Can Luxury Fashion Ever Be Considered Sustainable Fashion?

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Luxury, Fancy Goods & Other Pejoratives

For much of history, luxury carried negative connotations, associated with moral excess, indulgence and social decay rather than aspiration. 

Classical philosophers and religious thinkers argued that the pursuit of unnecessary possessions encouraged vanity and extravagance. 

This critique is reflected in Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), where Emma Bovary's desire for fashionable goods and an affluent lifestyle ultimately leads to financial and personal ruin. Rather than celebrating luxury, the novel presents it as an unattainable ideal driven by desire and illusion. 

Over time, however, luxury has evolved from a moral warning into a symbol of status, craftsmanship and cultural value. 

Definitions of Luxury

Luxury has never been a fixed concept. Rather, it has evolved alongside shifts in wealth, culture and consumption, with each era redefining what constitutes exclusivity and desire. Atkinson and Kang (2022) trace the origins of luxury to Ancient Greece, where the emergence of money as a medium of exchange enabled wealth to be accumulated and displayed through objects. For the first time, status could be purchased, establishing a lasting connection between material possessions and social distinction.

Today, luxury extends beyond exceptional craftsmanship or elevated price points. While scholars consistently identify characteristics such as rarity, premium pricing and superior aesthetic value as defining features of luxury goods (Eunju et al., 2019), these attributes alone are not enough. As Eunju et al. argue, a product or brand only becomes truly luxurious when it is recognised and valued as such by consumers. Luxury is therefore as much a cultural perception as it is a material reality.

This interplay between tangible attributes and symbolic meaning is reflected in Dubois et al.'s six dimensions of luxury: exceptional quality, high price, scarcity and uniqueness, aesthetics and multisensory appeal, heritage and personal history, and a degree of superfluousness. Together, these characteristics position luxury not as a functional necessity, but as an expression of craftsmanship, exclusivity and identity. 

In contemporary fashion, luxury is defined not simply by what is owned, but by the stories, values and cultural significance embedded within the products and brands themselves.

The History of European Luxury

The foundations of European luxury can be traced to eighteenth-century Paris, where the French court embedded fashion within aristocratic hierarchy, using dress and textiles as visible markers of status. 

In the nineteenth century, this system was formalised through the work of Charles Frederick Worth, originally from the United Kingdom; he moved to Paris to be close to the French court and is widely regarded as the father of haute couture. 

Working in Paris and associated with imperial society, according to some fashion historians, Worth shifted dressmaking from client-led commissions to designer authorship, introducing seasonal collections, signed garments, and the concept of the designer as creative authority.

This established haute couture as an institution defined by exclusivity, craftsmanship and controlled production. Parisian fashion houses positioned themselves as arbiters of taste, where heritage and atelier skill became central to luxury value creation (Steele, 1998).

In the twentieth century, couture houses consolidated their influence while leather goods maisons such as Hermès and Louis Vuitton expanded luxury into travel goods and lifestyle accessories. By the end of the twentieth century, luxury became increasingly brand-led, with heritage, logos and aesthetic codes acting as key signals of recognition and desirability.

European luxury can then be summarised as a heritage system transformed by modern corporate marketing systems, branding and corporate consolidation. 

The rise of groups such as LVMH and Kering introduced scale, global expansion and centralised brand management. 

Luxury thus evolved into a hybrid system combining European artisanal heritage with global corporate strategy inspired by an American globalised corporate culture, shareholders' thirst for expansion and capital markets.

Luxury, the Birth of Consumer Culture & the Department Store

The history of luxury is closely tied to the development of modern consumer culture. In nineteenth-century Paris, grand department stores such as Le Bon Marché transformed retail into a cultural experience, using display, spectacle and fixed pricing to make luxury more visible and desirable. Rather than simply selling goods, these spaces staged aspiration, shaping how consumers engaged with fashion and status.

In the United States, the rise of “fancy goods” stores similarly expanded access to imported textiles, accessories and decorative objects, helping to cultivate an emerging urban consumer culture. Over time, industrial production and rising incomes broadened access to goods, enabling middle-class consumers to emulate elite styles and reinforcing consumption as a marker of identity (Veblen, 1899). 

As ready-to-wear expanded through department stores and mail-order catalogues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, access to fashionable dress became increasingly democratised. This disrupted traditional class markers, as mass-produced garments began to echo styles once reserved for bespoke tailoring. The upper classes could no longer rely solely on seasonal trips to Paris or exclusive tailors as clear signals of status. Instead, distinction shifted to more subtle cues: craftsmanship, provenance, and the exclusivity of couture and made-to-measure systems through which elite consumers reasserted difference within an expanding consumer society.

After the Second World War, rapid economic growth, suburbanisation and mass production accelerated the expansion of the American middle class. 

Increased disposable income and the rise of advertising positioned consumption as both an economic engine and a cultural ideal. 

Luxury became aspirational rather than exclusively aristocratic, laying the foundations for a consumer society in which status, identity and mobility were expressed through branded goods.

The Problem With Modern Luxury 

Today, contemporary luxury is being reshaped by a fundamental shift in consumer values, yet many established brands appear slow to respond. 

While luxury consumption continues to evolve in line with broader social and cultural change (Bain, 2018), some heritage houses have struggled to adapt to the “new cultural codes and value systems that have developed around luxury consumption”. 

This growing disconnect is particularly evident in the difficulty brands face in distinguishing between traditional and emerging luxury consumers, whose expectations and motivations increasingly diverge.

Two dynamics are central to this transformation. First, the luxury consumer base is becoming younger and more values-driven, with millennials and Gen Z now accounting for a significant share of demand; consumers aged 25–44 alone represent around 30% of global luxury sales (Atkingson & Kang, 2022). These groups are not only economically influential but also more likely to prioritise alignment between personal values and brand identity, reshaping what luxury signifies. 

Despite this shift, many luxury brands continue to operate within legacy frameworks of exclusivity, heritage and aspiration that do not fully reflect these new expectations. As a result, luxury increasingly risks lagging behind the cultural moment it once defined, responding to consumer change rather than actively shaping it.

In the age of influencers and social media, luxury brands have increasingly lost control of the carefully constructed narratives that once governed meaning and exclusivity, as image-making has shifted from maison-led storytelling to decentralised digital circulation, an instability further underscored by recent episodes in which Chinese manufacturers publicly responded to tariff pressures by bypassing brands and communicating directly with consumers, exposing the fragility of traditional luxury mediation.

As Roland Barthes (1967) suggests in his analysis of fashion as a system of signs, meaning in dress is not inherent but constructed through cultural codes and representation, implying that luxury derives its power not from objects alone, but from the narratives and symbols through which they are made legible. 

Conclusions

Taken together, these shifts highlight a contemporary paradox: while luxury once shaped and signalled the cultural zeitgeist, it is now increasingly reactive to it. In a globalised and hyper-visible market, modern luxury struggles to maintain its traditional markers of distance and exclusivity, relying instead on celebrity endorsement, accelerated product cycles and expanded distribution. 

As access widens, particularly in markets such as China, where luxury is now readily available in tier two and three cities, the symbolic value of purchasing abroad or “elsewhere” has diminished, eroding the aura of scarcity that once underpinned luxury’s cultural authority. 

This raises a broader question about whether European luxury has reached a point of structural saturation within its traditional model. If so, it may open a space for a renewed form of luxury rooted less in scale and visibility, and more in artisanal craft defined by time-intensive production, exceptional materials, and skills passed down through generations. In this framing, value is not derived from ubiquity or symbolic status, but from authenticity, sustainability and the ability to support and sustain craft communities over time. 

Sources available on request