Sustainable Luxury Fashion: A Vehicle for Salvaging and Revaluing Indigenous Culture
Sustainable luxury is coming back into favor, essentially with its ancestral meaning, i.e., thoughtful purchasing, with consideration of artisan style manufacturing, assessment of product beauty in its broadest sense, and respect for social and environmen
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Abstract Sustainable luxury is coming back into favor, essentially with its ancestral meaning, i.e., thoughtful purchasing, with consideration of artisan style manufacturing, assessment of product beauty in its broadest sense, and respect for social and environmental issues. In addition, it also means consideration of craftsmanship and innovation of different nationalities and preservation of local and ancestral cultural heritage. The relationship between luxury, textiles, and fashion is quite an ambiguous one, as textiles and fashion do not fully belong to the luxury world but overlap with luxury in its most expensive and exclusive segments. Both luxury and fashion share the common need for social differentiation, but they also differ in two major aspects. First, luxury is timeless whereas fashion is ephemeral. Second, luxury is for self-reward whereas fashion is not. Thus, the term ‘luxuryfashion’ seems to consist of two inherently contradictory expressions, i.e., as a luxury product it is supposed to last, although as a fashion product it is expected to change frequently. Nevertheless, because the essence of fashion is change, luxury fashion gives exclusive access to enforced change. Luxury fashion is recurrent change at its highest level, and it is distinguished from other luxury segments by its constant pressure for change. However, beyond these contradictions, luxury fashion should not necessarily come into conflict with sustainable principles. In this chapter we present a number of real-world case studies—Pachacuti (UK), Carmen Rion (México), Aïny (France), Loro Piana (Italy), Ermenegildo Zegna (Italy), and Hermès (France)—to demonstrate how sustainable luxury fashion can become a vehicle for salvaging and revaluing indigenous cultures. M.A. Gardetti (*) Center for Studies on Sustainable Luxury, Av. San Isidro 4166, PB “A”, C1429ADP Buenos Aires, Republic of Argentina e-mail: [email protected] URL: http://www.lujosustentable.org S. Rahman School of Business IT and Logistics, College of Business, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 M.A. Gardetti and S.S. Muthu (eds.), Ethnic Fashion, Environmental Footprints and Eco-design of Products and Processes, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0765-1_1
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M.A. Gardetti and S. Rahman
Keywords Indigenous culture · Luxury · Luxury fashion · Sustainable luxury
1 Introduction Sustainable development is a new paradigm, and this requires looking at things from a different perspective. Although luxury has always been important as a social determinant, it is currently starting to give the opportunity to people to express their innate values. Thus, sustainable luxury promotes a return to the essence of luxury with its ancestral meaning, i.e., a thoughtful purchase, artisan manufacturing, beauty of materials in its broadest sense, and the respect for social and environmental issues. So, sustainable luxury would not only be the vehicle for greater respect for the environment and social de
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