Asia's love for luxury brands; the love that Asian consumers show for brand name luxury goods is well known. Radha Chadha, author of The Cult of the Luxury Brand, shares her views on why the psychology of the Asian consumer differs from that of their western counterparts and what propels them to buy more luxury brands.
LUXURY branded products are a US$80-billion global industry. More than half that business comes from Asians, and with Asian incomes rising, demand is set to grow rapidly. Buying luxury goods appears to be an intriguing social reality and a profitable business phenomenon in the region. Hong Kong has more...

Conspicuous consumption is so last year. The new approach is finding affordable indulgences.
SARASOTA HAS BEEN RIDING A WAVE of upscale consumption in the past few years. Some of it has been fueled by the super-wealthy, those corporate CEOs and tech entrepreneurs who jet in to stay at their downtown penthouse or Casey Key estate--one of several homes they own around the...

Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an "International Style" in the Ancient Near East, 1400-1200 BCE.
MARIAN H. FELDMAN Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an "International Style" in the Ancient Near East, 1400-1200 BCE Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 278 pp.; 18 color ills., 77 b/w. $60.00 Marian Feldman's copiously illustrated, exquisitely produced monograph Diplomacy by Design...

Practicing Sabbath economics: how to live in the light of God's abundance and provision.
Theologian Ched Myers characterizes "Sabbath economics" as the basic struggle of mammon vs. manna. "Mammon" is the Greek word (from Aramaic) used in Luke 16:13 when Jesus notes that "no slave can serve two masters ... you cannot serve God and mammon." The word is translated "wealth" in the...

Old Masters for New Masters: Jeff Koons's purchase of a late-medieval sculpture suggests that contemporary artists have a subtler understanding of the history of art than their admirers realise.
There was a certain amount of bafflement in the press last month when it was revealed that the buyer at Sotheby's of a ravishing limewood sculpture of St Catherine by the great late-medieval German carver Tilman Riemenschneider was none other than Jeff Koons. As the New Yorker discovered, this...

See you at reason.tv.
HERE'S SOME news that will (hopefully) disappoint some readers and (surely) delight others: After eight years at the top of the masthead, this is my last issue as editor-in-chief of the print edition of reason. I started with the magazine back in 1993 as an assistant editor....

The devil--and everyone else--wears Prada: the democratization of luxury.
Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster by Dana Thomas Penguin Press HC, 384 pp. In the early nineteenth century, a thirteen-year-old French boy named Louis Vuitton left his modest family homestead, a farm near the base of the Alps, for Paris, where he would become...

The luxury report: what distinguishes the ultra-wealthy lifestyle right now? we ask the editors at Robb Report, the national leader in luxury-and part of our family of publications.
Luxury can be a lifestyle, an experience, an item. Defining luxury? That is the elusive, ever-evolving and challenging mission of the editors at Robb Report magazine, part of the CurtCo Media company that also owns Sarasota. "Our readers are intelligent and curious people," explains Larry Bean, editor in chief...

Living in luxury's lair.
When this special "Platinum" edition was conceived, I was not convinced that tiny Sarasota had the wherewithal to sustain it. Florida's cultural hub? Yes. The epicenter of laid-back sophistication? Without question. But a bastion of world-class luxury? Dubious. My untested hypothesis assumed that Sarasota's worldly populace traveled...

India's middle class growing robustly.
India's middle class-already larger than the population of the United States (US)-continues to grow and to attract consumer goods manufacturers and marketers alike. A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) titled, "The Bird of Gold," was reviewed by The Economic Times (Guragon) on May 4, 2007. The...