Exploring Sustainable Luxury: A Focus on Consumer Behavior and Aesthetics

Luxury consumers are becoming more and more sensitive to sustainable development issues, and thus they increasingly care about how to spend their money to improve the lives of present and future generations. However, making responsible choices has long proved challenging for luxury brands, since many customers have long used to think that a product’s sustainability comes at the expense of its quality. Recently, however, literature about sustainable consumption has evolved towards a more positive view of sustainable luxury, whereby luxury goods have some intrinsic elements, such as their higher durability based on higher quality of material and production processes, which make them inherently sustainable and long-lasting. While concurring with the idea that durability stems from tangible elements such as product high quality, we argue that how long consumers use a luxury product for can also depend on hedonic element of luxury goods, such the aesthetic experience of customers with luxury goods. Therefore, this chapter aims to review extant literature about sustainable luxury consumption also adding specific insights on how consumers experience luxury aesthetics, thus highlighting the aesthetics dimensions which are more relevant in shaping sustainable behaviors.