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Introduction
Conventional, connectionist perspectives on branding regard luxury as one of a number of benefits consumers use in establishing links between brand name, product category and place of consumption ([70] Janiszewski and Osselaer, 2000). Underlying this conventional view is the assumption of a determinable relationship between luxury brands and luxury-motivated consumers. Luxury is assumed to be a relatively stable, unproblematic and predictable concept. However, structural and cultural shifts in capitalist markets have engendered a democratisation of luxury, making accessible to all a conventionally exclusive cultural category. In the resulting context of market fragmentation, contestation and ambiguity over luxury, this study explores what luxury brands now mean to consumers in an era of mass-prestige - "masstige".
Ostensibly elite brands like Burberry have become appropriated into the cultural repertoire of lower-income, so-called "Chav" consumers in the UK ([9] Bothwell, 2005). Similarly, the notion of "Bling" offers another countervailing cultural discourse of the luxury market. Nowadays middle-class consumers are trading up, namely paying a premium for luxury items they value, or trading down in other areas ([36] Houtz, 2004). [22] Evrard and Roux (2005, p. 6) explain that "rationale has moved from conspicuous-elitist logic to individualism-democratic logic because 'everyone is worth it!'" With a blurring of brand/consumer boundaries amidst countervailing discourses on luxury, researchers can no longer rely upon narrow assertions that "the affluent are the primary focus of luxury goods marketers" ([71] Seringhaus, 2002, p. 8). Alternative approaches to understanding brands are required ([51] O'Reilly, 2005).
Whilst managerialist approaches may discern some stable set of core luxury traits, at least from a consumer's viewpoint, the notion of a luxury brand is not without tensions and contradictions. First, if luxury brands offer potential for distinguishing "the self" from "others" ([72] Newholm and Hopkinson, 2009), it is unclear how a stable sense of self is asserted in fluid contexts where potentially everything is luxury ([38] Kapferer and Bastien, 2009a). Second, despite luxury brand segmentation annexing one set of affluent consumers from "the masses" ([38] Kapferer and Bastien, 2009a), consumers' own expressions of luxury illustrate the paradoxically interdependent nature of "high" and "low" culture ([73] Rocamora, 2002). Here, luxury is a negotiated order of discourse, a contested domain of meaning; a cultural work in progress. These more complex, fluid and...