Gerald Mazzalovo’s Exoticism, Brands & Society: Ethics and Aesthetics of Diversity looks back at a term once tangled in colonial dust and asks what it still has to say about beauty, desire, and distance.
Mazzalovo takes the reader across borders from Victor Segalen’s early 20th-century philosophy to the language of modern advertising to uncover how our fascination with difference has survived, changed, and adapted to the age of algorithms and inclusion.
What makes this book different is its refusal to take sides. It neither romanticizes the past nor scolds the present. Instead, it highlights the voices hidden in images, the stories brands tell, and the quiet negotiations that occur when we meet someone or something we don’t fully understand. In doing so, it reveals how exoticism still shapes taste, emotion, and identity not as nostalgia, but as an active language of curiosity.
The book does not defend exoticism; it redeems the act of seeing, the moment of encounter before judgment. It moves between scholarship and storytelling, showing how brands, museums, and individuals negotiate otherness in a world that pretends to have none left.
Graceful, critical, and alive with questions, this is less a theory than an invitation to remember that difference, when seen rightly, is not a threat but a form of light.
Exoticism, Brands & Society: Ethics and Aesthetics of Diversity is available in print and digital formats.
About the Author
Gerald Mazzalovo is a brand specialist whose career bridges the worlds of luxury, culture, and meaning. His expertise includes top management experience with renowned houses such as Ferragamo, Loewe, Bally, Clergerie, and Jim Thompson, across Europe, America, and Asia.
Driven by a belief that practice and theory must feed one another, Mazzalovo combines executive insight with academic rigor. He researches and teaches the nature of brands, their role in society, their cultural resonance, and their strategic and operational complexities. His work approaches brands as living systems of meaning, shaped by semiotics, symbolism, and human desire.
He is the author of four books on branding and numerous academic articles. Over the years, he has taught at institutions including Sasin School of Management (Bangkok), ESSEC, Université Paris-Dauphine, Lyon 2, ISC Paris, Instituto de Empresa, Istituto Europeo di Design, and Jiao Tong University.
Today, Mazzalovo is a Senior research Fellow at Sasin School of Management (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand) and continues to consult globally in brand strategy, management, and education — advancing the idea that brands are not only business tools but cultural languages that tell stories about who we are, and what we value.