Luxury is a Mirror
What do you say about luxury? What does luxury say about you?
Luxury, as if it had adopted the words attributed to a Chinese poet of the 8th century, “suggests the living relief of things,” gives form to human aspirations within our contemporary cultures; it resonates with our own ambitions and contradictions, those that accompany our shared and individual existential quests.
Luxury evolves on the fringes of the ordinary or more precisely at the boundaries of what is aesthetically, financially, or sometimes even morally acceptable. It is there, at the border of what is accessible to us and what eludes us, that luxury unites opposites, containing and integrating them in a dynamic and subjective manner: simplicity and complication, tradition and innovation, discretion and extravagance, the ephemeral and the timeless, to name just a few of the paradoxes that animate luxury. Luxury does not fear paradoxes; it thrives on them, constantly seeking itself in an “art of invention” — to quote the motto of Greubel Forsey, the high-end watchmaking company based in Switzerland at a thousand meters of altitude, on the outskirts of the city where both the architect Le Corbusier and the poet Blaise Cendrars were born. These tensions give life to luxury, nourishing it and making it a mirror of ourselves.
