For more than twenty-five hundred years, until the modern era, the notion of luxury represented one of the most important and pervasive restraining principles to organized society in the West. Before it was “de-moralized” with the advent of capitalism and the consumer revolution, it was always identified as dangerous and subversive. Its dodgy reputation as an expression of vice or sin arose from the perception that it was both a cause and a symptom of evil—counterposed with the virtues of limits and restraint. Beginning with the Greeks, public and private virtue were both summed up by “moderation,” luxury’s antonym.
