Neue Luxury is a global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

“Sculpture is an exorcism,” Louise Bourgeois once told an interviewer. “When you are really depressed and have no other way out except suicide, sculpture will get you out of it.” It’s the voice of a lifelong extremist: Give me art or give me death.

In this nicotine-stained café, once the preserve of market workers and late-night hustlers, there are black boys with pink hair talking fashion to white girls with Afros. “She’s beyond amazing,” declares a wild-eyed youth describing his latest discovery. “It’s like Lang on acid—sick and beautiful and completely NOW!” Beyond this scenario, lurking in the corner, sits legendary American photographer Annie Leibovitz—chic and understated, but surveying the room with a frosty antipathy. Paris Fashion Week is in full flow, and people are watching.

Both artist and designer imbued their work with the same love of nature, eclectic influences (from classical art to folk traditions and ethnography), and self-expression: Klimt, in his highly decorated Art Nouveau canvasses that swirled with symbolism and sexual desires; Flöge in her free flowing and bold reform dresses that liberated fin-de-siècle Viennese women from tight-laced fashions.

Virgilio Martínez may be a long way from home but food is providing familiar comfort. The 40-year-old Peruvian super-chef is in Europe on a profile-raising trip of sorts, and the spoils of his craft are never far away.

Neue Luxury highlights the disruptive trajectory of seven fearless artisans who resonate with an unconventional and progressive view of the world. We explore how these luminaries have harnessed their fear and liberated their potential beyond the paradigms of possibility.

“Drop in like a pin.” The words come from my friend, who stands beside me on the cliff. Rocks, scrub, dried mud. “There’s no other way down,” he says. The quarry water is brown, darker than everything except the sky. I wonder how many car wrecks are under me? How many crags? I have been tricked into jumping, I know it. But I also know I must.