Ellsworth/Fabricating Authenticity, 6. Fool's Gold: Tapping into Luxury

Building on Cotter’s argument, Lin uses her own ethnographic research on the supply chain of luxurious precious stones to argue that luxury, just as notions of authenticity, cannot be understood independently of material factors, social stratification or historical change. Lin shows how modern aesthetic shopping malls are designed to center consumerist practice in a fashion that reinserts the “authentic” into the shopping experience.