Luxury's First Ladies

By Kate Betts

I recently attended a panel discussion about luxury in the year 2012. Naturally, talk turned to brands and the need for increasingly unique products and experiences. One panelist dismissed the idea of luxury altogether, arguing that it had become too accessible. Another defined the future of luxury as one-of-a-kind experiences, like a group of hedge-fund managers who recently paid top dollar to be dropped into the middle of the Amazon. Uniqueness is something, along with quality, that luxury consumers desire universally--who doesn't covet that one-of-a-kind object, whether it be an Hermes handbag, a Breguet watch or even a multimillion-dollar Damien Hirst skull? But luxury is also about layering comfort into our turbocharged daily lives. As Coco Chanel once said, "Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it's not luxury." Nobody knows this better than the handful of dynamic women who drive the global luxury-goods business--from Jimmy Choo president Tamara Mellon, who built a $379 million business on the hunch that lots of other women would want what she wanted, to YSL CEO Valerie Hermann, who is relying on her own feminine instincts to reinvigorate the famous French brand.

So what will the luxury consumer want in 2012? Analysts and experts may have a clear definition of luxury as it pertains to established markets like the U.S., Europe and Japan, but for many affluent consumers in emerging markets like China, India and Russia, the concept of luxury is still new. In this special supplement to TIME magazine, we introduce the Global Luxury Survey, the first in a series that will look at how consumers in different markets around the world define luxury.