Luxury is a Mirror

Collage de Luxe, 2024

What do you say about luxury?
​What does luxury say about you?

Luxury, as if it had adopted the words attributed to a Chinese poet of the 8th century, “suggests the living relief of things,” gives form to human aspirations within our contemporary cultures; it resonates with our own ambitions and contradictions, those that accompany our shared and individual existential quests.

Luxury evolves on the fringes of the ordinary or more precisely at the boundaries of what is aesthetically, financially, or sometimes even morally acceptable. It is there, at the border of what is accessible to us and what eludes us, that luxury unites opposites, containing and integrating them in a dynamic and subjective manner: simplicity and complication, tradition and innovation, discretion and extravagance, the ephemeral and the timeless, to name just a few of the paradoxes that animate luxury. Luxury does not fear paradoxes; it thrives on them, constantly seeking itself in an “art of invention” — to quote the motto of Greubel Forsey, the high-end watchmaking company based in Switzerland at a thousand meters of altitude, on the outskirts of the city where both the architect Le Corbusier and the poet Blaise Cendrars were born. These tensions give life to luxury, nourishing it and making it a mirror of ourselves.

A first glance may be enough for luxury to awaken deep instincts. On one hand, luxury taps into our primal desire for individual power and higher social status, which we often associate with greater security and better access to resources — allowing us to protect ourselves and care for those we love. On the other hand, it also speaks to our need for connection, to engage with others, and to be part of a community, reminding us that we are, at our core, a social species.

For those who dare to look, luxury reflects multiple facets of our personalities, revealing the relationship we have with our own desires, confronting us with our own paradoxes, challenging our need to shine, to stand out, and to exist in the world. This is not insignificant and thus not without danger. Others before us got lost in the experience of luxury, dazzled by its reflections, hypnotized by its songs, allowing themselves, more or less willingly, to be swept up in its emotional whirlwinds. As they gradually slip into a chronic sense of lack, they eventually recognize in themselves only a desire for possession, turning into obsession, as if only the accumulation of goods and experiences could finally fill them. In the face of luxury, there is the risk of seeking refuge and ultimately imprisoning oneself in an idealized, unreal vision of life, without rough edges, which gradually becomes immobilized in its habits. Instead of opening a path to oneself, by illustrating the possibility of integrating opposites, luxury would then be reduced to being merely a crutch to support fragile identities and their frail sense of personal worth.

Through the experiences it offers, luxury illuminates our desires, stimulates our emotions, and questions our values. It thus invites us to explore our own limits, and perhaps transgress and transcend them, beyond the stereotypes that have defined us so far. The French cruise company Ponant has understood this well, informing us explicitly in its advertisements for sea experiences aboard its exceptional yachts and sailing ships: “The destination is you.”

Eventually, this may be the most intense experience luxury has to offer — if we dare to open ourselves to it — the existential experience of confronting ourselves. Like the Sphinx of antiquity, luxury asks: “Who are you?”, “Who do you desire to become?”

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Inspirations
Abélès, M. (2018). Un ethnologue au pays du luxe. Paris : Odile Jacob.
Du Fu (1994). Il y a un homme errant. Paris : La Différence.
Jung, C. G. (1963). L’Âme et la Vie. Paris : Buchet/Chastel.
Nurick A. J., Sanfuentes, M., Nagel, C. Editeurs. (2024). Organisational and Social Dynamics, Volume 24, Number 1. London: Karnac.
Stanford, M. (2024). Leadership Transition — How Leaders Turn Chaos Into Growth. London: LID Publishing.