Mandeville describes luxury everything beyond the bare necessities. The luxury covers everything that is deemed superfluous and unnecessary. But the usual sense means the splendor and sophistication in the way of life (tableware, toilet elegant, sumptuous decor). We can acquire luxury by large expenditures. So it is either praised or vilified by political thinkers.
Voltaire thought it was the essential support of the economy. Rousseau operating principle of the common people and the spring of all perversions, because luxury is made to be admired, it dazzles.
Coco Chanel: "the opposite of vulgarity".
Chantal Thomass: "what is exceptionally fine quality, creative". D. Potard: "a bit like God: no one really knows what it is but everyone has an opinion". More generally luxury is mainly an economic sector emerged in the seventeenth century in France, with the opposition of the nobility against the new culture born of the industrial revolution.
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