Quiet Luxury. Simplicity, Sustainability, and the Rearticulation of Status in Consumer Culture
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60923/issn.1971-8853/23734Keywords:
Consumer culture, Quiet luxury, Sustainability, Conspicuousness, Decluttering, Forest-bathing, UpcyclingAbstract
Contemporary consumer culture is increasingly shaped by a tension between calls for environmental sustainability and the persistence of status-driven, acquisitive consumption. While practices of voluntary simplicity are often presented as ethical alternatives to excess, their social and cultural implications remain deeply ambivalent. This article examines three emblematic consumption practices — decluttering, forest bathing, and upcycling — to theorize the emergence of quiet luxury as a distinctive reconfiguration of simplicity within late-modern consumer culture. Drawing on practice theory, the analysis conceptualizes these practices as constellations of meanings, materialities, and competences through which sustainability, moral value, and social distinction are co-produced. Empirically, the article combines discourse analysis of heterogeneous sources, including books, media coverage, brand communications, blogs, and digital platforms such as Reddit. The findings show that, rather than displacing consumerist logics, these practices rearticulate status in subdued and reflexive forms, grounded in restraint, presence, craft, and embodied competence. Together, these cases reveal how sustainability is mobilized as a moral and aesthetic resource that reshapes, rather than resolves, social inequalities. The article concludes by discussing the implications of quiet luxury for contemporary debates on sustainable consumption, class, and moralized lifestyles.References
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