Luxury Reloaded: What is Modern Luxury?

Karl Lagerfeld once said: "The height of luxury is not asking the price." The exact opposite of popular wisdom, which likes to whisper consolingly to itself that you can't buy true luxury. This begs the question: what is luxury these days? And does it have a price tag?

There is no denying that the feeling of luxury comes more easily with a little more budget. Every Lufthansa First Class passenger will probably agree with this. Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that the greater the material resources, the more spiritually charged the term luxury becomes. Successful people in particular like to emphasize that time is their ultimate luxury, or the freedom to say no. However, this privilege is in turn linked to a certain economic autonomy.

Nevertheless, just because something is expensive doesn't mean it deserves the title of luxury. Nowadays, the term luxury is attached to all kinds of things: hotels, spas, cosmetics, and the most banal accessories, which increasingly rarely deserve the label. As a result, the term has degenerated into a marketing formula – and one with a bad reputation, because luxury is associated with ostentation.

Much of what we define as a luxury product today has long since been mass-produced. There is no other explanation for the billions in sales generated by the so-called luxury groups. The concept is as simple as it is problematic: goods of all kinds are enriched with culture, history and meaning, and so-called experts confirm their authenticity and determine their presumed collector's value. And then you have a modern luxury object, at least from a capitalist perspective. The craft behind it no longer determines the value. Particularly talented counterfeiters now produce superfakes that even specialists regularly fail to produce. So a prominently placed label does not equal luxury.

Professor Lambert Wiesing is the first humanities scholar to venture a philosophical explanation. For him, luxury is not a property of things or actions per se, but rather arises from a private experience. He quotes Friedrich Schiller, who wrote that a person who allows himself to be guided solely by the constraints of reason is nothing less than a barbarian. According to Wiesing, the experience of luxury consists of owning something that fulfills a purpose but is not exhausted by it. Irrationally expensive, superfluous or lavish – from the author's point of view, such an experience of luxury is a stubborn liberation from the rule of utilitarian rationalism. Defiance instead of ostentation!

And this can lie in many things. From the insanely exhausting practice of record collecting (although music is always available digitally) to the thickly woven cashmere blanket (though wool warms just as well) to the logistically completely crazy sailing yacht.

The external effect is completely irrelevant for real luxury. Coco Chanel, who liked to use fur or silk, preferably as the inner lining of a coat that could only be felt by the owner, already knew this. However, the fact that elegant simplicity automatically means something incredibly luxurious is not a law carved in stone. The quiet-luxury trend of recent years, which propagated minimalist camel hair coats and thick-threaded cashmere sweaters, was quickly copied by high-street fashion chains in far less expensive materials.

Aesthetics can be deceiving, but the feeling that an experience or a product gives you is real. It can be a dress or a suit that fits so well you feel like you were born in it. A wine that magically completes a dish. A hotel that feels like the place you've been looking for all your life. 

You don't find real luxury, it comes to you when you are in harmony with the world you are in. At that one moment, it feels as natural and without alternative as drinking water. It is a luxury. Sometimes it costs an incredible amount (often), sometimes it costs nothing (unfortunately rather rarely). Or to paraphrase the sociologist Ernst Wilhelm Eschmann: the superfluous is the profoundly necessary because it is the desire for freedom.

German author and fashion journalist Julia Werner lives in Athens. She worked as deputy editor-in-chief for "Glamour" magazine and writes a style column for the "Süddeutsche Zeitung". Her book "For the Love of Bags" about women's favorite accessory, the handbag, was published by teNeues.