Luxury and Digital, Hindered Narratives?

Previously exclusive, because of a rather too quick assimilation of social classes to a particular access to wealth, luxury, in parallel with the blossoming of mass consumption, has been democratized, with a particularly intense acceleration due to the development of virtual means of communication.

We wanted to show how these forms of communication operate. We have established the notion of semiosic alteration as the organizing principle of luxury communication on the Internet, with the constraint of control defined as what allows us to preserve its exclusivity. While we should have expected the rhetoric of luxury to operate as forms of expression, it becomes the form of content: the legend, the documentary, the praise, the chronicle. In the end, we retain luxury not what concretely translates it, i.e. the substance of the brands or products, but the spectacle held around these translations. This seemed to us to be the essential issue; under the model of theatricalization. While the Internet medium offers the widest latitude to highlight in all its forms what usually constitutes the essence of luxury, i.e. its substance, all the rhetorical games operate precisely to postpone it. The tactic is quite visible: it is a question of subtly putting away recognizable signs for the sole benefit of a prior decoding operation. The paradox of the luxury is played thus, like a discriminatory order.