Ask someone who works in watchmaking, hospitality, automotive or real estate what they do, and the answer is clear. The name of the sector unambiguously defines the merchandise category. Ask someone who works in luxury, and honestly, the answer gets harder: some will say they deal in “stuff that costs a lot,” others in “useless stuff,” others still in “nice things for a few clients.” But luxury isn’t only that: it’s also whatever label someone slaps on a “pricey” t-shirt sold for a hundred euros or more, just because it carries the right logo.

Luxury is a bastard sector. I say this with affection, but without discount: it’s a space where industries that normally have nothing to say to one another converge, fashion and watchmaking, automotive and hospitality, art and real estate, jewellery and private aviation, each with its own supply chain, its own margins, its own mechanics and its own customers. And because luxury is inherently cross-industry, anyone who has worked even briefly on an expensive product, or who follows a handful of celebrated brands on a blog or a magazine, feels automatically entitled to talk about luxury. The result is that in public debate, and often in boardrooms or university lecture halls too, contradictory definitions coexist without anyone noticing, or caring, or, worse still, without there being any definition at all.

The cross-industry alibi

Faced with such a heterogeneous subject, the temptation is to conclude there’s nothing to clarify: that luxury is simply too varied to allow for a definition or a method, and that any attempt to set rules is an academic exercise doomed to collide with market reality. That’s a convenient argument, and a wrong one. In my book Il Lusso Tradito (Luxury Betrayed) I start from exactly this point, from the need to first distinguish, within luxury, between product and brand, which is the original source of confusion, and from the observation that the very building blocks of a luxury product, extreme quality, creativity, scarcity, are homogeneous and show up with comparable intensity in fashion as in watchmaking, in automotive as in hospitality. Cross-industry breadth isn’t a problem to resign oneself to: it’s an asset, a distinguishing feature of the sector, and precisely the reason a framework able to work across so many industries is needed.

Meanwhile, to legitimise almost anything, categories have been invented purely to avoid having to dig deeper and define: mass luxury, affordable luxury, masstige. Labels that widen the perimeter of what can claim the word “luxury,” and every unwarranted widening empties its content still further. I’ve never heard an actual customer, the kind who really buys, use the word masstige. Consultants use it, in slide decks, so they don’t have to tell a company that its product is simply expensive, not luxurious.

The relativism alibi

The second convenient refuge is relativism: “luxury means different things in different cultures, so every local definition is as legitimate as any other, and to argue for rigour is a Eurocentric affectation.” There’s something true in this objection, and it deserves to be taken seriously: the historical anchor of Parisian Haute Couture, through which the West codified the canon of good taste, and therefore of luxury, for two centuries, is not at all neutral. It arises from a particular history, that of the court of Louis XIV, and postcolonial critique is right to remind us of this every time we take for granted something that is, simply, French and historically dominant.

But it’s a long and mistaken step from there to concluding that anything goes. The non-Western luxury cases that genuinely work, I think of Amouage in Oman, which builds an autonomous olfactory grammar on the region’s millennia-old tradition of incense and myrrh, or of Sabyasachi in India, which channels Rajasthan embroidery and Bengal weaving through an international distribution system, don’t succeed because they abandon rigour in the name of their own cultural specificity. They succeed because, within their own grammar, they build exactly the same internal discipline a Parisian maison relies on: a recognisable semiotic anchor, a coherence between product and narrative, a defended boundary. Relativism is legitimate on the question “which reference system,” not on the question “is a reference system needed at all.” These are plural luxury systems, not the absence of a system.

Who benefits from the confusion

Some people benefit from the confusion, and it’s worth saying so plainly. Companies benefit, the ones that want to sell their products at high prices without paying the cost of real luxury, extreme quality, genuine creativity, real scarcity: just use the right word on an unremarkable product, and the less expert consumer will do the rest. Consultants benefit, the ones who invent labels like masstige or affordable luxury, because a new category sells better than an uncomfortable diagnosis. University professors like me benefit too, and it would be dishonest not to say so: confusion is an endless mine of cases to explain, of courses to refresh every year, of consultancy to invoice, and it’s far more comfortable to keep teaching an ambiguous sector indefinitely than to risk making it clear. And in the short term, anyone in a listed group who has to deliver a quarter’s growth benefits too: extending a line by diluting a historic brand’s semiotic anchor produces revenue immediately, while the credibility bill arrives later, often once the person who made the decision has already moved to another company. This isn’t an isolated incident, it’s a mechanism: every time a customer agrees to pay a premium price for a product that has nothing of luxury but the name, that premium lands in someone’s accounts, regardless of how well those accounts hold up over time.

In this chaos it isn’t always possible to tell apart those who wallow in it knowing exactly what they’re doing from those who benefit without ever having to admit it, even to themselves. This second category is more insidious precisely because it’s harder to condemn: people who gain from the confusion without seeking it, simply because the system they operate in rewards them, and they take that reward as proof their assumptions were right. It’s rarely deliberate cynicism, it’s a mechanism of misaligned incentives, in which whoever decides is rarely the one who later pays the bill.