The 19th century was marked by a shift in the luxury industry among English jewelers toward the mass distribution of products for the general public. 2 A luxury product primarily refers to a quality label: the buyer knows in advance that it has been produced using state-of-the-art expertise in a given profession and is therefore willing to pay for the quality of such a product.

Luxury has not always been seen as a welcome economic stimulus: in 18th-century France, it was generally accused of a number of ills, such as increasing prices at the expense of the basic needs of the poor or promoting the corruption of morals, particularly among young people. However, Paris acquired from this time a reputation as the “capital of luxury” even if this reputation was not appreciated by everyone: “That luxury, growing every day, begins to become an expensive and unsustainable custom in the world that invented it, that it is from here [Paris] that it spreads throughout Europe…” (Massillon, Panegyric of Saint Louis). With the help of great couturiers, perfumers and industrialists3, the formation of large luxury industry groups nevertheless took place in France4 around the 1990s and nowadays, luxury appears to be a dynamic and booming field. With the formation of these entities, luxury, half of which is made up of the fashion sector, has been growing at an annual average of 5% per year for more than three decades