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The University of Southampton
Winchester Luxury Research Group

About us

 Winchester Luxury Research Group

The Winchester Luxury Research Group encompasses luxury-based production including fine art, design, and media. The aim of the group is to develop research projects that engage with the theory and practice of concepts such as pleasure and sumptuousness, excess and waste, extravagance and consumption. Yet the Group also seeks to build a critical appreciation of luxury that investigates the intersections of theories of desire and necessity, practices of luxury, and applications of these theories and practices within historical and contemporary cultures.

The Group is a focused platform for established and emerging research on ideas of indulgence, enjoyment and comfort, and builds upon and fosters members' connections with the luxury and creative industries (branding, management, fashion, media, and design) as well as with other academic disciplines within the social sciences and the humanities. There is a special emphasis on the interplay and relationships between notions of sumptuous living, necessity, satisfaction of desire, and luxury. The Group is located within the Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton.  

Our mission

The Winchester Luxury Research Group is dedicated to advancing our knowledge and furthering the appreciation of luxury, its innumerable histories and contemporary manifestations through its expertise, dynamic academic curriculums and public speaker programmes, institutional and business partners, exhibitions, conference participation, academic publications, and MA and PhD programmes.

The Group's academic research is concerned with questions of necessity and needs, abundance, sumptuous environments, pleasure, indulgence, and the satisfaction of desire. This research is published in the form of monographs and edited collections, journals, book chapters, and articles and is disseminated to a global community of scholars, practitioners and the interested public.

The Winchester Luxury Research Group's activities and academic outputs influence and support each other and jointly furnish an innovative milieu for critically inquiring into luxury in addition to scholarly exchange in Winchester and beyond.

Postgraduate study

Click here for information on MA and PhD study in Luxury and related fields.

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People

The staff, research students and affiliated members of the group.

The idea of luxury is increasingly influential worldwide for research in the arts, design, the humanities, philosophy, fashion studies, the social sciences, cultural studies, business studies, architecture, and media studies.

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