54
C. L. Moreno Biec
Analysing what we consider “beautiful” is a way to better understand this new
concept of luxury. Luxury is no longer connected so strongly to aesthetics, and is
much more bound up with the quality of experiences, what Kant calls “subjective
sensation” or “feeling” [2, p. 21] leading to a more holistic meaning. How we analyse
aesthetics comes first from what society has told us about beauty, and secondly
from our own experience, from what has a positive impact on us and what gives us
pleasure. That society often viewed beauty as being linked to (if not synonymous
with) aesthetics was an unfair measure for something so important. Refocusing on
the quality of experiences, as we are now, was a necessary corrective, because that
is the beauty that engages our senses and makes us feel happier. The advantage of
this is that everybody in the whole world is always going in search of pleasure and
fulfilment, and it is something that we do not need to encourage people to go for,
because that drive resides already inside every human being.
All these points make us look back to ancestral cultures and realise that even
though luxury in the past was not even a concept for those societies, certain objects,
ceremonies, and making processes were a space of joy, a source of happiness, and
a sense maker of belonging, which overlaps to an extent with what we nowadays
consider luxury. They found it not by looking for luxury but in the search of selfimprovement, while at the same time strengthening their bonds to the cultures from
which they came. When Socrates talks about the creation of a “Luxury state” he
points out that in all probability a city where everyone is satisfied in terms of food,
clothing, and shelter could be fairly balanced, but such a city does not fully cover
human necessities. Human desires and feelings of fulfilment go beyond such bare
necessities. The new concept of luxury tries to incorporate these deeper needs in our
search for what makes us human, encouraging us to define ourselves by trying to
reach a spiritual and personal evolution. Despite the differences in the communities
analysed here, we can see that the development of unwritten languages and craft
techniques made them sense a feeling of time and community, and offered them a
knowledge that they could carry everywhere, that they could pass to anyone and
where they could “write” the most interesting narratives about who they were, what
they felt, what they made, and how this defined their way of being in the world.
Although these cultural values were mostly open to the whole community, many
did not have access for different reasons, mostly because of their social status. This
limited access is something that our society is suffering from as well. Not many
people are aware of the importance of these values for our evolution as a society, and
not many of them understand that by reaching higher levels of well-being we are not
just improving ourselves but also positively influencing our surroundings. Likewise,
not many people are willing to spend the required time to go beyond basic needs
and understand, learn and consciously engage with alternative languages beyond the
written and spoken. For the people that are already aiming for this new luxury, it is
hard to understand that many others do not want to face changes consciously that
they do not want to adapt to or do something about big social and environmental
issues, and this is perhaps one of the saddest parts of luxury: even if this new concept
of luxury is opened up to more people than before, it is still available only to those
C. L. Moreno Biec
Analysing what we consider “beautiful” is a way to better understand this new
concept of luxury. Luxury is no longer connected so strongly to aesthetics, and is
much more bound up with the quality of experiences, what Kant calls “subjective
sensation” or “feeling” [2, p. 21] leading to a more holistic meaning. How we analyse
aesthetics comes first from what society has told us about beauty, and secondly
from our own experience, from what has a positive impact on us and what gives us
pleasure. That society often viewed beauty as being linked to (if not synonymous
with) aesthetics was an unfair measure for something so important. Refocusing on
the quality of experiences, as we are now, was a necessary corrective, because that
is the beauty that engages our senses and makes us feel happier. The advantage of
this is that everybody in the whole world is always going in search of pleasure and
fulfilment, and it is something that we do not need to encourage people to go for,
because that drive resides already inside every human being.
All these points make us look back to ancestral cultures and realise that even
though luxury in the past was not even a concept for those societies, certain objects,
ceremonies, and making processes were a space of joy, a source of happiness, and
a sense maker of belonging, which overlaps to an extent with what we nowadays
consider luxury. They found it not by looking for luxury but in the search of selfimprovement, while at the same time strengthening their bonds to the cultures from
which they came. When Socrates talks about the creation of a “Luxury state” he
points out that in all probability a city where everyone is satisfied in terms of food,
clothing, and shelter could be fairly balanced, but such a city does not fully cover
human necessities. Human desires and feelings of fulfilment go beyond such bare
necessities. The new concept of luxury tries to incorporate these deeper needs in our
search for what makes us human, encouraging us to define ourselves by trying to
reach a spiritual and personal evolution. Despite the differences in the communities
analysed here, we can see that the development of unwritten languages and craft
techniques made them sense a feeling of time and community, and offered them a
knowledge that they could carry everywhere, that they could pass to anyone and
where they could “write” the most interesting narratives about who they were, what
they felt, what they made, and how this defined their way of being in the world.
Although these cultural values were mostly open to the whole community, many
did not have access for different reasons, mostly because of their social status. This
limited access is something that our society is suffering from as well. Not many
people are aware of the importance of these values for our evolution as a society, and
not many of them understand that by reaching higher levels of well-being we are not
just improving ourselves but also positively influencing our surroundings. Likewise,
not many people are willing to spend the required time to go beyond basic needs
and understand, learn and consciously engage with alternative languages beyond the
written and spoken. For the people that are already aiming for this new luxury, it is
hard to understand that many others do not want to face changes consciously that
they do not want to adapt to or do something about big social and environmental
issues, and this is perhaps one of the saddest parts of luxury: even if this new concept
of luxury is opened up to more people than before, it is still available only to those