Читать книгу Luxury Brand Management in Digital and Sustainable Times - Michel Chevalier - Страница 12

What we commonly call luxury no longer has much to do with what was meant only a century ago; or, a little further back, in the years before the Industrial Revolution. We are not talking here about objects of luxury. A product like soap, for example, although a real luxury in the Middle Ages, has become largely democratic since then, and it has therefore ceased to be a luxury in our eyes. Today, the word has a very different meaning from how it was used, for example, in the seventeenth century. It connotes for us both positive and negative images; most of the negative images are derived from its historical heritage, while positive images are for the most of a recent introduction.

As we will see, the term has experienced, particularly in the past two centuries, important semantic changes that reflect the construction of our modern consumer society. These transformations are of great interest for our subject: they had direct impact on the progressive segmentation of the global luxury market and on the current positioning of brands claiming this territory.