‘Luxury’ and ‘Designer’ are becoming more and more entwined in •Advertising •

‘Luxury’ and ‘Designer’ are becoming more and more entwined within the design industry, the meanings of both words are almost emerging together to equate to the same thing. People are keen to purchase ‘designer’ and ‘luxury’ products because of the status it can create, even more so if the products are affordable to them. 

Luxury goods today have a new significance as marks of esteem, and acquiring them has become essentially easy. Luxury has formed in our evolution; we crave beautiful surroundings and possessions, and yearn beyond the basics of life. Patrizia Pressimone, director of architecture at the Paris department store ‘Printemps’, stated, 'Luxury is not measured in dollars - it is measured in details.'

Perfume is a product which is increasingly forever popular, and the television advertisements are becoming more eccentric and sensual. Perfume provides us with pleasing scents and appealing aromas, which equate to a luxurious sensation. Perfumes have been forever linked with luxury. ‘Pretty glass bottles were prisms through which everyday consumers could glimpse a life of luxury’. Perfumes link back to the Ancient Egyptians Era, where they discovered glass to protect their perfumes and scents. These products are not necessarily a necessity in our lives; there are much cheaper alternatives and other beauty products available on the high street. Yet most high end, successful and ever-popular ‘eau de parfum’ designer’s such as Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent and Tom Ford, include a designer price tag to match their reputations.

Edra - Italian furniture design.

Edra are a relatively unfamiliar company to the average person, although an extremely successful up-market Italian furniture design group. Edra as a company include a collection of craftsmen and world renowned designers. 

The company was created in 1987. Edra provides their clients’ with truly iconic, bespoke, and exclusive, well thought-out designs. On their main website description their products are described to be in ‘a class of their own’, and are made up of a ‘priceless combination of natural and man-made’ material which enables them to offer an ‘unrivalled excellence’. Edra deem that as a company their designs are matchless and incomparable to any others work – they report to be continuously pushing materials to their extreme, and extensively researching in to materials to create innovative fabric designs and furniture creations that people have not thought up before.

Edra’s pricing of products appear to be relatively high, but because the products provided are so remarkably individual it would be almost impossible to find another product similar, or in fact cheaper. Many of Edra’s designs and collaborations are show cased among the world’s most famous museums such as MoMa in New York, USA and in France at Paris’s Beaubourg. Edra’s creation’s exclusivity could be considered as a luxury, by owning an Edra product you possess a made-to-order artistic furniture design and creation.

Edra’s product range appears to be not merely about comfort and function, but the focus clearly remains on attention to detail and unique structure which fits and works in harmony with the human body. They express they have developed a new kind of ‘contemporary comfort’.

As a company Edra have worked in collaboration with the successful crystal creators, Swarovski, to create their ‘diamond collection’ furniture range. This triumphant teaming created Edra chair designs enhanced with a deluxe sheen by entirely encrusting the furniture with Swarovski crystals, these however also had a ‘diamond’ price tag to match.

There are fourteen main designers whom work at or have worked in partnership with Edra in the past, all are described to be extremely highly qualified and experienced, although some are more well-known than others. The skilled designers associated with Edra include; art director Francesco Binfaré who has collaborated in the past with Le Corbusier, Masanori Umeda who was a previous design consultant for well-known design company, Olivetti, and lucrative architect Massimo Morozzi. A design studio having such a high involvement with very well regarded and highly-skilled design professionals it would be acceptable to consider these finished furniture creations as ‘luxurious’.