Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the communication of highly legitimised luxury brands beyond a marketing interest or communicative effectiveness in order to focus on «noneconomic » concepts of luxury which are studied in particular from the perspective of the French philosopher Georges Bataille and taken up in some recent studies on luxury. After recontextualising certain Bataille concepts such as «profitless expenditure», «heterogeneous part of society» and «transgression» in the contemporary world, the article analyses certain luxury brand communication campaigns as an observatory on luxury’s non-economic aspect and revealing the heterogeneous dimension of society. In particular, the article focuses on a series of case studies in which luxury strategies are visible with goods of high heritage and symbolic value and the way that, through appropriation mechanisms, luxury «feeds on» this non-utilitarian value, in part by «homogenising» it, in order to prevent the appeal of the various brands being routinised. The article also analyses the appropriation by luxury of a difficult heritage, a building in Rome that is a key emblem of Italian imperial fascism