LUXURY AND ITS IMPACT ON SOCIETY | LUXURY AND ITS IMPACT ON SOCIETY

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What is a luxury? The dictionary defines “luxury” as something not essential but conducive to pleasure and comfort; something expensive or hard to obtain; sumptuous living or surroundings. Another way to define a luxury good is one that is expensive but non-essential. Luxury can also be defined as excess in comfort and pleasures, connected to the squandering of wealth.

But I propose to expand the meaning of the word. Luxury should be defined as objects or services not essential to human beings, including those which include superfluous functions and superfluous design features whose purpose is to raise prices with the goal of limiting access , thus transforming them (partially or completely) into symbols of wealth

(Let’s not confuse luxury with comfort, because within reasonable limits, comfort is an essential need. Only excesses in comfort should be classified as luxury.)

Luxury goods include absolutely all jewelry made of precious metals and gems; automobiles whose prices exceed a reasonable maximum; dwellings whose size exceeds a reasonable number of square feet; furniture manufactured from expensive woods or with superfluous design features; fashionable clothing in which the price reflects the designer’s name, the producer’s brand, etc.

Luxury goods are so popular that to one degree or another, luxury features are present in a broad spectrum of the most varied goods. In other words, an enormous number of goods and services include some non-functional addition whose main purpose is to bring a higher price.

For example, the price of an ordinary assembly-line electric water kettle for making tea can vary from about 15 dollars to about 600 dollars. But the functionality and the quality of the materials used are basically not much different. Close examination leads to the conclusion that price increases can be justified up to about 30-60 dollars. From the practical point of view, further increases in the kettle’s price have diminishing significance and pursue one goal only – that of artificially limiting access to the item through the use of more costly materials, unnecessary expenditures of labor and unnecessary design features.

I can foresee objections along the following lines – there is no such thing as superfluous design, and a beautiful design sometimes costs a great deal of money. I disagree, first of all because beauty in design is a relative concept. In the final analysis, design is beautiful or attractive when it has a definite practical purpose, inseparably connected with generally accepted values. If a luxury good

incorporating precious metals and gems seems in the eyes of the ordinary person to have some vitally important value, then that is because those precious metals and gems enter into our mind’s concept of beauty to a significant degree. A 600-dollar tea kettle, glittering with genuine gold leaf and

sporting a handle that has been twisted into fanciful shapes and carved with colorful patterns, will look beautiful to us. But if the significance and value of the precious metals and gemstones incorporated by that $600 tea kettle were to suddenly disappear, would we see it as so beautiful?

A logical question arises. Why, then, do people “need” luxury (or luxury features), if they are not physically necessary for human life? What makes luxury so alluring?

The fact is that luxury fulfills a most important function in a person’s life. By giving a visual demonstration of a person’s level of success and his or her social status, luxury defines a person’s significance in society. In other words, luxury is a symbol that gives visual proof of its owner’s social importance .

The determination of a person’s social importance is extraordinarily important for every single person. Money acts as a marker of importance. The higher the amount of money earned by a person, the higher his or her social status. But a person’s earnings cannot be directly seen by other people. For that reason, a person feels obliged to give visual form to part of his or her money by transforming it into luxury goods and good with luxury features, thus demonstrating his value and importance. Luxury and luxury features have penetrated all the goods surrounding us, at all social levels. Luxury requires colossal investments of our labor and materials, but its sole purpose is to demonstrate its owners’ social significance! Colossal human resources are engaged in the production of uninspired symbols.

It is probably not necessary to explain how much it matters to people to be able to demonstrate their social importance and position in society.

Indeed, it is a vital need. A person’s social significance is a basic part of the evolutionary mechanism which forms and improves human beings.

Social importance has always played a crucial role in the selection of a mate and in the formation of business and social ties; and luxuries (or luxury...