Study 110: What the Bain Global Luxury Report 2026 Actually Proves About the Collapse of Sign-Value and the Rise of the Post-Growth Consumer

The Bain Global Luxury Report 2026, formally titled Finding a New Longevity for Luxury, arrives at a peculiar historical moment, framing a contraction from 400 million to 330 million active consumers as a temporary cyclical disruption poised for a near-term rebound. However, through the lens of Post-Luxury Conceptual Functional Art (PLCFA) theory, this 70-million-consumer exodus is diagnosed not as a market fluctuation, but as the empirical confirmation of the structural collapse of sign-value. The conventional luxury system relies on a load-bearing fiction where inflated price premiums are va