Letter From the Editor: The Essence of Luxury

True luxury today is hidden like buried treasure. In a society where the market is fast-paced and flooded with mass-produced commodities, luxury becomes harder to detect. That’s because refinement isn’t necessarily indicated by a price tag. In this issue, we delve into the shifting meaning of luxury, exploring its roots and essence in an ever-changing world.Whether it’s an everyday object, a piece of artwork, a film, or a dance, true luxury touches the soul. It enriches the spirit and creates beautiful emotions on our life journey.
Luxury, for example, is a bottle of perfume with the fragrance of May roses freshly picked by farmers in the town of Grasse. It’s a small copper kettle with a rich patina that ages slowly and gracefully over the years. It’s the hand-woven wool, slowly crafted with meditative rhythm on a 19th-century loom.Luxury takes time and is long lasting. Master watchmaker Michel Parmigiani spent a lifetime working on centuries-old clocks and watches. Today, he creates heirloom timepieces, so generation after generation can experience his philosophy, “Making things beautiful makes life more beautiful.”The same axioms hold true in the world of cinema. Through our conversation with the award-winning Canadian filmmaker Leon Lee, we learned about the great care and exquisite detail he put into his stop-motion short Ragdoll. Inspired by the lead character’s faith, bravery, and determination, Lee pushed on through four years of gruelling production to bring an animated masterpiece to life.Luxury transcends the ordinary world. It can enlighten our soul. In recent years, Shen Yun Performing Arts, the world’s premier classical Chinese dance and music company, has restored long lost dancing techniques and brought them to the global stage. Through its performances, Shen Yun weaves a wondrous tapestry of heavenly realms, ancient legends, and modern heroic tales. Every Shen Yun performance is a refined journey into the soul of divinely inspired Chinese culture, free from the destructive communist influence of recent years.When distilled down to its essence, luxury rises above price tags and status symbols, creating a sense of timelessness that uplifts the spirit. It draws us into the eternity of the moment, and inspires us with a continuous pursuit of beauty, meaning, and spiritual significance.