THE recently reopened Louis Vuitton store on the Champs Elysées is a deliberate exercise in democratic luxury. On its new, opulent art deco terraces, elegant French ladies of a certain age—the epitome of the traditional consumer of luxury fashion—rub padded shoulders with jeans-and-tee-shirt sporting younger women who could be their daughters, or, just as easily, rap singers or a gaggle of British working-class hen-weekenders.

What traditional buyers of luxury make of their nouveau co-consumers they are, of course, too civilised to say. But it seems unlikely that they consider Louis Vuitton's still-exquisite handbags, shoes and other indulgences to be quite as exclusive as before. If they continue to shop there—and the store's owner, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, thinks it can extend its brand to a broader market without losing its existing customers—it may no longer be because its products are a signal of exalted social status.

In this respect, LVMH's goods are by no means unique. Products and services that were once the preserve of a very wealthy few—from designer handbags to fast cars, bespoke tailoring and domestic servants—are increasingly becoming accessible, if not to everyone, then certainly to millions of people around the world. This may appall killjoy economists such as Robert Frank, the author a few years ago of a book condemning “Luxury Fever” in this new “era of excess”. But it is arguably even more upsetting to those super-rich folk who have long been able to afford luxury, and may in one crucial respect even regard it as a necessity.

As Thorstein Veblen noted over a century ago in “The Theory of the Leisure Class”—the book in which he coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption”—spending lavishly on expensive but essentially wasteful goods and services is “evidence of wealth” and the “failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.” But in the 21st century, “being a conspicuous consumer is getting harder and harder”, says James Lawson of Ledbury Research, a firm that advises luxury businesses on market trends. What does a billionaire have to do to get noticed nowadays?

Luxury for the people

A stone's throw from the Louis Vuitton store, the classical grandeur of the five-star Four Seasons George V hotel was the perfect Old World venue for the World Luxury Congress in October. But all the talk at the gathering was of the potentially lucrative opportunities presented by new consumers of luxury, in rich and emerging economies alike.

Being a millionaire, for instance, is becoming commonplace. In 2004 there were 8.3m households worldwide with assets of at least $1m, up by 7% on a year earlier, according to the latest annual survey by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini. The newly wealthy are often desperate to affirm their status by conspicuously consuming the favoured brands of the already rich. In developed countries this can be seen, in its extreme form, in the rise of “Bling”—jewellery, diamonds and other luxuries sported initially by rappers—and Britain's unsophisticated Burberry-loving “chavs”. (Burberry is considered unusually successful at tapping a broader market. But even it now understands that not every new customer is desirable: in January it withdrew its distinctive checked baseball caps because of their popularity with chavs.)

The number of luxury buyers in the developed world is also being swelled by two other trends. First, consumers are increasingly adopting a “trading up, trading down” shopping strategy. Many traditional mid-market shoppers are abandoning middle-of-the-range products for a mix of lots of extremely cheap goods and a few genuine luxuries that they would once have thought out of their price league.

Alongside this “selective extravagance” is the growth of “fractional ownership”: time-shares in luxury goods and services formerly available only to those paying full price. Fractional ownership first got noticed when firms such as NetJets started selling access to private jets. It has since spread to luxury resorts, fast cars and much more. In America, From Bags to Riches—“better bags, better value”—lets less-well-off people rent designer handbags. In Britain, Damon Hill, a former racing driver, has launched P1 International. A £2,500 ($4,300) joining fee, plus annual membership of £13,750, buys around 50-70 driving days a year in cars ranging from a Range Rover Sport to a Bentley or a Ferrari.

AIM

As a result, “the price of entry for much of what traditionally was available to the top 0.001% is now far lower”, says Mr Lawson, who notes the sorry implications for a would-be conspicuous consumer: “How do I know if the guy who drives past me in a Ferrari owns it or is just renting it for the weekend?”

Demand for luxury is also soaring from emerging economies such as Russia, India, Brazil and China. Antoine Colonna, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, estimates that last year Chinese consumers already accounted for 11% of the worldwide revenues of luxury-goods firms, with most of their buying done outside mainland China. He forecasts that by 2014, they will have overtaken both American and Japanese consumers, becoming the world's leading luxury shoppers, yielding 24% of global revenues.

These emerging consumers have a big appetite for the top luxury brands—and the owners of those brands are increasingly keen to oblige. Russia is producing today's most determinedly conspicuous consumers. Roman Abramovich, the best-known oligarch not in jail, has conspicuously set new standards in buying mansions, ski resorts and soccer teams.

Veblen revisited

For the already rich, strategies such as splashing out on ever bigger houses, longer yachts or getting special treatment from luxury-goods firms does not contribute much marginal conspicuousness. Meanwhile, the list of new ways to get noticed by the masses is shrinking fast. Even space tourism—impressive in 2001, when Dennis Tito paid Russia $20m to visit the International Space Station—will soon be humdrum.

As it gets ever harder to consume conspicuously, are some traditional luxury consumers giving up trying? According to Virginia Postrel, author of “The Substance of Style”, conspicuous consumption is much more important when people are not far from being poor, as in today's emerging economies. In developed countries, in particular, “status is always there, but the shift in the balance is towards enjoyment”. For instance, the first thing the newly super-rich tend to buy is a private plane. But that, she says, is “not so much about distinguishing themselves from the masses as not being stuck with them in a security line”.

Rex

In his new book, “Hypermodern Times”, Gilles Lipovetsky, the favourite philosopher of LVMH's boss, Bernard Arnaud, has coined the term “hyperconsumption”. This is consumption which pervades ever more spheres of life and which encourages people to consume for their own pleasure rather than to enhance their social status. H.L. Mencken made the same point more crisply in a critique of Veblen in 1919: “Do I prefer kissing a pretty girl to kissing a charwoman because even a janitor may kiss a charwoman—or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better and kisses better?”

Yet rather than abandoning status anxiety, the way the rich seek to display status may simply be getting more complex. As inequality grows again in rich countries, some of the very rich worry about consumption that is so conspicuous to the masses that it provokes them to try to take their wealth away. Some car-industry experts blame weak sales of the latest luxury limousines on this fear.

As well as traditional conspicuous consumption and “self-treating”, Ledbury Research identifies two other motives that are driving buying by the rich: connoisseurship and being an “early adopter”. Both are arguably consumption that is conspicuous only to those you really want to impress. Connoisseurs are people whom their friends respect for their deep knowledge of, say, fine wine or handmade Swiss watches. Early adopters are those who are first with a new technology. Silicon Valley millionaires currently impress their friends by buying an amphibian vehicle to avoid the commuter traffic on the Bay Bridge. Several millionaires have already paid $50,000 a go to clone their pet cat.

In America, at least, says Marian Salzman, a leading trendspotter, the focus of conspicuous consumption is increasingly on getting your children into the best schools and universities. Harvard may be today's ultimate luxury good. Getting into the right clubs is also as important a social statement as ever. America's young wealthy may currently be seen at the Core Club in New York: membership is by invitation only, with a joining fee of $55,000 plus annual dues of $12,000.

But perhaps the true symbol of exalted status in the era of mass luxury is conspicuous non-consumption. This is not just the growing tendency of the very rich to dress scruffily and drive beaten-up cars, as described by David Brooks in “Bobos in Paradise”. It is showing that you have more money than you know how to spend. So, for example, philanthropy is increasingly fashionable, and multi-billion-dollar endowments such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are certainly conspicuous. However, since the new philanthropists are keen to demonstrate that their giving produces results, this does not quite meet Veblen's threshold of being a complete waste of money. So the laurels surely go to those who are so wealthy that they are willing to buy adverts encouraging the state to tax them. Kudos, then, to those conspicuously non-consuming wealthy American opponents of recent efforts to abolish estate taxes: George Soros, Bill Gates senior (the father of the world's richest man) and Warren Buffett.