identities are constituted, but it nevertheless lies within our power to shape that raw material in various ways, just as the sculptor may make various things from a given lump of clay. According to Foucault, this relationship of the self to the self is the terrain of ethics, and when engaging the age-old ethical question, ‘How am I to live?,’ Foucault suggests that we avoid the traditional search for a moral code and instead ask ourselves the further question, ‘What type of person should I become?’ Using aesthetic metaphors to describe and develop this process of self-creation, Foucault summarizes his ethical position with the pronouncement, ‘Make life a work of art’ – an intriguing, provocative, but ambiguous statement that provides this paper with it’s foundation. The aim of this paper, however, is not to present a thorough analysis of Foucault’s notion of an aesthetics of existence. Instead, after providing a brief exposition of Foucault’s ethics, this paper will undertake to actually apply the idea of an aesthetics of existence to a particular subject of ethical concern, namely, to our role as ‘consumers’ in the context of First World overconsumption. Three consumption-related issues – ecological degradation, poverty amidst plenty, and consumer malaise – provide ample grounds for thinking that consumption is a proper subject for ethical engagement, in the Foucauldian sense of ethics as ‘the self engaging the self.’ If it is the case that our individual identities have been shaped, insidiously perhaps, by a social system that celebrates and encourages consumption without apparent limit – and it would not be unfair to describe consumer societies in these terms – then it may be that ethical practice today calls for a rethinking of our assumptions and attitudes concerning consumption, which might involve a deliberate reshaping of the self by the self.This paper will explore the possibility of such an ethics of consumption in the following ways. First, by explaining how neoclassical economics, which is arguably the most influential paradigm of thought in the world today, conceptualizes consumption as something that benefits both ‘self’ and ‘other’ and, therefore, as something that should be maximized. To the extent that we, modern consumers, have internalized this conception of consumption, an ethics of consumption might involve engaging the self for the purpose of changing the self and creating something new. The second way an ethics of consumption will be explored will be through an examination of the theory and practice of ‘voluntary simplicity,’ a term that refers to an oppositional living strategy with which people, somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, seek an increased quality of life through a reduction and restraint of one’s level of consumption. The paradox, so-called, consists in the attempt to live ‘more with less.’ Since voluntarily living simply means heading in the opposite direction to where most people in consumer societies (and increasingly elsewhere) seem to want to go, one would expect living simply to require a fundamentally creative engagement with life and culture, especially in contemporary consumer societies that seem to be predicated on the assumption that ‘more consumption is always better.’ This need for a fundamentally creative engagement with life is what prompted the present attempt to elucidate the idea of ‘voluntary simplicity as aesthetics of existence,’ and it is this attempt to infuse Foucauldian ethics with an emerging post-consumerist philosophy of life that constitutes the original contribution of this paper.

(Words and) Images of power in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Petrolio

This contribution focuses on an unfinished novel, Petrólio by Pier Paolo Pasolini to reflect on nature and images of power, as interpreted by one of the greatest Italian post-war intellectuals. The central thesis is that while the peasant and fascist society was based on the male command, on the normative force of tradition, the contemporary consumer society is based on female persuasion, on the push to conform and not to differentiate. However, while patriarchal authoritarianism allowed emancipatory rebellion, consumerist homologation was able to prevent forms of resistance by disseminating power in an infinite network of relationships, whose plot cannot be dissolved. The reading of Petrólio invites the jurist not to focus exclusively on the rational aspects of the rules and procedures that limit power, but also to devote herself to reflecting on the two dimensions of power, the discursive and the aesthetic.

My Body is Your Vehicle: Materialität als Reflexionsbegriff in den Werken von Janine Antoni

Through the radical use of the sheer materiality of the artwork, including her own body, Janine Antoni intends a profound encounter between herself, the artwork and the viewer. The work of art becomes thereby a critical concept of reflection and an occasion for reflexive thinking regarding the identity of the subject in the contemporary postmodern consumer society. This essay examines where and how in the art historical reception is Antoni’s sculpture and performance art portrayed, due to its display of materiality, as a locus of reflection on the constitution of subjectivity.

The Yoga Industry: A Conscious Luxury Experience in the Transformation Economy

ABSTRACT Yoga is both a sociocultural phenomenon and a multibillion dollar industry. As consumers shift spending habits towards transformational and well-being experiences, the yoga industry provides a sophisticated and diverse offer of commodities, services and experiences that mix and bricolage conscious luxury with holistic and sustainable practices. The promise of happiness, harmony, balance and self-actualization are key indicators of cultural capital and status in contemporary consumer society. The yoga industry offers these services across a multitude of platforms and uses branding strategies that borrow emotional and sensory dynamics from the luxury market as well as upward mobility logics of social differentiation. The success of this consumption pattern is evident in the economic worth of the yoga and wellness industries. Yoga brands function as aspirational lifestyle brands offering social, symbolic, and psychological benefits that go beyond the physical practice. These brands also propose new aesthetic and ethical body ideals. This article argues that yoga is a multisensory luxury experience, providing consumers with achievement of both tangible and intangible physical, mental and spiritual individual needs and aspirations. The yoga studio becomes the immersive or escapist space that replaces traditional religious institutions; representing self-transformation, self-empowerment and community engagement. It is the space where the quest for meaning takes place, under hyper-individualistic logics of consumer capitalism and luxury market dynamics. Through the analysis of aspirational lifestyle branding and marketing strategies associated with three yoga studios, this article considers the inherent paradoxes of yoga as a conscious luxury experience and yoga as a traditional practice.

The conceptualisation of problem gambling in social services: email interviews with Finnish social services directors

Research on handling problem gambling has mostly been concentrated on therapeutic treatment and individual psychotherapy. The treatment focus, however, underscores the financial troubles of problem gamblers. In the Nordic welfare state, citizens’ financial problems fall under the umbrella of social services. Eleven Finnish social services directors were interviewed via email or telephone on their professional experiences with problem gambling and about the support methods available in their institutions. The social services directors believed that gambling problems are rooted in the contemporary consumer society with its financial inequality and pressures of belonging. They had no shared definition or method of recognising problem gambling. Despite being in a supervisory position, the social services directors were unable to give an estimate of the degree of problem gambling among their institution’s clients. A register of cases related to problem gambling in Finnish social services seems necessary. The results indicate, furthermore, that tools should be developed for the early identification of problem gambling in social services as well as for improvement of the linkage between the financial support of social services and therapeutic treatment in specialised centres.

The “Sociological-Сaloric” Value of Food: Culinary, Cultural, and Spatial “Measurements”

The article was initially intended as a review of Carolyn Steel’s book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. However, the author’s foreword on the reasons and variations of the sociological interest in food turned the review into the reflections on the ways of (or a kind of) sociological analysis of food’s role in the contemporary consumer society, a role that cannot be simply reduced to a “fuel” necessary for the trouble-free operation of man as a biological creature. There are several clearly-defined contexts of the scientific analysis of food that can be of interest and importance for sociologists. These contexts include the macroeconomic approach (such as various interpretations of food security from the social-economic to the (geo)political, such as the Russian state’s politicized discourse of import substitution that ignores the population’s real food practices and access to food); the gender-economic approach (a ‘feminized’ version of economic history); the culinary-ideological approach (when the recipes of the usual cookbook or the model of public catering development hide the ideological didactic instructions on the mandatory way of life, i.e., “political dietology”); and the historical-cultural-anthropological approach (the attempts to reconstruct the social-cultural codes of food and its role in the epoch-making events of the past). Such wide boundaries of today’s scientific interpretations of food allowed the presentation of the Hungry City as an almost ideal example of the sociological analysis of the social life of food in all its diverse manifestations (such as the production and transportation of food, urbanization and food markets, the transformations of home kitchens’ design, the development of the public catering system, social meanings of the joint meal-and-wastes recycling, social justice and utopias), even though the book focuses on only the culinary culture of England.

Comparative Analysis of Serbian and European Legislation in the Area of Waste Management

Abstract Waste management, ecological consciousness and environmental protection have become increasingly topical issues ever since the beginning of the 21st century, and in favour of this claim is the fact that there is an increasing number of authors dealing with environmental law, as well the level of global ecological consciousness. The contemporary consumer society is characterized by the fact that it creates a plethora of different kinds of waste. The goal is to create a modern system of integrated waste management in order to encompass the cycle of manufacturing and consumption with a recycling process at the end of the consumer products lifespan. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the European legislation, as well as to analyse the Serbian legislation in the area of waste management. The European legislation on waste management is much older and far more developed than its Serbian counterpart, hence, it represents the foundation for future development of regulations in Serbia. The current waste management legislation in Serbia is largely based on the EU legislation, however, owing to the insufficiently matured and stable Serbian institutions, implementation of these regulations is below the expected level.

Laughing off the Stereotypes: Age and Aging in Seniors' Online Sex-Related Humor.

Focusing on sex, the most salient topic featured in ageist jokes, this study aims at exploring the extent to which seniors' own humor reflects common ageist stereotypes or rather echoes contemporary consumer society representations of seniors' sexuality. The study was based on a quantitative content analysis of 300 humorous sex-related messages posted during one full year by members of 14 leading online communities for seniors. Findings indicated that whereas the portrayal of older adults in humor typically relied on negative ageist stereotypes, their representation in seniors' online sex-related humor depended on the social identity of the butt of this humor. If it was an in-group member (oneself, another community member, or the community as a whole), the portrayal was rather positive, but when the butt belonged to the out-group (older adults in general), the depiction was far more ageist. Nonetheless, the representation of older butts of humor was generally more positive than that of the younger ones. These findings suggest that seniors tend to identify with current cultural representations of sexuality in later life and use sex-related humor as a personal means of resisting ageism. They apply two principal strategies: Distancing-reproducing certain ageist stereotypes by ascribing them to other older adults, but less so to their own group and even less than that to themselves-and equalizing older and younger individuals, even according the former an advantage regarding sexuality.

Survival Strategies of New Religions in a Secular Consumer Society

In this article, I argue that in contemporary neoliberal consumer societies, traditional religious missionizing activity is superseded by religious branding and marketing. An example of this at a national level is Estonia, a small secular society in Europe where the majority of the population defines itself as religiously unaffiliated. Over the last quarter-century, Estonia has been characterized by neoliberal reforms and governance and has seen the creation of a religious or spiritual marketplace. I examine three strategies for survival in this marketplace by using three examples: a native Neopagan association with legal status as a religious association; a Kriya Yoga community with legal entity status as a non-profit association; and a Neo-Tantric organization with legal entity status as a regular business enterprise. I show that despite the differences in their approaches, each case shows how branding and marketing are increasingly important for new religious groups seeking to establish a successful presence in contemporary neoliberal consumer society.

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany & Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany & Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

Psychoanalytic Stimulus Packages

David Bennett, The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 2016, 314pp+vii; £20 paperback'What happens when we start to decode sex-talk as metaphoric moneytalk?' (p2) This is the organising question running through David Bennett's finely-argued, wide-ranging and lively study The Currency of Desire, a history of 'libidinal economy', its thinkers and discontents, from the Enlightenment to the present day. Bennett's reading is capacious, taking in everything from Lawrence to Lyotard, Viennese Actionism to Christina Aguilera, and his pursuit of his subject energetic and expansive, travelling from the 'complex marriages' of the Oneida Community in nineteenth-century North America to the new money - crime - psychoanalysis circuit of Yeltsin's Russia from our own recent past. If the vastness and stretch of Bennett's interests give his text a sometimes baggy formlessness, each chapter comes studded with insights and asides enough to reward any reader's patience. Erudite, engaging, and sometimes drily funny, The Currency of Desire combines political seriousness with an admirably scrupulous regard for what sometimes seems, to us now, the absurdities and delusions of the past. Bennett's aim 'is to denaturalise [...] the language of libidinal economy and reopen it to critique by historicising, rather than parodying, it' (p38).Contemporary consumer society, from the relationships column in the Guardian to dating apps Tinder and Grindr, is awash with money metaphors floating in the discourses of sexuality and sex talk swimming through the language of money. We 'invest' in relationships, see our erotic or cultural 'capital' rise and fall as we work over our personal 'brand' and online identity, our private lives all the while being commodified, measured and monetised by Facebook as our financial lives are subject to strictures for stimulus or austerity. Economic concepts, in Bennett's account, 'have permeated the vocabularies of both popular and scientific discourses on sexual anatomy, psychology, morality and politics for several centuries' (p7) and The Currency of Desire sets itself the task of carrying out 'the resurrection of dead metaphors, or the resuscitation of unconscious ones' (p36) in order that we might estrange and see afresh the libidinal economic terms informing our consumerist lives.Sex and money have, after all, been talked about together for a very long time. They even share cliches, from money making the world go round to the various insinuations about the 'oldest profession'. All sorts of pimps and pamphleteers have seen the financial appeal of desire, while a century's worth of Freudian analysis has searched the money-world for evidence of libidinal drives and dynamics. As the cynical author of The Wandering Whore Continued (1660) put it, 'Mony and cunny are good commodities'.1 Eschewing the twin temptations of 'biologising' money (the orthodox Freudian approach) or 'eroticising' capital (the project of both psychoanalytic dissidents such as Wilhelm Reich as well as neoliberal advertising and marketing gurus), Bennett insists instead that 'neither discourse can ultimately claim to demystify the other, or explain the other historically' (p80). At a certain historical moment 'the discourses of money and sex became inseparable', and it is this interconnectedness, and its consequences, which The Currency of Desire traces. Bennett 'traces the history of the exchange or intercourse between the languages of money and sex, economic and libidinal economy' (pp3-4), not in order for one to 'establish itself as the literal, rather than the metaphoric, voice of history' (p80), but rather so readers can trace how these two mutually-reinforcing discourses have shaped our accounts of selfhood and society together. Bennett's work is thus both psychoanalytic history and a history of psychoanalysis, a work of a discourse analysis and an analysis of discourse mutating and shifting through history. …

The Christmas celebration of secondary consumers: Observations from food banks in Finland

This article explores what Christmas entails to people with limited consumer options and how they cope in their difficult life situations. Previous research suggests that in the contemporary consumer society in which people construct and maintain their identities by participating in consumer culture, those who lack the means to consume face social exclusion. Secondary consumption is a way for poor consumers to come closer to prevailing consumption standards. Drawing from an ethnographic study of Christmas celebrations in four faith-based food assistance organizations within one Finnish city, this study shows that for secondary consumers, Christmas simultaneously entails both more resources and a more intense sense of social exclusion. Christmas highlights the paradoxical dual position of secondary consumers where they are both excluded from and dependent on the prevailing practices of consumer culture. To cope with their situation, food receivers use different strategies: they may refuse to celebrate, distance themselves from their dependence on charity or reframe their situation by considering the food donations as gifts from God.

Experiential luxury shopping at the Louis Vuitton Flagship in Paris: Dramas of identity

Abstract Purpose: Outline the dimensions of the luxury shopping experience that distinguish it from hedonic shopping in other contexts. Focus on the meaning the luxury flagship shopping experience has to consumers at the point of purchase. Design: Ethnographic field study. Observation, interviews and analysis of responses of twenty shoppers at the Louis Vuitton flagship on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. Findings: Identification of seven general types of experience, the most prevalent having to do with the Paris location and French cultural associations that the brand connotes through the store. Shoppers respond to the symbolic attributes of the brand in defining and enacting a self in the store environment. Research Limitations: An exploratory study with a small sample and brief interviews. Larger samples at this and other locations will provide us with more data on the key attributes of luxury shopping. Practical implications: Furthers knowledge on experiential shopping by allowing customers to share their motivations. Of interest to academics and luxury retailers as it illustrates the importance of the store environment and location to customers. Social implications: Furthers our understanding of the individual in contemporary consumer society within a branded context where the self is dramatically put into play. Originality/value: Louis Vuitton occupies an important place within the rarified world of luxury brands catering to the aspirations and fantasies of customers. Understanding subjective meanings provided by shoppers as they exist, the store provides a greater depth of understanding of the customer response to luxury brands.