Luxury

This essay contemplates the recent concern with ecologically conscious luxury in fashion alongside similar developments elsewhere in the context of and, indeed, as an expression of a distinct yet increasingly prevalent and pervasive cultural dynamic, a shift in our collective mood or what more popularly tends to be called zeitgeist: the passage from postmodernism to metamodernism.

Pre-loved clothes have much to offer the consumer as a future form of luxury, not in the least because of their sustainability. However, despite their quality and exclusivity, not all pre-loved clothes are believed to offer consumers the luxury value vintage clothes do. Can pre-loved clothes become a luxury, and if so, how? This raises questions about how luxury fashion comes into being and about the stakes of human versus material agency in processes of the ‘luxurization’ of fashion.