Can luxury, a product of capitalist structures rooted in extraction and inequality, ever be truly emancipatory?
For Black women who have endured historical and ongoing violence—physical, economic, social—the pursuit of luxury appears not only understandable but necessary. The Black Girl Luxury movement offers a compelling and seductive vision of liberation—one that rightly insists Black women deserve joy, ease, and beauty in a world that has long denied us all three.
Through curated images of travel, fashion, and leisure, Black women are claiming a space long denied: the right to be seen enjoying abundance. In a world that has historically associated Blackness with struggle, the spectacle of Black luxury appears striking, even radical. But is it truly an act of resistance—or is it bound up with the very systems it seeks to transcend?
Luxury is not immune to critique. It is shaped by the same capitalist logics that have historically marginalised Black life. To transform it into a truly liberatory space, we must ask not only who gets to experience luxury—but at what cost, and to whom.
What we need is a call for ethical joy—a joy not predicated on the suffering, invisibility, or displacement of others. Black joy and Black rest are radical acts of resistance, but resistance must remain critically aware of the power structures in which it operates. To simply enter luxury without interrogating its foundations risks reproducing the very harms we seek to escape.
The task, then, is to reimagine luxury altogether—not as individual accumulation, but as a communal, sustainable, and restorative practice. Luxury, as it exists today, is violent: it hoards, excludes, and commodifies life. True Black liberation cannot be found in accumulation; it is forged through collective struggle and the shared reclamation of abundance for those systematically denied it.