Review: Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan , by Annika A. Culver

In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen described conspicuous consumption as an irrational, wasteful, and socially corrosive pattern of behavior driven by the desire to signal status rather than to meet real needs.When teaching the anthropology of consumption, Mary Douglas would sometimes criticize Veblen's term because of its implicit moralism.As students of consumption, we would paraphrase her retort as the "champagne-and-lobster argument": societies do not collapse because they run out of things to consume; they collapse when the means to distinguish oneself from the hoi polloi were no longer available, or, conversely, when they became available to too many, or worse, the wrong people.When Daimler-Benz launched its luxury car, the Maybach 62 in 2002, it was transported to New York on the Queen Elizabeth II in a glass case like a holy relic; its success with the hedge fund crowd revitalised the ailing brand.The follow-up, the Maybach 62 Landaulet, was meant to be chauffeur-driven and was snapped up by rappers like DJ Khaled and Jay-Z.But in 2007 only 164 cars had been sold and Maybach closed half of its dealerships in the United States.The failure was blamed on the financial crisis of 2008, but word in Stuttgart was that the brand's high-class cachet had been killed by being name-checked in rap songs by Drake and Chris Brown.The tension between the distinction that luxury goods convey and the egalitarian ethos of mass consumption is at the heart of Annika A. Culver's magisterial Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan.In this hefty tome, she paints a broad picture of the development of companies, marketing, and the notion of value from the early modern trade associations to the soft diplomacy of the "Cool Japan" hype of the 2010s.Drawing This is the accepted version of the following item: Gygi, F. (2026).Review of Annika A. Culver (2024) Democratizing Luxury: Name Brands, Advertising, and Consumption in Modern Japan [Review of the book Democratizing Luxury: