Читать книгу Luxury Brand Management in Digital and Sustainable Times - Michel Chevalier - Страница 35

Yves Michaud introduces an interesting metaphor in characterizing the change of focus from product to experience luxury as a vaporization of luxury.²³

As experience takes precedence over product, the objects tend to dissolve themselves into a vaster and composite multisensory space. This ethereal condition that characterizes a gaseous state like vapor finds its natural place into the trend of semantization of consumption initially highlighted by Barthes when he introduces the notion of “universal semantization of usage”²⁴ and by Baudrillard, who states that objects have become signs belonging themselves to larger systems of meaning where symbolization, virtualization, miniaturization, and transparence are becoming characteristics of the products we purchase.²⁵

We find also a correspondence between the notion of product vaporization and the concept of aura introduced by Walter Benjamin, which he defines as being what makes an art piece authentic and unique, that is, “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”²⁶ We may extrapolate that some consumption objects are so exceptional that they can generate emotional shocks, and that they can qualify as having a genuine aura (an engagement ring, a vintage collection car, a famous precious stone), a sort of halo, which transfigurates them, makes them distant, apparently unapproachable—although proximate because they are accessible through purchase. This could be a definition of luxury, where the power of an object reaches beyond its functional purpose and forces the customer into a different world, due to the apparent inaccessibility, exceptionality, intensity, and, sometimes, strangeness of the product.