Elizabeth Chase on Educating the Next Generation of Luxury Leaders

What excites me most is the moment when a student realizes that luxury is not what they thought it was. Most people arrive with a set of assumptions that luxury is about price, scarcity, or brand prestige. Those things matter but the deeper story is about meaning, authority, and time.

Luxury has always been a system for making value visible and feel inevitable, from bronze portraits of Akkadian rulers to Hermès ateliers on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

When students begin to see that continuity and trace a line from a Renaissance patron’s strategic display of a hardstone vase to a contemporary brand’s foundation and exhibition program, something shifts.

They stop being consumers of luxury and start becoming critical readers of it. That’s when teaching becomes most exciting.

What distinguishes the MA in Luxury Business curriculum?

We treat luxury as a system, not a sector. The curriculum is built on the understanding that art and luxury are not separate worlds. They are overlapping systems that organize belief, stabilize meaning, and train us how to see.

Students learn to analyze how value is produced through institutions, patronage, markets, and cultural narratives. We study the economics of desire alongside the history of taste.

We examine how museums, auction houses, galleries, fairs, and digital platforms help to create value by shaping attention, trust, and aspiration. And we ground all of this in objects: their materials, their stories, and their circulation through time.

The result is graduates who can move between the boardroom and the gallery with equal fluency because they understand the deeper forces that connect them.

What conversations or shifts in the luxury sector do you find most compelling right now?

The tension between speed and meaning. We are living in what I describe to students as a culture of constant visibility and constant refresh. When collections refresh every two weeks, objects don’t have time to become authoritative.

They become content. And yet, the most compelling luxury today is moving in the opposite direction: toward slowness, care, and duration.

Brands like Prada are investing in foundations and long-term cultural programs that operate outside of the sales cycle. Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn’s Design Emergency project insists that design carries intergenerational responsibility.

There is a growing recognition that symbolic weight cannot be accelerated and that luxury, at its most meaningful, is about control over time, not the accumulation of things.

What skills do you believe are essential for success in today’s global luxury landscape, and how does the MA in Luxury Business help students build them?

There are three skills above all. First, historical fluency—the ability to see contemporary luxury as part of a long arc that includes Renaissance patronage, industrial exhibitions, and the evolution of the museum.

Without this context, you’re reacting to trends rather than understanding systems. Second, critical looking—the discipline of slowing down in a world that profits from speed. At Christie’s, I learned that the difference between “Louis XV” and “Louis XV style” could transform value. That kind of precision matters in every corner of the luxury landscape, from authentication to brand strategy and client advising.

Third, what I call conscious participation—the ability to move through markets, institutions, and cultural spaces with awareness of how they shape perception and desire, rather than being shaped by them unconsciously.

The curriculum builds all three through case studies, object analysis, site visits, and sustained engagement with the frameworks of thinkers like Bourdieu, Pearce, Benjamin, and Simmel.

How do you encourage students to think critically about luxury as a cultural language, business proposition, and global force?

I always start with objects, not theory or market reports, but things. A Cellini salt cellar, a Fabergé egg, a design object that sat in museum storage for decades before anyone decided it mattered. Objects make abstraction visible.

They are where cultural language, business logic, and global power converge in physical form. From there, I introduce frameworks that help students see the systems behind what they’re looking at. And throughout, we return to a question I find essential: who benefits from the way this story is being told?

That question keeps students honest, whether they are analyzing a museum exhibition, an auction strategy, or a brand’s corporate patronage program.

If students adopted just one mindset from your teaching into their careers, what do you hope it would be?

That meaning takes time. Objects accumulate stories and those stories shape value. In a world that rewards speed, efficiency, and constant optimization, the most radical thing you can do is slow down and look carefully, to learn a story before you assign a price, to sit with an object long enough for its meaning to reveal itself.

This is not sentimentality, it’s a competitive advantage. The professionals who understand why something matters—not just what it costs—are the ones who build lasting relationships with collectors, institutions, and brands.

Markets move fast and meaning moves slowly, the best people in the field know how to hold both realities at once.

What continues to inspire you about the world of luxury today?

I am inspired by the people who move through the world with curiosity, discipline, and care, those who resist noise, spectacle, and engineered desire in order to ask what something really means.

I’m inspired by designers who are finding new ways to combine technology and craft, and curators and thinkers like Paola Antonelli, who insist that all objects carry history.

The world of luxury can be full of distraction. But underneath all of that, there are people who care deeply about what objects mean, how they connect us to each other across time, and what our choices about them say about who we are and who we want to become. That’s what keeps me in this work.