Discuss The Concept Of Luxury

The world of fashion is an exciting one and people have become a part of it (Jennifer and Kim, 2010). Fashion is a word that can mean different things, to some people it means what celebrities or models wear on a public event. To others, fashion means the dressing style that people can wear it for their daily basis. Understand the definition of fashion is a basis of discussing the luxury consumption (Jennifer and Kim, 2010). Tortora and Eubank defined fashion as a way of behaving or some things and must be accepted by many members of group (Tortora and Eubank, 2005). For instance, the way of behaving include a wide variety of activities, such as the words people speak, the clothes people wear and the lifestyle people have. The majority of a

Literature Review

2.1 The Concept of Luxury

2.1.1 the concept of luxury in Western culture

Lots of Western sociologists have defined luxury as a symbolic show, a reflection of social and class, the majority purpose of purchasing the luxury-goods is to improve their social position and have the highly desires to become to be a higher class. (Pierre Xiao, 2008). However, according to Roux, he defined luxury as emotional, experimental, and psychological (Lipovetsky and Roux, 2005). It means, the concept of luxury can be described as the expression of consumers’ emotions or attitudes, such as the lifestyles people have or the aspirations people desire.

Other scholars pointed out that, the concept of luxury became more democratization, more and more luxury brands have changed their business strategy from family hand crafted traditions to market-oriented (Dubios and Laurent, 2001). For instance, the company such as LVMH Group and Richemont restructured their strategy form the family-owned luxury brands into powerful luxury giants (Pierre Xiao, 2008). Furthermore, Danielle Alleres has defined luxury in different ways, he discovered three levels of luxury:

 Inaccessible, the exclusive or unique hand-made

In China, luxury can be defined as extravagant and wasteful, because the word “luxury” is combined of two characters in Chinese—“she” and “chi” (Pierre Xiao, 2008). In recent research based on the Chinese fashion consumers, Gutman has proposed that the main concept of luxury product is to satisfy the desired values of consumers. For luxury goods, the characteristics of the luxury products and of the luxury brand should highly significant cater to the needs of consumers and become more symbolic in Chinese fashion consumers society (J.Gutman, 1992).

According to Dubois and Czellar, the Chinese elite’s attitude via luxury goods has identified to six attributes: excellent quality, uniqueness, very high price, emotional content, superfluous/inessential and the last one brand history and heritage.

 Excellent