A critical approach to contemporary luxury studies focusing on aesthetic, design-led and media practice with key case studies

Assembling the foremost scholars in this innovative, distinctive, and expanding subject, internationally well-known critical theorists John Armitage and Joanne Roberts present a ground-breaking aesthetic, design-led and media-related examination of the relations between historical and, crucially, contemporary ideas of luxury.

Critical Luxury Studies offers a technoculturally inspired survey of the mediated arts and design, as well as a means of comprehending the socio-economic order with novel philosophical tools and critical methods of interrogation that are re-defining the concept of luxury in the twenty-first century.

John Armitage is Professor of Media Arts and Co-Director of the Winchester Luxury Research Group at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. John's research interests include luxury and visual culture, new media art, continental philosophy, and the critical theory of technology. He is the founder and co-editor of the Duke University Press journal Cultural Politics.

Joanne Roberts is Professor in Arts and Cultural Management and Director of the Winchester Luxury Research Group at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Her research interests include knowledge, innovation, creativity, and luxury. Her latest book is A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Knowledge Management (Sage Publications, 2015). She is an Editorial Advisory Board member of Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption (Taylor & Francis).

List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
Series Editors' Preface
Notes on Contributors

1. Critical Luxury Studies: Defining a Field
John Armitage and Joanne Roberts

PART I: CRITICAL LUXURY STUDIES
2. Knowing Luxury: From Socio-Cultural Value to Market Price?
Joanne Roberts and John Armitage
3. Luxury: A Dialectic of Desire?
Christopher J. Berry
4. The Luxury Duality: From Economic Fact to Cultural Capital
Ulrich Lehmann
5. 'Life's Little Luxuries?': The Social and Spatial Construction of Luxury
Juliana Mansvelt, Mary Breheny and Iain Hay
6. The Object and Art of Luxury Consumption
Mike Featherstone

PART II: ART, DESIGN, MEDIA
7. Experiments in Suchness: Hiroshi Sugimoto's Silk Shiki for Hermès
Thomaï Serdari
8. Libeskind in Las Vegas: Reflections on Architecture as a Luxury Commodity
Adam Sharr
9. Sartorial Connoisseurship: The T-Shirt and the Interrogation of Luxury
Jonathan Faiers
10. Online Luxury: Geographies of Production and Consumption and the Louis Vuitton Website
Agnès Rocamora

Index