There may be a concept more subjective than "luxury" but I can't think what. Maybe "art."
I have not read this book, but from what I have read about it, I can easily see why so much has been written about it, so many people discussing it.
Effective marketing, especially if sustained over time, can cause a brand name itself to mean "luxury" to one consumer, even though her sister may consider the product itself not luxurious at all!
Even "quality," a term I see used here more than "luxury" to express what people look for, or the reason someone prefers one brand over another, is an ephemera, whose meaning can reflect anything from the range of "specimens" in a product category to which the speaker has been exposed, to - once again - effective marketing! And of course all points in between, and every possible combination of the two!
There may be human beings who are completely and truly immune to any and all marketing, but I have never met one.
I know I have bought products just because I liked the ads. Or the packaging - the most recent example I can think of is Scope White mouthwash. I didn't even pay much attention to the ad. I just saw that it came in a white bottle, and I reacted exactly as the company intended - the next time I bought mouthwash, I chose that white bottle, because I made an association, whether you want to call it emotional or subconscious or whatever, between the whiteness of that bottle and my desire to have clean white teeth.
Of course, intellectually, I know that Scope White will not really make my teeth as white as that bottle, and if it did, I would look like Eric Estrada, but there it is in my bathroom anyway!
Let me hasten to add that I am in no way comparing the purchase of a $2000 bag, for which people may sacrifice, save up for months, during which they shop and examine and consider an investment for a lifetime and beyond with buying a $3 bottle of mouthwash, other than to say that both decisions are almost certain to be influenced to some extent, by marketing.
Even the bullet points in the original post are bound to set even those who don't usually do so, to think about marketing, and here and elsewhere, it has spurred some very thought-provoking discussions on the subject, both Famous Name handbag-specific, and in general.
From those discussions, here and elsewhere, and the various reviews, excerpts, etc, I can also see how it would step on the toes of some beliefs, reaffirm others, and even set a few readers to pondering just how realistic it would be to expect any company to operate farms on which they raise their own animals, mines from which they extract their own ore, and so on down every step of every raw material that goes into a product.
There are small family-owned artist operations that do personally raise their own animals, personally remove and prepare the skins, personally sell the edible parts of the animal in the local market, etc, even grow small quantities of textile-producing plants, and pick it and spin it and thread it into a needle, and personally make art out of the leather by hand, but even they do not own mines, nor facilities for smelting and melting and forging, etc.
Even though they may "make" the hardware elements, they are still purchasing the metal, whether silver, gold, or whatever, from someone else. They did not personally get it out of the ground of their own mine, etc, and in fact I personally know people who commission bags from such artist families and specifically ask that the closures themselves be made of leather or wood grown, harvested and processed by the family, precisely for "chain of custody" concerns.
And even then, they are carrying bags sewn with a needle for whose provenance they cannot speak. I suppose theoretically you could request that the artist use a bone needle, and somebody somewhere probably does, but the leather must still be cut with a metal tool, so, at some point, even the noblest efforts will run up against that brick wall, it is just a question of at what point of the process from raw material to the hand of the end consumer does that wall appear.
As Jahpson so succinctly points out:
...cheap labour means more production of goods which means more sales and larger profits...
And that is just as true of every tool and where applicable, machine part, involved in that journey from raw material to you or to me as it is of the product itself!
Points to ponder. Granted, many of those points lie along roads that not everybody will want to go down, and granted, there is a certain nihilistic tipping point in the repetition of history, and some would argue that there is thus a corresponding tipping point with regard to whether it is kind to attempt to push people down those roads: at what point does raising awareness become a forced cage match between idealist and pragmatist, at what point does it become of itself inhumane to remove comfort against a backdrop of events set in motion so long ago, the comfort that is born of that subjective and ephemeral concept of "luxury," - and there we are full circle - right back where we started!
And even if you don't like what the author has to say about certain designer brands, IMO it's good to be aware of the facts of these issues. So that when you encounter those people who think you're ridiculous for paying so much money for a bag and tell you some of these astounding facts, you won't be caught by surprise and made to feel guilty.
and I said "Sorry, I've read How Luxury Lost It's Luster...."
Sounds like a it provides information that we really should have access to anyway before making a $1000+ purchase.