Overview

Luxury has been both celebrated and condemned throughout history right up to the present day. This groundbreaking text examines luxury and its relationship with desire, status, consumption and economic value, exploring why luxury remains prominent even in the context of a global recession. Using approaches from cultural studies, semiotic research and aesthetics, Luxury presents a wide range of case studies including urban space and new technologies, travel, interior design, cars, fashion ads and jewellery to explore what luxury represents, and why, in the contemporary world. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars across a range of fashion studies, cultural studies and sociology, and anyone interested in the power and allure of luxury today.

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9780857853301

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Reviews

Luxury is so much more than any current It bag with a designer name on it. As a distinguished Italian scholar Patrizia Calefato shows in this seminal book, luxury is about excess in its purest form. Calefato draws on various, and often unexpected, guises of historical and contemporary luxury, in order to establish her unique analysis of the phenomenon of luxury. -- Djurdja Bartlett, author of FashionEast: the Spectre That Haunted Socialism, and editor of volume 9 of Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, Senior Research Fellow, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, UK.

Author Information

Patrizia Calefato is Associate Professor at the Università degli studi di Bari, Italy. Lisa Adams is lecturer in English at the University of Bari, Italy.

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