Can we better understand Luxury markets by confronting their dark sides? Luxury brands have symbolically mimicked ‘the ghetto’, ‘the inner city’ or ‘ the streets’. Such forms of symbolic appropriation have intensified as fashion labels have appropriated popular combinations of ‘brandedness’ –  i.e. the use of logos skipping their propertied meanings, like when track suits combine Gucci and North Face. In such times of dupe and piracy culture – young people challenge the sumptuary norms of consumer culture preferring high quality knock-offs to pricy originals. They combine logos in irreverent and ironic ways.

Textile industry also facilitates informal production of high-quality fakes. Messaging apps and digital payment systems enable small-scale traders to order directly from factories. A neo-plebeian universe social media provide bottom-up articulation of fads and fashions.  

Empirical studies around piazza Garibaldi in Naples flesh out how digital transformations of production, distribution and consumption create bottom-up neo-plebeian market system with its own aesthetic cannons.

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Professor Adam Arvidsson is fascinated by the fluid formation of markets and its surprising brand dynamics. Already his doctoral dissertation (European University in Fiesole Florence) he critically investigated phenomena such as Italian design and the symbolic dynamics of blue jeans.

His publications are today regarded sociological branding classics, and his students today constitute an “Arvidsson school of marketing sociology” critically working on various themes as hipster economy in market media disruptions.

After posts in Copenhagen and Milano he now holds a Chair at the University of Naples. He currently inspects dark subculture consumption through a sensitive historical lens of medieval class materialism.

Professor Arvidsson has published extensively in for instance the Journal of Communication, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Culture, and The Sociological Review