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  • Why So Many Luxury Start-Ups Fail

    Why So Many Luxury Start-Ups Fail

    The business that looks like easy money is one of the hardest there is. What the founders who fail tend to miss.

    PERSPECTIVE VII

    Most new businesses do not survive.

    That is the plain starting point, and it is worth saying before anything about luxury, as the people who launch luxury brands are usually the first to forget it. Roughly one in five new businesses in the United States closes within its first year. Around half are gone within five, and close to two-thirds within ten. Among the more ambitious sort, the scalable ventures built to grow fast and pull in investment, the attrition is far steeper still.

    The reasons are not mysterious. When CB Insights read through hundreds of founder post-mortems, the most common cause was not a clever rival or a sudden crash. It was simpler and more uncomfortable. There was no real demand. The company made something that not enough people wanted badly enough to pay for. Running out of cash came next, although that is usually the symptom rather than the disease. Businesses rarely die in a single accident. They starve, slowly, because the venture they built never found enough people who needed it.

    Then put luxury on top of that. The instinct, when people hear you work in luxury, is that the maths must be gentler. Charge more, do less, let the margins look after themselves. It is the wrong instinct. Luxury does not make things easier; it can only add complexity. You take the ordinary obstacles that every start-up faces, and on top of it, you add people who want to operate in the luxury industry, which brings a new level of complexity. So the whole thing becomes a far more daunting quest than it looked.

    There are two things a luxury founder has to hold at the same time, and in my experience, most hold neither. The first is always the same. It is human biology. Luxury speaks a specific language and appeals to a specific part of the brain that the mass market does not. This has always been so, and it always will be, at least until we evolve into something structurally different, which is not a matter of years but of a very long time indeed. Our brains reached their present form essentially a long time ago. The size was already within the modern range around three hundred thousand years ago, and the shape settled into what we carry now, somewhere between a hundred thousand and thirty-five thousand years ago. The mechanism of desire is even older. In the timeline of any market, any brand, any business plan, none of it has changed at all. So the founder has to understand how the brain actually works, first of all. And I do not believe most of them do.

    That equipment has a fascinating feature. As desire rises, judgment falls. The more someone wants a thing, the less coldly they weigh the purchase. This is not a flaw to be corrected – it is the system luxury operates through. The founder who misses it competes on specification and price, which is exactly the ground where desire does not operate.

    The Annual Performance Metrics report, commissioned by LSI – Life Science Intelligence™ (https://www.cosmos.so/e/384273127)

    The second force is harder, because it asks the founder to read the world rather than the numbers. Not to follow the trend, because following the trend is the logic of fast fashion, and that logic is not what proper luxury is, or is meant to be. The task is to read the change in society, which is a different and subtler thing. Not what a trend tells us to wear, or to use, or to do today, but the slower movement underneath it: where a society is going, and what it now wants to say about itself. Trends can be followed. Change has to be read early, before it announces itself. You cannot sell a European luxury brand in China the way you could a few years ago. The object is the same. What it means is not.

    Here is the thing that the people handling beautiful brands tend not to grasp. When you handle luxury, you are handling a very precious and very delicate jewel. And you have to be careful. You cannot treat it like the little rubber ring that falls out of a packet of crisps, the kind of toy my son plays with for an afternoon and then forgets. You are dealing with something else. Something delicate. Something precious. Something that asks for a different kind of care in the way you handle it: the design, the marketing, the timing. Yet a remarkable number of brands manage the jewel as though it were the ring. They discount it, they stretch it, they put it everywhere, and then they are surprised when the magic drains out of it.

    Which brings me to positioning, the part founders most want to believe is flexible. It is not. In luxury, the rules of positioning are close to absolute. Positioning is the place a brand holds in the mind of the consumer, and that place is an asset. Move it carelessly, and you do not reposition it. You break it.

    Now look at the very top, where the money is endless, and the mistakes are still being made. In the automotive industry, a luxury legend has begun to explore the fully electric road: Ferrari, with its newest creation, the Ferrari Luce. Have a look at it. And then just look at the thing.

    It is not really just a car. It is a signal sent from above. I am not going to reach for adjectives, because I do not want to put my judgment between you and the object. Look at it and decide for yourself what it tells you about where Ferrari is going, and the risks it is taking by going there. A Ferrari has never really been about the engine (although superb, even mythological), or the figures, or the technology. Those are the explanations people reach for afterwards. The beauty itself is something else, and it has always rested on one quiet, unspoken truth. It is not for everybody. You are not everybody. That is part of what you are buying.

    Everyone is going electric, the argument runs, so Ferrari should too. But Ferrari is not everyone. The strongest brands sometimes do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Maybe. I say maybe, because the move only works if you are Ferrari. If you are Volkswagen, go ahead, chase the crowd; it is the right thing to do, because Volkswagen is the car of the people, and that is honest work. A Ferrari that behaves like everybody else automatically stops being a Ferrari.

    Here is what surprises me most, as at these levels it ought to be understood, yet it is not. What makes a product or a service truly luxurious is the aura. You stand in front of the masterpiece, and you have to wonder how it was even possible to create it, to invent it, to craft it. I could not do it myself. That is the feeling. It is the pure essence of luxury, and it transcends the technicalities, the features, and the characteristics of the product.

    What is missing in the Ferrari Luce, for me, is exactly that. It is pure magic. A true luxury object keeps the buyer feeling that it is somehow beyond them, that they could not simply make it, or casually own it. The feeling clings even to the toy version, the small model on a shelf with no use at all, yet it is wanted anyway. The moment that feeling goes, the point of luxury goes with it.

    This is close to what Bourdieu called distinction: the object draws a line between those who belong and those who do not. None of it is rational, and that is precisely the point. People buy luxury to feel something strong, and to feel, consciously or not, that whatever they are acquiring is an object of pure desire. It is not something useful. It is a completely different dimension, a completely different paradigm. The moment a brand starts justifying itself on usefulness and value for money, it has already left luxury behind.

    Other houses felt the same pull and answered differently. Lamborghini had the same temptation to do what Ferrari is doing, and cleverly it said no, not yet, this is not us. Because there are positioning rules you have to respect, and they are rules for a reason. They are not optional.

    Then think about Jaguar. Jaguar wanted to recast itself, and you can see in real time the impact of breaking those rules. The lesson is not that electric cars are right or wrong. It is that the rules of positioning do not bend because a technology happens to be trendy at the moment.

    Desk accessories designed by Parasol for Hem, 2017. Photo by Julien Renault (https://www.cosmos.so/e/296240340)

    There is one more issue, and it sits inside these companies. The large groups are driven by finance, not by creativity or vision. When a business is run by finance, it tends to be profitable in the immediate, which means it quietly loses in the long term. And then comes the hard part. How do you keep a sense of heritage while staying current with technology, AI, and the new virtual channels? How do you honour the older customer whilst simultaneously attracting the deciding factor in the future of luxury – the younger generations? By 2030, most of the spending will come from people who are young today. They have the highest spending power, yet are walking away from luxury, unconvinced by status and exclusivity alone. But what for? What is the goal? What do they actually want to spend the money on? Get that wrong, and no amount of financial discipline will save you.

    So the people handling beautiful, prestigious brands today are handling them like any other brand. But they are not any other brand. If you want the short version of what is missing right now, it is a deep understanding of what luxury actually is.

    So why do so many luxury start-ups fail? Rarely for the reason the founder gives afterwards. They fail because they bring the ordinary energy of a normal business to a game with a second, hidden set of rules, and because somewhere underneath, they believed that luxury would make the sums kinder. It does the opposite. A start-up already has a high chance of failing, and luxury does not make that easier. It makes it harder. The rules can be learned, though. Desire can be understood, society can be read, and the jewel can be handled with the care it asks for. Most of your competitors will never trouble themselves to do any of it. Which is exactly why, if you do, there is still room at the very top for you.

  • The FOMO Economy

    The FOMO Economy

    How Luxury Learned to Monetise the Scarcity Mindset

    For most of its history, the luxury industry sold objects whose rarity could be traced back to something physical. A Kashmir sapphire is rare because the mines above Padar were largely depleted by the 1930s. A Patek Philippe minute repeater is rare because the number of people capable of tuning its gongs is limited and shrinking. Hermès trains a leather artisan for two years before that person is allowed to finish a bag independently , and the output level of a workshop is limited by the number of employees inside it. In each case, the scarcity exists outside the brand’s marketing department. A buyer paying for rarity was paying for a shortage that existed whether or not anyone was looking.

    The economics of such a business model stopped matching the size of the industry sometime in the last two decades. The large conglomerates now report revenues in the tens of billions of euros, and speak to audiences measured in the hundreds of millions on Instagram. Hermès produces more Birkins today than it did ten years ago, and the waiting times have not shortened. The concept of scarcity in luxury lives on, but it has moved from production limitations to being the heart of the new distribution model. The shortage an individual client experiences is increasingly a shortage of permission to consume rather than a shortage of goods and services, which changes how the act of buying feels. The question shifts from whether an object is rare to whether the opportunity to acquire it will still exist next season.

    Jewelry by Fernando Jorge at his New York showroom, designed by Andre Mellone. Photo by: Billal Baruk Taright (https://www.cosmos.so/e/797450311)

    The waitlist is the oldest of these instruments and the least honest about what it truly is. Hermès has never admitted to the existence of a formal Birkin list, which is true in some sense, because it is instead a purchase history a sales associate reads before deciding what to offer. Ferrari makes the logic explicit: access to a limited series such as the LaFerrari Aperta was restricted to collectors with an existing ownership record. The wait is not a delay in the transaction. It is part of the buying decision, because the time spent qualifying becomes evidence that the object was difficult to obtain, whilst allowing time to personalise the sale for the customers that do qualify.

    This limited-edition drop delivers the same concept in a much tighter window. A product exists for a defined timeline, and the decision to buy is made under time pressure rather than after proper reflection. When Patek Philippe discontinued the Nautilus 5711 in 2021 and released a final green-dial run, resale prices on the secondary market climbed to several times the original retail price almost immediately, with no change to the watch itself. The sold-out label completes the picture. Absence communicates more powerfully than availability, and a brand that sells out quickly has demonstrated demand in a way no campaign can.

    The invitation is arguably the most valuable of these tools because it cannot be acquired directly. Private salons above the boutiques on Place Vendôme, high jewellery previews held during couture week, dinners attached to a fair, first access to a collection before it is catalogued: none of these appear in a product assortment. They are distributed on the basis of the client-brand relationship, and the client who receives one has been evaluated and chosen rather than served. 

    Kylie Jenner and Odessa A’zion at the 83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards. Photo by: German Larkin (https://www.cosmos.so/e/145211867)

    A collector who was not invited to a dinner in Geneva would most likely never learn the dinner had taken place, and the social cost of exclusion used to be low because exclusion was invisible. Instagram removed that confinement, and now the guest list, the table, the pieces shown, and the people shown in them circulate publicly within minutes. The effect is asymmetric: the number of people who see an event has grown by several orders of magnitude while the number of people admitted has stayed constant or fallen. Visibility, which the industry pursued as a growth strategy, turned out to be the mechanism that takes away accessibility.

    The limit of the model is that engineered scarcity depends on whether it is believed. When every capsule is limited, every dinner is private, and every release is a limited edition, it loses its information value, and clients begin to read the mechanism rather than the object. Scarcity fatigue is difficult to measure from the inside, because the queue is still there and the product still sells out.

  • WHY DO WE STILL WANT THINGS WE DO NOT NEED?

    WHY DO WE STILL WANT THINGS WE DO NOT NEED?

    Guest:Cédric Laforge
    Duration: 50 minutes
    Episode: 3


    In this conversation, we explore the psychology of desire and its influence on luxury, identity, and modern consumption. Together with Cédric Laforge, we examine why we desire things beyond necessity, how luxury brands create and sustain desirability, and the evolving relationship between status, ownership, and personal fulfilment. From the influence of social recognition to the paradox of overconsumption, we question what truly creates value and whether the future of luxury lies not in wanting more, but in knowing when we have enough.

  • Creating Viral Moments: How Luxury Startups Turn Attention Into Brand Desire

    Creating Viral Moments: How Luxury Startups Turn Attention Into Brand Desire

    For most contemporary brands, going viral is the ultimate goal. But for luxury, mass exposure can threaten the exclusivity and mystique that traditionally fueled desire. Yet social media has made mass attention almost indistinguishable from cultural relevance, leaving luxury brands with a more complicated question: how do you become part of the conversation without becoming too familiar? (Creevey, Coughlan and O’Connor, 2022).

    The distinction between visibility and desirability is important because visibility alone does not create desire. Research on luxury brand growth has found that awareness can increase desirability, while excessive market penetration can weaken it (Kapferer and Valette-Florence, 2018). Therefore, a viral moment can be seen by millions and still do very little for the brand behind it. What matters is the feeling that kind of attention triggers in viewers: curiosity, aspiration, proximity, or the sense that they are looking at something they want to be part of.

    This is where the idea of the viral moment becomes increasingly viable for luxury. The strongest examples are rarely about simply putting a product in front of as many people as possible. They create something people want to talk about: an unexpected collaboration, an installation worth photographing, an invitation that cannot be easily obtained, or a detail that leaves just enough unanswered. The moment spreads, but the feeling of access remains selective.

    For luxury startups, the challenge is not to choose between attention and exclusivity. It is to design moments where one creates the other.

    A behind-the-scenes look at a photoshoot for the collection THE DROP. Photo by: THE DROP Staff (https://www.cosmos.so/e/649921880)

    Why Traditional Virality Conflicts With Luxury Positioning

    Traditional viral marketing is built around removing barriers. The easier something is to see, understand, reproduce, and share, the further it can travel. Luxury has historically created desire through a different set of signals: rarity, selectivity, and the feeling that access is not equally available to everyone. Social media brings these two systems into direct contact, giving consumers more power to create and distribute brand-related content while making exclusivity harder to control (Creevey, Coughlan and O’Connor, 2022).

    The tension, however, is not simply between being visible and being exclusive. Research on 60 major luxury brands across six countries found that awareness consistently increases desirability, while greater brand penetration can have the opposite effect (Kapferer and Valette-Florence, 2018). In other words, luxury does not need less attention. In other words, the challenge is not to limit attention, but to ensure that greater visibility does not come at the expense of desirability.

    This makes the mechanics of virality particularly impactful. A moment that reaches millions can strengthen a brand by giving those audiences something distinctive to recognise and desire. But simply adding restrictions or making content harder to access is not enough. Recent research about scarcity-based communication on Instagram found that scarcity can reduce perceived exclusivity when it fails to generate consumer interest, with brand familiarity influencing the effect (Godey et al., 2025). 

    The real question, then, lies in the gap between reach and desire. A successful viral moment for luxury should not be hidden from the majority. It has to give people a reason to care about seeing it, talking about it, or being close to it, while preserving a sense of access and experience that social media alone cannot provide.

    Visibility Is Not Desirability

    A million views tell a brand how far a moment travelled. They do not reveal what the audience wanted from it. In luxury, that distinction is exceptionally crucial: consumers engage with brands not only because they recognise them, but because the content reflects how they see themselves: through aesthetics, entertainment, self-expression, or status (Bazi, Filieri and Gorton, 2020).

    This changes the role of the audience. The person sharing a luxury moment is not simply distributing the brand’s message; they are equating it to their own identity. Research on luxury social media engagement has found that brand self-expressiveness is a significant driver of engagement, which can in turn strengthen brand image and loyalty (Gummerus et al., 2020). The most valuable interaction is not necessarily the one that generates another impression; it is the one that allows the person sharing it to express themselves.

    This also explains why a highly visible moment can still feel strangely empty. If the audience has nothing to gain beyond having seen it, there is little reason for the moment to travel further. The strongest luxury content gives people something to signal: taste, cultural awareness, proximity, or simply the fact that they noticed something before it became familiar. Recent research similarly finds that digital word-of-mouth can support luxury brand equity while remaining compatible with an exclusivity positioning (Casais et al., 2025)

    The measure of a successful viral moment, therefore, is not only how many people saw it. It is whether they left wanting something that interaction could not provide: the product, the experience, the access, or the feeling of belonging to the world around the brand.

    Talkability Without Becoming Mainstream

    The most impactful luxury moments are rarely the ones that explain themselves. They leave something for the audience to capture, interpret, speculate about, or pass between people. That unfinished quality gives a brand conversation a life beyond the original campaign.

    Model Bella Hadid wears a spray-on dress from Coperni’s Spring 2023 show at Paris Fashion Week. (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1401601474) 

    Coperni’s 2022 spray-on dress is a useful example. During its Spring/Summer 2023 show, Bella Hadid walked onto the runway in underwear before scientists sprayed a liquid directly onto her body, turning it into a fitted white dress in minutes. Coperni’s 2022 spray-on dress is a useful example. During its Spring/Summer 2023 show, Bella Hadid walked onto the runway in underwear before scientists sprayed a liquid directly onto her body, turning it into a fitted white dress in minutes. The technology was real, but the spectacle was almost theatrical: it was less a product demonstration than a moment designed to be witnessed. Within 48 hours, the activation generated an estimated $26.3 million in media impact value, while Coperni’s Instagram following jumped from 315,000 to 552,000 (Maguire, 2022).

    What made the moment travel was not simply novelty. It gave people something to talk about beyond the clothes themselves: how the material worked, whether it could become a real garment, and what they had just watched unfold on the runway.

    That level of recognition creates a different kind of visibility, one where the brand becomes part of the conversation rather than simply being seen. The brand did not make every part of the experience readily accessible; it created an event that could be endlessly reproduced through images and video while remaining impossible to experience in exactly the same way. The original moment belonged to the runway. Everything that followed was its echo.

    For a luxury startup, this distinction matters. The objective is not simply to give people something to share. It is to create a moment, the meaningfulness of which expands as it travels, without making the brand itself feel ordinary.

    Designing Moments People Want to Share

    True shareability occurs when an experience shifts from passive viewing to active participation. Research into engagement with social media accounts of luxury brands points to several recurring drivers, including entertainment, aesthetics, authenticity, inspiration and social status (Bazi, Filieri and Gorton, 2020). The implication is simple: the product does not have to be the entire story. Sometimes, the experience surrounding it is what makes people want to pass it on.

    This is where the design of the moment matters. The strongest activations usually contain something immediately recognisable, something unexpected, and something that rewards a second look. This is where the design of the moment matters. The strongest activations usually contain something immediately recognisable, something unexpected, and something that rewards a second look. They should be immediately understandable, while still leaving enough ambiguity to reward a second look. That tension gives the audience a reason to pause before giving them a reason to share.

    Gentle Monster has built much of its retail strategy around this principle. Its stores are designed less as conventional points of sale than as immersive environments, filled with oversized sculptures, moving figures, and surreal installations. The products remain present, but the store itself becomes the destination. The experience is therefore easy to photograph and circulate without reducing the brand to a single product image (Kim, 2023).

    This lesson is especially relevant for startups. A shareable moment does not necessarily require a large budget or an elaborate production. It needs a clear idea that can be understood instantly and remembered afterwards. The strongest moments give people an image, an emotion, or a story they can carry elsewhere, while keeping enough of the brand’s world intact for the audience to be able to spot and recognise where it came from.

    In luxury, the most effective viral moment is therefore not the one that asks to be shared. It is the one that makes sharing feel like part of the experience.

    From Viral Moment to Brand Desire

    A viral moment can put a brand into the conversation. It cannot, on its own, give that conversation meaning. For a luxury startup, the real test comes after the attention: does the moment make the brand more recognisable, more culturally relevant, or more desirable?

    This is where consistency becomes integral. The most effective moments are not isolated acts of spectacle; they feel like extensions of a world the brand has already been building. Coperni’s sense of technology and experimentation made its spray-on dress feel like more than a stunt. Gentle Monster’s surreal retail environments work for the same reason: the spectacle is not separate from the brand, but an expression of how it wants to be experienced.

    The distinction is easy to miss. A brand can engineer an enormous spike in attention and still leave consumers with nothing to remember beyond the event itself. Luxury startups lack room for that disconnection because they are often still teaching the market what the brand stands for. Every highly visible moment therefore does two jobs at once: it attracts attention and defines the brand.

    The value of a viral moment therefore lies not only in the attention it generates, but in its ability to strengthen the associations consumers form with the brand.

    Conclusion

    For luxury startups, the goal is not to avoid mass attention, but to control what that attention communicates. A viral moment is valuable when it creates recognition without exhausting the sense of discovery that makes a brand desirable.

    This will become more difficult as social platforms become increasingly crowded and AI makes the production of attention-grabbing content faster and cheaper. The advantage will therefore shift from simply creating something visually striking to creating moments that are difficult to replicate because they are rooted in a distinctive product, place, experience, or brand idea. For emerging luxury brands, virality will matter less as a measure of how many people saw them and more as a test of whether people remember what made them different.

    References

    1. Bazi, S., Filieri, R. and Gorton, M. (2020) ‘Customers’ Motivation to Engage with Luxury Brands on Social Media’, Journal of Business Research, 112, pp. 223–235.
      https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.02.032⁠
    2. Casais, B., Soares, A.M., Abreu, M., Lungu, D. and Rodrigues, J. (2025) ‘“Look at What I Own”: The Role of Social Media in Luxury Brand Equity and Conspicuous Consumption’, Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics, 38(7), pp. 2035–2050.
      https://doi.org/10.1108/APJML-03-2025-0403⁠
    3. Creevey, D., Coughlan, J. and O’Connor, C. (2022) ‘Social Media and Luxury: A Systematic Literature Review’, International Journal of Management Reviews, 24(1), pp. 99–129.
      https://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12271⁠
    4. Kapferer, J.-N. and Valette-Florence, P. (2018) ‘The Impact of Brand Penetration and Awareness on Luxury Brand Desirability: A Cross Country Analysis of the Relevance of the Rarity Principle’, Journal of Business Research, 83, pp. 38–50.
      https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.09.025⁠
    5. Lim, H., Childs, M., Cuevas, L. and Lyu, J. (2021) ‘Between You and Me: The Effects of Content Ephemerality and the Role of Social Value Orientation in Luxury Brands’ Social Media Communication’, Journal of Global Fashion Marketing, 12(2), pp. 120–132.
      https://doi.org/10.1080/20932685.2021.1881579⁠
    6. Maguire, L. (2022) ‘A Spray-On Dress and a Solid Gold Bag: Coperni Goes After Gen Z With Novelty and Fun’, Vogue Business, 1 October.
      Vogue Business article⁠
    7. Nechaeva, O., Dasmia, C., Mazzoli, V., Vannucci, V. and Donvito, R. (2025) ‘Scarcity in Luxury Brand Digital Communication: Unveiling Its Effect on Consumer Perceptions’, International Journal of Advertising, 44(7), pp. 1195–1226.
      https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2024.2427516⁠
    8. Oliveira, M. and Fernandes, T. (2022) ‘Luxury Brands and Social Media: Drivers and Outcomes of Consumer Engagement on Instagram’, Journal of Strategic Marketing, 30(4), pp. 389–407.
      https://doi.org/10.1080/0965254X.2020.1777459⁠
  • The Leather Never Declined

    The Leather Never Declined

    A hundred and seventy-five years of Swiss shoemaking is currently before a judge in a Lugano courtroom. Not because anyone forgot how to craft a quality shoe.

    I have always been fascinated by how luxury brands decline. Not from bad products. From bad leadership.

    Bally comes to mind, and this autumn it comes to mind even more, as the court is now determining the future of the company, and whether it gets to live on at all.

    Founded in 1851 by Carl Franz Bally, for over a century Bally dressed the likes of royalty, celebrities, and customers who recognised quality when they saw it. The craftsmanship was impeccable. The heritage was undeniable.

    Then the leadership rollercoaster began.

    The family lost control of the company in 1977, when a Swiss financier bought a majority stake and sold it nine months later to an armaments manufacturer. In 2008, the house passed to the Reimann family’s investment vehicle, and in August 2024, to a Beverly Hills investment firm. The creative direction went in 2022 to the founder of a Los Angeles streetwear label, who left after two seasons, then to a Gucci veteran who left for Jil Sander in 2025. The chief executive changed again in February 2026. Each arrival brought a repositioning. One wanted to go mass market. Another chased streetwear. Then back to heritage. Then contemporary. Then accessible luxury, which is the polite way of saying that no decision was taken at all.

    The artisans in the workshops kept making beautiful shoes. But nobody at the top could decide what Bally was supposed to represent anymore, and when vision changes every eighteen months, even the finest craftsmanship becomes irrelevant.

    An artisan inspects leather, a process highlighted by brands Tod’s and Berluti (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1881407287)

    I remember walking past a Bally store in Milan a few years ago. The windows looked confused. The messaging felt uncertain. You could sense the internal chaos from the street. A window is the last link in a chain that starts much further up. I would not have been able to tell you in that moment how this story would end. What I could tell was that nobody upstairs knew what the point of the shop was.

    This is where we find ourselves now: in June, the Lugano court placed Bally Schuhfabriken under a supervised debt moratorium and appointed an external administrator. Since then, the company has faced more layoffs and factory closures, the rescue bid has been turned down by the owner, and a further round of redundancies follows in September. The protection period finishes in mid-October, when the administrator must announce whether the company can be restructured or close down. A court has already blocked an attempt to move the Bally trademark to an American entity registered weeks earlier, over concerns the house’s most valuable asset might end up beyond its creditors.

    Bally’s leather quality never declined: what kept changing was the answer to what the house was for, and Lugano is now counting the cost.

    Nobody wrecked anything. Every team acted reasonably on the information it had and the time it was given. From inside, none of it looked like failure. But a team can only execute brilliantly when it understands what it is executing towards, and for twenty years nobody could say with certainty that they did. Product excellence cannot survive leadership instability. The lesson is not subtle: leadership outlasts product, always.

    It is tempting to describe this as chief executives parachuted in from industries with nothing to do with luxury, and I have described it that way myself. Having looked at the record properly, I would put it differently. The people brought in to run and design the house were mostly luxury professionals with real records. The discontinuity came from above them, from owners for whom a shoemaker was one asset among many: an armaments group in the 1970s, a consumer goods fortune later, a turnaround fund now. I have argued before that luxury speaks a specific language, and appeals to a part of the brain the mass market never reaches. An owner who has never worked with that language analyses a house the way you analyse a balance sheet, and from there everything goes consistently wrong.

    Now the part that stops this being a story about one unlucky house.

    Bottega Veneta had the same disease and survived it. Founded in Vicenza in 1966, its whole idea was announced in a 1978 advertisement Andy Warhol made for Interview magazine, under a line that has outlived everyone involved: when your own initials are enough. Then, through the loudest logo decade the industry has ever had, it went chasing trends that had nothing to do with the brand. By 2001, it was close to bankruptcy, and Gucci Group bought it for around a hundred and fifty-six million dollars.

    Tomas Maier arrived with two rules: no logos and no compromises; put the money back into the Vicenza workshops and the intrecciato artisans, and rebuild the house around a single idea rather than a season. Revenue skyrocketed from well under a hundred million dollars to more than 1.2 billion by 2016. The creative direction has changed hands several times since, to designers with very different sensibilities, and not one of them has reopened the founding question. The signal stayed the same.

    An artisan crafts the signature Bottega Veneta Intrecciato weave. Photo by: Bottega Veneta(https://www.cosmos.so/e/2045642051)

    The difference is not luck, and not the calibre of the designers, since Bally hired amazing designers too. At Bottega Veneta, someone at the top decided what the house was, and everyone who came afterwards inherited that decision instead of relitigating it. That is the true meaning of succession. The other case is a rollercoaster.

    I am simplifying, and I know it. There are market cycles, and owners who buy in order to sell. But after seeing enough companies up close, I have stopped treating context as a sufficient explanation. Context is the same for everybody. The response to it is not.

    If you are a founder, you are almost certainly not running a house that is a hundred and seventy-five years old. The smaller scale of this problem can be even more dangerous: in a company of three people, the whole leadership structure might consist of the founder alone, and there is no framework to absorb the shifts. Change your mind about the brand direction every six months, and nobody will notice for a while. If your standard lives only in your hands and not in the company decision-making process, it will weigh you down forever. Make a move to mirror a competitor, and you are answering their strategy instead of building your own.

    I did not set out with a theory of this. Working with the people who run these houses, and watching the ones that fall apart, I kept encountering the same quiet concept. The houses that held together were led by people who knew who they were, and remained true to themselves while everything around them shifted. Where that comes from, and how a leader builds that powerful brand core, is what we will explore next.

    Because in the end, luxury is not just about the product. It is about the clarity and conviction behind why you make it. You can recover from a bad collection. You cannot recover from leaders who do not know what the brand stands for.

    Bottega Veneta proves the damage is reversible. It does not prove it is cheap.

  • Why Most Luxury Design Is Still Surface Level and How To Take It To The Next Level

    Why Most Luxury Design Is Still Surface Level and How To Take It To The Next Level

    Not long ago, I was approached by a major developer considering the acquisition of a shopping centre in the United States. Like many destinations across the country, it is predominantly accessed by car.

    As we began discussing the asset, the conversation naturally moved towards experiential retail, entertainment, and the customer journey. This raised a simple question: if the customer journey matters so much, where does it actually begin?

    The answer was the car park.

    Car parks are treated as functional spaces. Designed well, they have good lighting, clear navigation, strong graphics and, perhaps, a few considered details. 

    They work. They are rarely remembered.

    A bad one, though, we remember vividly: leaking pipes, dark corners, confusing circulation, damaged ceilings. Bad enough, and it colours our perception of the entire destination before we have set foot inside it.

    So we reversed the question. If a bad car park can define the beginning of an experience negatively, why should an extraordinary one not define it positively? If the journey begins there, perhaps the investment in experience should begin there too.

    Rather than decorating the car park, we developed a narrative specific to the location, its audience, and the destination we wanted to create. The car park became the first chapter of the story.

    This, for me, is where design starts moving beyond the surface.

    Decoration can improve a space. Meaning can transform it; meaning creates identity, identity can create an icon, and an icon becomes memorable. Today, memorability also creates another increasingly valuable quality: shareability.

    Social media has turned architecture into a form of communication. An experience created for a few thousand physical visitors can reach an audience many times larger. Miami’s Museum Garage is an obvious example. A building type normally designed to disappear became an architectural destination in its own right.

    But shareability should be the consequence of memorable design rather than its objective. Designing a feature simply because people might photograph it quickly becomes another form of surface decoration. The strongest spaces are shared because people remember them and want others to experience them.

    When design becomes shareable, architecture becomes earned media, and earned media creates distinction, visibility, and, ultimately, commercial value.

    The Sangyuan House in Zhujiajiao, designed by Yvonne Liu with lighting by Frandy Fu. Photo by: Wang Zilu (https://www.cosmos.so/e/361280688) 

    Going Beyond the Surface

    Surface-level design should not be confused with bad design.

    A space can be beautiful, expensive, professionally executed and technically excellent while remaining strategically superficial. Exceptional marble, bespoke furniture and sophisticated lighting can create an impressive environment. They cannot, on their own, create meaning.

    The next level does not necessarily require a larger budget. It requires another layer of thinking beneath the aesthetics.

    Why should this place exist in this particular form? What is the idea behind it? Who is it for? What should the visitors remember after leaving?

    Storytelling matters here, but the story has to come before the design. A narrative invented afterwards to justify an aesthetic is simply another layer of decoration. The narrative should generate the design, giving materials, colours, proportions and architectural gestures a common origin.

    The customer does not need to know the story in detail. They need to feel that everything belongs to the same world.

    Concentrating Impact

    I encountered a different challenge while developing a new concept for Black Crows.

    The brand was relatively young, but it already had something extremely valuable: a strong identity and an authentic story. We started there, looking at how the brand was born in Chamonix, the passion of the people behind it, the culture surrounding it, and, most importantly, the people who identify with it.

    Consumers rarely connect with a brand’s story simply because its history is interesting. 

    They recognise something in that story that reflects their own identity, or perhaps the identity they aspire to. Choosing a brand becomes a way of associating themselves with its values and its world. The physical environment should reinforce that connection.

    Rather than trying to make every square metre compete for attention, we concentrated the design around a strong focal point based on the concept of a nest, supported by an architectural feature that connected the space to the origins of the brand. This created one theatrical moment capable of establishing the character of the entire environment. Everything around it could then become quieter, allowing that focal point to carry greater weight.

    Hospitality often works similarly. A powerful arrival, lobby, or public space can establish an expectation that influences how guests perceive everything that follows, even when other areas are intentionally more restrained.

    Good design is also about knowing where to concentrate impact. It means understanding where investment can create the greatest perceptual value.

    The OAKV Healthcare Space in Oakville, Canada, designed by Atelier Carle. Photo by: Alex Lesage (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1885568273) 

    When Identity Loses Clarity 

    The opposite can also happen: significant investment without the same clarity of meaning. Gucci’s New Bond Street flagship, in my opinion, provides a curious example.

    The store opened in 2023 during a period of profound transition for the House, following Alessandro Michele’s departure and before a new creative direction had fully established itself. The project itself had already been in development for around two years, so its creation inevitably crossed various moments in Gucci’s recent history.

    The result contains beautiful individual elements: an extraordinary historic building, significant artworks, restored architectural features and references to the Gucci archive. Yet I struggle to find a clear brand identity or a strong concept capable of holding those elements together. Traces of different periods coexist within a more generic luxury language, but the narrative that makes the environment unmistakably Gucci feels absent.

    Interestingly, this search for clarity is now reflected in Kering’s own strategy for Gucci, which speaks of refocusing the brand around what makes it “unmistakably Gucci”, through clear creative direction, disciplined codes and a revitalized heritage.

    In that sense, the New Bond Street store can perhaps be read as a physical expression of a particular moment of transition rather than simply as a design problem.

    This is where surface-level design becomes visible. Art, craftsmanship and expensive materials can create aesthetic quality, but meaning comes from the relationship between them: from understanding what the brand represents, where it comes from and where it wants to go.

    Gucci possesses extraordinary heritage and enormous resources. Yet neither can replace a clear idea and narrative.

    The Whole

    The importance of coherence is hardly a contemporary discovery.

    At the beginning of the twentieth century, Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, leading figures of the Wiener Werkstätte, developed their work around the principle of the Gesamtkunstwerk, literally the “total work of art”. Architecture, furniture, lighting, graphics, objects and craftsmanship were conceived as parts of a single vision, each reinforcing the meaning of the whole. 

    The aesthetic language of the Wiener Werkstätte can arguably be seen as belonging to its time. The principle does not. In fact, it could hardly be more relevant today.

    We are entering an era in which experiential retail and hospitality increasingly overlap. Retail borrows from hospitality to create richer and more emotional customer journeys, while hospitality increasingly incorporates retail, branding, culture and curated experiences into its identity.

    Architecture, furniture, product, service, art, digital communication and storytelling may all be developed as separate disciplines.

    The Customer Experiences the Whole

    The greater the number of touchpoints, the greater the need for a clear idea connecting them.

    While Hoffmann and Moser’s style arguably belongs to design history, their pursuit of a total, coherent experience was ahead of its time and feels increasingly relevant today.

    Finding the Harbour

    Ultimately, meaningful design does not necessarily  depend on budget, nor does it require centuries of heritage. It requires clarity, consistency and, above all, meaning.

    Nearly two thousand years ago, in his letters to Lucilius, Seneca wrote: “When a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”

    The same principle applies to design. Before deciding how a brand should look, we need to understand where it is going, what it stands for and, crucially, who it is for. Without that clarity, the finest materials, the largest budgets and the most talented designers can still produce something beautiful but directionless.

    Taking design beyond the surface, therefore, begins long before the first material is selected or the first line is drawn.

    It begins by defining the harbour.

    Once you know where you are going, design can take you there.

  • From Runway to Exhibition: Fashion Needs Museums

    From Runway to Exhibition: Fashion Needs Museums

    How Institutions Legitimize and Preserve the Art of Dress

    When a museum, MIT, or Palais Galliera puts a dress behind glass, something happens to that dress that has nothing to do with the fabric or the stitching. 

    The garment is first removed from circulation. It is no longer worn to dinner, photographed on a red carpet, sold through a boutique, or folded back into a private wardrobe. Instead, it is placed into institutional storage, waiting under the same conditions that have long been reserved for paintings and sculptures. Once it enters exhibition, it is presented through controlled lighting, careful display, and the accompanying wall label that tells viewers how to approach it. The dress itself does not change; what changes is its presentation, and that presentation is doing exactly the work museums have always done for objects they decide are worth remembering. Fashion has spent the last several decades asking for this treatment more insistently than any other applied art.

    This conversation has a clear historical dimension. A silhouette communicates a narrative the way a painting does. The corseted waist of the 1890s, the dropped waist of the 1920s, the padded shoulder of the 1940s, the cinched waist of Dior’s New Look in 1947. Each of these shapes a body according to what a given decade believed a body should do, how much it should move, how visible it should be, what kind of labor or leisure it was built for. Paul Poiret’s decision to remove the corset in the years before the First World War was read at the time as a design choice, but it was also a statement about how women were expected to occupy space. Dior’s New Look was read by some as pure escapism and by others as a rather blunt argument about where women’s bodies belonged after the war economy had briefly needed them elsewhere. 

    Installation view of the “Just Before” exhibition by Issey Miyake in 1999. (https://www.cosmos.so/e/726618500 )

    Together, these shifts show that fashion rarely changes in isolation. Major silhouettes often emerge as visible signals of broader cultural, political, and economic transformations, making garments historical documents as much as aesthetic objects. Neither interpretation requires the dress to hang in a museum to be true. A museum, however, is where that interpretation is preserved beyond the lifetime of the people who experienced it firsthand.

    Cristóbal Balenciaga built garments as if he were solving problems in geometry, and by the late 1960s his standing envelope coat and his balloon skirts were being discussed by critics using vocabulary borrowed from sculpture. Alexander McQueen staged collections that functioned as installations before they functioned as clothing lines, a runway with a wind machine and a hologram of Kate Moss doing more to communicate an idea rather than showing a garment. Iris van Herpen works with 3D printing and magnetic fields in a studio that looks closer to a materials-science lab than a traditional atelier, and her pieces have been acquired by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art with the same acquisition logic applied to a piece of contemporary sculpture. None of these designers needed to call themselves artists for the label to attach itself to what they made.

    The collaborations between designers and painters are where this intersection becomes most visible, because they intentionally close the gap between the two categories. Elsa Schiaparelli’s work with Salvador Dalí in the late 1930s produced garments that read as Surrealist objects taking shape as clothing. Lobster Dress print has been used in Dalí’s paintings; the Shoe Hat is modeled directly on one of Dalí’s own sketches. Schiaparelli was translating these surrealist pieces into a brand-new medium that could be worn to a party or to a fancy dinner. These collaborations also elevated her maison beyond dressmaking. By aligning her work with one of the defining artists of the twentieth century, Schiaparelli positioned haute couture as a legitimate participant in artistic discourse rather than merely a producer of fashionable clothing.

    Nearly a century later, Louis Vuitton’s collaborations with Yayoi Kusama, first in 2012 and again in 2023, worked from a similar idea but different tools: Kusama’s polka dots and infinity nets applied across handbags, trunks, and ready-to-wear, with storefronts around the world transformed into installations featuring a giant animatronic Kusama painting dots onto a canvas in the window. The commercial scale of that second collaboration was enormous, but the gesture was the same one Schiaparelli had made decades earlier: an artist’s visual language grafted directly onto the surface of a garment which could be perfectly wearable. What ties the historical and the recent collaborations together is that in both cases the fashion house needed the artist’s authority to make a claim about itself. Schiaparelli needed Dalí to show that her house could produce Surrealism as convincingly as it produced eveningwear. Louis Vuitton needed Kusama to show that a maison built on monogrammed trunks could still speak the language of contemporary art. A museum retrospective borrows the authority of an institution. A collaboration borrows the authority of an individual artist. Both allow garments to reach a cultural status that might otherwise take decades to achieve, if they achieve it at all.

    ‘Azzedine Alaïa – Thierry Mugler: 1980-1990 Two Decades of Artistic Affinities’ at Fondation Azzedine Alaïa, Paris 2025. Photo by: Stéphane Aït Ouarab (https://www.wallpaper.com/fashion-beauty/azzedine-alaia-thierry-mugler-paris-exhibition)

    For today’s luxury consumer, these collaborations represent more than successful marketing campaigns. Purchasing such a garment or accessory is also the acquisition of cultural capital. The object carries the symbolic authority of the artist whose work it incorporates. This helps explain why the intersection between fashion and art has become one of the defining characteristics of the contemporary luxury industry. Haute couture has long justified its value through extraordinary craftsmanship, but increasingly it also justifies itself through intellectual and artistic associations. In this context, luxury is measured not only by exclusivity or technical excellence, but by a garment’s ability to participate in wider cultural conversations.

    That is probably the simplest way to describe what a museum does for a dress – it buys the garment time. A painting gets studied across centuries because someone decided early on that it was worth keeping past the death of everyone who understood its original context. Every viewer past that generation inherits knowledge of that period, instead of having to start from nothing. Clothing rarely gets that kind of a head start, since it is made to be worn, damaged, and altered. The majority of the garments that survive past their time are just pieces someone happened to hold onto. A museum purposefully breaks that linear process. It is truly the only institution built to insist that a coat from 1912 deserves the same care as a painting from the same year, and the fact that this insistence is even necessary says something about how fashion has been treated all along. 

    Looking forward, this approach should become less of an exception and more of a standard. As museums continue expanding their fashion collections and collaborations between artists and designers become increasingly common, garments should be evaluated not only for their craftsmanship or commercial success but also for their cultural, historical, and artistic significance. Fashion is one of the most immediate records of how societies imagine identity, status, technology, and beauty. Preserving it accordingly allows future generations to study these ideas with the same seriousness afforded to painting, sculpture, or architecture. If museums give fashion time, scholarship must continue giving it attention.

  • Beyond Status: How Sustainability Redefines Desirability in Luxury

    Beyond Status: How Sustainability Redefines Desirability in Luxury

    Across generations, indulgence in luxury has been a deep sense of pride for many individuals, with the desire for it only intensifying over time. Oftentimes, luxury has been the perfect language to translate one’s identity, values, and social position, but, most importantly, the richness and fulfillment of one’s existence. This very essence of luxury begins with nature’s unparalleled contribution to its creation.

    Luxury’s Silent Source

    To this day, the luxury industry remains heavily reliant on nature and its resources in the development of its creations. Nature contributes to the quality, craftsmanship, and distinctiveness associated with luxury, shaping the standards of excellence expected across the industry. Centered on intentionality and exclusivity, luxury’s dedication to crafting excellence begins with nature’s resources. From creative conception and design to exceptional craftsmanship, continuous innovation, and premium experiences, luxury is supported by nature’s endowments at every level.

    Whether directly or indirectly, most tangible luxury products depend on nature’s finest resources. Each industry in the luxury market relies on its own combination of resources, such as flowers for fragrances, cotton and leather for fashion, grapes for wine, and precious metals and gemstones for jewelry and watches. This dependence has, over time, placed considerable strain on the environment and the sources that have sustained it. Although the integration of alternative materials has gradually reduced reliance on certain resources over the past decade, the luxury industry has no intention of operating independently of nature, which has long been central to its creations beyond raw materials. 

    In recent years, the escalation of production and consumption has increased the strain on nature’s resources. Despite lower production volumes than the mass and premium markets, the luxury industry’s reliance on resource-intensive materials such as leather, precious metals, gemstones, fine textiles, and natural ingredients has significant environmental implications. The extraction and processing of these materials require substantial amounts of land, water, and energy while generating carbon emissions and disrupting biodiversity. Beyond the industry’s own resource demands, the strain is further intensified by a growing global population, climate volatility, and the absence of viable means to manage previously accumulated excess. At the same time, the rapidly increasing levels of consumption have become increasingly normalised, allowing the overconsumption of natural resources to go largely unnoticed.  This has called for a serious reassessment of the unsustainable practices and resource consumption across the global luxury market. 

    Such realities raise a compelling question: if luxury is intended to make life more comfortable and indulgent, at whose expense is that comfort achieved?

    Photo by: Parker Coffman, 2020    (https://unsplash.com/photos/white-dress-shirt-hanged-on-brown-wooden-clothes-hanger-nAJEr8KlUnE) 

    Luxury’s New Desirability Feature

    Neither nature nor future generations should have to bear the cost of today’s comfort. This represents a defining shift in how luxury is conceived, created, and presented to its audience. 

    In contemporary luxury, one of the most prominent and debated factors in desirability is sustainability. At a time when luxury has become a common expression of identity and values, its commitment to the environment and society is what makes luxury, luxury. A sustainable structure across all aspects of luxury is fundamental to its ethical framework. It is the ability to meet the customer’s needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own (1). 

    Surpassing all previous generations, today’s luxury consumers place a stronger emphasis on identity, social and cultural standing, meaningful experiences, and heritage. Their appreciation of intentionality deepens when it closely aligns with their value system. Likewise, their perception of exclusivity is increasingly defined by thoughtfulness and responsible resource management rather than by scarcity alone. Therefore, individuals place greater value on responsibly produced luxury than on unethically sourced rare products. This has become the new standard for the new generations of luxury consumers. Quality, craftsmanship, and innovation, driven by the need to expand into sustainability, fuel consumer desire as much as a product’s or brand’s history and resonance. “Does this product reflect me – my identity and my morality?” is now the internal question many individuals raise to evaluate their purchasing decisions. This is further deepened by the desire for transparency throughout the production chain, allowing individuals to make comprehensive assessments of how well a purchase aligns with their preferences. A traceable product is often more favoured by the contemporary luxury consumer than comparable alternatives, as it lends credibility to its environmental and ethical credentials. Further fueled by modern consumers’ need to authenticate luxury products, traceability poses as a new solution to rapid spikes in counterfeiting. This defining shift towards sustainability has set a new baseline for luxury.

    Sustainability and Innovation

    At present, sustainability initiatives are no longer an option but a prerequisite within the luxury industry. While luxury brands may choose to retain traditional practices, they have a responsibility to ensure their operations reflect the values upon which they are founded. Given the luxury market’s position and resources, it carries the duty to lead by example, far above mass-market expectations. To this end, every brand, and especially a luxury brand, should visibly embody its commitment to sustainability, making customer engagement more meaningful rather than purely transactional. 

    Innovation aimed at reducing the excessive use of nature’s resources should be prioritised. Across the supply chain, this could include responsible sourcing, resource-efficient production, mindful product design, low-impact logistics, and circular end-of-life strategies. Therefore, from pre- to post-production, sustainable practices should be explored at every possible stage. 

    Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2027 show in Paris, 2026. Photo by: Louis Vuitton (https://www.dezeen.com/2026/06/25/jumbo-tidal-wave-louis-vuitton-menswear-show/) 

    Luxury’s Commitment to Sustainability

    Intentionally

    Most luxury brands have adapted to this new standard fairly quickly with their comprehensive sustainability strategies. One of the most prominent examples of sustainability in luxury is Guerlain. With close to 18 years of unrelenting dedication to sustainability, and continuing, Guerlain has consistently taken the initiative to re-evaluate and protect its longstanding foundations.

    Since Guerlain’s brand identity is inspired by bees and its dedication to living nature, the brand has introduced numerous sustainability measures to protect bees and their environment. When it comes to its products – the heart of the brand – Guerlain has built an effective structure to make them as sustainable as possible. Using naturally derived and ethically sourced ingredients, Guerlain’s products are eco-formulated. The products are also designed with refillable options to extend their lifespan. Their packaging now features innovative, eco-friendly materials and construction designed to reduce their carbon footprint. Collectively, these practices contribute to reducing Guerlain’s overall greenhouse gas emissions while minimising the environmental impact of its products throughout their lifecycle. Guerlain also prioritises transparency to allow consumers to better understand the brand’s ethical positioning; therefore, traceability is a core part of their product strategy. Together, these initiatives reflect a sustainability-led product philosophy.

    “At Guerlain, product development is guided by a precise understanding of the impact of each ingredient and component” (2).

    Creatively

    At the same time, sustainability within the luxury framework should not be limited to the production of physical, tangible products. Given the contemporary luxury demographic’s preference for experiences over tangible possessions, sustainability should continue to guide strategic decision-making across the luxury value chain. Therefore, every curated luxury experience should place as much emphasis on sustainable practices as it does on the experience itself. Every component of a luxury experience should be sourced, reused, and disposed of ethically while minimising its environmental impact. 

    The Louis Vuitton Men’s Spring–Summer 2027 show is a compelling example of how luxury can embrace both extravagance and responsible practices without compromising its creativity or impact. Pharrell Williams, Creative Director of Louis Vuitton Menswear, showcased a surf-inspired Spring–Summer 2027 ready-to-wear collection that captivated the fashion community, turning into one of the season’s most talked-about shows. It was not only the actual collection that attracted attention, but also the construction of the runway. A striking wave-like bridge, with cascading blue water and glistening sand carpeting the entire runway, transformed the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris into a surfer’s turf. 

    Although the show was widely celebrated, it also raised questions about the extent of the brand’s environmental commitments. As part of LVMH’s Regeneration 2030 roadmap, Louis Vuitton supports Coral Gardeners in advancing reef restoration efforts in French Polynesia, while the show’s water, sourced from Eaux de Paris, will return to the sewer system through a closed circuit, and the sand will be donated to the beach volleyball courts at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (3). This creative vision by Louis Vuitton exemplified how luxury can be realized responsibly and sustainably without compromise. 

    The Future of Luxury 

    Over the course of time, nature’s own luxuries have contributed immeasurably to countless expressions of luxury. Although the luxury industry has made considerable progress towards more ethical practices, sustainability remains an ongoing challenge. While many brands have embraced greater environmental and social responsibility, lasting change requires a comprehensive approach that integrates sustainability across every aspect of the industry. 

    Therefore, a relentless pursuit of change across the luxury industry, regardless of its initial impact, is essential to preserve and regenerate the natural resources upon which it has long relied. This will enable future generations to continue experiencing and appreciating the same luxuries that define the industry today.

    Sources:

    (1) Håland, W. (1999). On needs — a Central Concept in the Brundtland Report. Towards Sustainable Development, pp.48–69. doi:10.1057/9780230378797_3.

    (2) Guerlain (2024). ACTING FOR LIVING BEAUTY – Sustainable Development Report 2024. [online] Available at: https://www.guerlain.com/on/demandware.static/-/Library-Sites-Guerlain_SharedLibrary/default/vd9a268fd1449769468d4a43e8a3d3e8ea2462b22/pdf/RRSE_guerlain_2025_english%201.pdf?version=1,758,626,467,908&_gl=1*t5pdo5*_gcl_au*MjIwNjI5NDQzLjE3ODMzNjQ1MDE.*FPAU*MTYxNTg0NTU1Mi4xNzgzMzY0NTAx*_ga*MjI2Njg2OTE0LjE3NjkxOTg5ODI.*_ga_TL8PLE0B55*czE3ODMzNjQ1MDAkbzIkZzEkdDE3ODMzNjU3MjAkajQ2JGwwJGgxMjAyMTUzMzkwJGRfV0pKakxtOGxwaUtOWnk5TVprRld1S2dyemNqdXBDTmh3*_fplc*SkV3Y3pSMXhGVVNIcjZOcjhQekdFWnRpYkJxS0RSbiUyQlphVlFLb3Y3cFoxUUVtSGJyNzdVS2g1bW93MSUyQnpqQ3ltc3VPUSUyRmwwTSUyQmFyS2NUSG4xMGRhUjNIMTVONVpUWVdpVFZtdGtTdkFCeHBjNWxHMnRxWUM5VFBpNnFUZ1ElM0QlM0Q.

    (3) LVMH (2025). Louis Vuitton Unveils Its Men’s Spring-Summer 2027 Show – LVMH. [online] LVMH.com. Available at: https://www.lvmh.com/en/news-lvmh/new-wave-at-the-louis-vuitton-spring-summer-2027-mens-show.

  • Where Luxury Went: Twenty Years of Watching Bangkok Change

    Where Luxury Went: Twenty Years of Watching Bangkok Change

    In 2005, European customers seeking a luxury experience would not fly to Asia. That has inverted, and Bangkok shows how.

    My first trip to Asia began in Bangkok in 2005. It was a holiday, not a posting. I visited a tailor, ate on the street, walked through temples and then went south to Koh Samui for the beach. Nothing about that trip suggested that my work would be centred entirely on this region for the next twenty years.

    I landed at Don Mueang; Suvarnabhumi would open the following year in September. What luxury retail I encountered was largely confined to arcades inside a handful of hotels. Siam Paragon opened in December of that same year. The city I walked through was fundamentally different from the Bangkok that exists today.

    Set that against my own reference points. In the early nineties I travelled repeatedly to New York and Los Angeles, and Fifth Avenue was a genuine destination, because it was one of the few streets anywhere in the world where luxury houses stood side by side. Outside Paris and a small number of European addresses, there was nowhere else to go.

    Yet if I were asked today where to experience luxury rather than simply buy it, I would answer Asia and name several cities. That shift happened within two decades, even as much of the outside commentary continued to reduce Asian luxury to Chinese consumer spending.

    A City That Changed Shape

    A decade ago, Bangkok’s luxury conversation centred on a familiar collection of addresses: Siam Paragon, Emporium, Central Chidlom and Gaysorn, joined more recently by Central Embassy and EmQuartier. Retail was organised primarily around access and convenience. Flagships were rarer, formats smaller, and brand storytelling usually followed the standard practice of putting products within reach of visitors.

    The city now operates as a network of destinations, each with a distinct role. Siam Paragon carries scale and energy. Gaysorn Village offers intimacy, where private appointments feel relaxed and unhurried. Central Embassy communicates through restraint. ICONSIAM turned the riverside into a day out, combining maisons, craft, culture and a shuttle boat into a destination people plan around rather than merely drop by. EmQuartier and EmSphere, which sit alongside Emporium as the Em District, draw energy from residents’ daily routines as well as visitor traffic. One Bangkok, whose phased opening began in October 2024 and will continue through 2030, extends this logic across an entire district.

    The important part is the movement between them. Clients can choose flagship theatre in one place and quieter service in another. Bangkok offers both without forcing either.

    Helix EmQuartier Chandelier 6-9 Floors. Photo by: Tripadvisor Staff (https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g293916-d16868062-Reviews-or20-The_EmQuartier-Bangkok.html)

    What Moved Underneath

    The visible change rests on shifts that are financial, demographic and geopolitical, rather than architectural alone.

    The largest is the redistribution of Chinese travel. Chinese visitors were treated as the engine of Asian luxury for a decade, and Thailand built considerable capacity around that assumption. In 2025, Chinese arrivals fell by roughly a third, from 6.73 million to 4.47 million. Total foreign arrivals declined by 7.2 per cent to 32.97 million, the first annual fall in more than a decade outside the pandemic years. Malaysia regained its position as Thailand’s largest source market despite sending fewer visitors, as arrivals from China fell much faster.

    The causes formed a chain rather than a single event. The high-profile abduction of Chinese actor Wang Xing, who was taken through Thailand to a scam compound in Myanmar in January 2025, damaged confidence in Thai safety. China’s economic slowdown, a stronger baht and growing regional competition added pressure. Myanmar’s earthquake, the border conflict with Cambodia and severe flooding in southern Thailand deepened a wider sense of instability during the year.

    Retail moved in the opposite direction. In January 2025, Bloomberg reported that Dior, Louis Vuitton and Porsche were placing serious bets on Bangkok. Dior’s Gold House had opened weeks earlier. In March, Siam Piwat announced that fifteen further luxury brands would make new or exclusive debuts across its destinations during the year.

    That investment entered a mixed market. CBRE’s 2026 outlook projects new retail supply to outpace tenant demand, with average occupancy slipping below 90 per cent. Thai consumer confidence fell for six consecutive months to July 2025, reaching its lowest level in 31 months. The result is a more polarised market, with the best-positioned assets pulling away while older properties face a harder fight for relevance.

    At the same time, capital continues to concentrate at the upper end. Bangkok expects more than 4,300 new hotel rooms during 2026, primarily in the upscale and luxury segments. New downtown luxury and super-luxury residences continue to launch, with average asking prices forecast to rise by up to 15 per cent year-on-year.

    The market, then, is neither broadly booming nor collapsing. Its strongest segments are attracting disproportionate investment.

    Currency reinforced that sorting. By September 2025, the baht had appreciated by around 8 per cent against the US dollar, reaching a four-year high. At the time, the president of the Thai Hotels Association warned that prolonged strength would eventually affect tourism. My understanding is that it affects particular kinds of tourism. A stronger baht changes the equation for someone choosing between Bangkok and a less expensive neighbour. It matters far less to a client commissioning a piece of high jewellery.

    Phantom Illusion, Bangkok, 2024. Photo by: Tan Kaninthanond (https://unsplash.com/photos/a-view-of-a-city-skyline-at-night-417FF0HwyIM)

    What People Buy Now

    The two most significant luxury openings in Bangkok in recent years both arrived in 2024, and each extends far beyond a conventional store. Louis Vuitton’s LV The Place opened at Gaysorn Amarin in February, combining an exhibition, café, boutique and restaurant by Gaggan Anand. Dior’s Gold House opened in December, reinterpreting the façade of 30 Avenue Montaigne and bringing Thai art and craftsmanship into the interior. Today, it also includes Café Dior.

    Both are capital-intensive expressions of the brand. Selling remains part of their purpose, while culture, food and place-making broaden the relationship. That combination would have been difficult to justify to a board when I first came here. It is now increasingly expected of a serious flagship in Asia.

    What changed is the shape of the client’s day, and it changed differently depending on whose day it is. For a visitor, the purchase sits within an itinerary that runs from hotel to exhibition to dinner, and the boutique competes for attention alongside it. For a resident, there is no itinerary, only a routine: a Saturday that takes in a fitting, a café and a film, or a weekday lunch that ends on a shop floor. EmQuartier and EmSphere fit naturally into that second rhythm.

    Residents offer a more durable opportunity because the relationship can become habitual. Once a boutique becomes part of an ordinary Saturday, the next visit requires much less persuasion.

    Why The Region Moves Faster

    In my view, Asia is redefining luxury more quickly than any other region. The test is not simply spending growth; it is how readily the map can be redrawn.

    Luxury spending has risen almost everywhere over the past twenty years. What distinguishes Asia is how much of the physical city has changed to accommodate it. Europe’s luxury geography remains anchored in many of the same addresses that mattered in 1995, and the incentives favour protecting their position. In the twenty years since I first landed here, Bangkok has replaced its international airport, built much of its current luxury retail map and redefined what a flagship is expected to do. That pace of change remains rare elsewhere.

    The second reason is greater freedom from inherited assumptions. Much of Asia’s luxury infrastructure is recent enough to have been designed around the client who exists now, rather than retrofitted for that client. ICONSIAM was conceived as a destination from the outset. That offers considerable freedom compared to a heritage address adapting a nineteenth-century building to twenty-first-century expectations.

    The third is the growing confidence of domestic and regional buyers. In my work, I have watched Thai clients buying at home, and Malaysian and Indonesian clients arriving for a weekend, placing greater emphasis on craftsmanship, provenance and personal alignment. The label still matters, while inherited prestige alone carries less authority. Regional names can compete for attention alongside global maisons, while global houses increasingly build local relevance into their expression. Dior Gold House’s collaboration with Thai artists and craftspeople makes the shift visible.

    Ojo Bangkok, The Standard, Bangkok Mahanakhon, Naradhiwas Rajanagarindra Road, Si Lom, Bangkok, 2025. Photo by: Sam Lembeck (https://unsplash.com/photos/elegant-restaurant-interior-with-people-dining-and-drinking-3C8z9DfH82s)

    Three Hubs, Three Answers

    Having lived in Hong Kong and Singapore while working across the region, I have observed that the distinctions between Asia’s three premier luxury hubs are structural rather than superficial.

    Hong Kong served as the region’s luxury retail hub for many years, and it retains commercial significance and depth of assortment. Singapore built something broader over the past twenty years, layering retail, hospitality and entertainment into a single proposition, with the integrated resorts, the Grand Prix and a global concert calendar all pulling in the same direction. It is the most deliberately engineered of the three.

    Bangkok arrived at its position differently, and its wellness sector offers a good illustration. RAKxa, on Bang Krachao, combines medical diagnostics with traditional Thai, Chinese and Ayurvedic therapies. VitalLife Scientific Wellness Center, the wellness arm of Bumrungrad International Hospital, has run longevity and preventive programmes on the hospital campus since 2001. Biomarker testing, hormone optimisation and NAD infusions are now readily available across the city. A client can fly in for a week that includes a full health assessment, a boutique appointment and dinner, and the three sit comfortably together.

    Evidence for this extends well past retail. Bangkok is a place people choose to live as well as visit. The cost of a high-quality life remains considerably lower than in Hong Kong or Singapore, its food culture is exceptional at every price point, and the city has become a practical base for people whose work is regional rather than fixed. Convenience and quality of life bring the client to the city. Shopping follows.

    At the upper end of Asian retail, technical service standards are high across the major hubs. Bangkok’s distinction lies elsewhere: Thai hospitality draws on long-established social codes of attentiveness and welcome. Training sharpens it rather than creates it. A well-trained team executes correctly. A genuinely hospitable one makes the client feel expected. The difference is immediate, even when the client cannot name it.

    The Durable Asset

    Architecture creates the invitation. Hospitality creates the connection. One is capital expenditure; the other is culture.

    Twenty years ago, I came here as a tourist with no professional interest in the region. What I found was a country with extraordinary hospitality and very little luxury infrastructure. The infrastructure could be built, and over twenty years it was. The hospitality never had to be. It was already in the culture, and what the new buildings did was give it somewhere to go.

    Every city in Asia can build. Not every city can host.

  • Design as a Strategic Tool in Building Future Luxury Brands

    Design as a Strategic Tool in Building Future Luxury Brands

    Design is where strategy becomes tangible. It is the point at which every decision made in the boardroom becomes visible to the customer.

    Ask most people what makes a boutique, hotel, or restaurant feel luxurious, and they will point to aesthetics: the marble, the lighting, the way a space simply looks expensive. Ask a founder who has actually built one, and the answer changes. Design was never the finishing touch. It was one of the first strategic decisions they made, and one of the most consequential.

    Within commercial environments, and particularly in luxury, treating design as a matter of taste is a costly misreading of what it actually does.

    Design Is Not the Aesthetic Layer. It Is the Delivery Mechanism for Strategy.

    Behind every architectural decision in a well-run luxury business sits a strategic intention. Materials, proportions, lighting, circulation, and the sequence in which a space unfolds are orchestrated to communicate identity, not decorate it. Long before a product is touched or a conversation begins, a customer has already formed a judgment about the brand. The space has done its introduction.

    This is why design deserves a seat at the table alongside pricing, positioning, and capital allocation, rather than being commissioned after those decisions are made. Months of work on brand strategy, customer research, heritage, and commercial planning eventually have to converge into a physical environment. If design is brought in late, as a cosmetic finish over a polished business plan, that convergence never quite happens. The result is a space that looks luxurious without behaving like luxury.

    For founders, the implication is direct: design briefs should be written by the same people who own positioning and brand strategy, not handed off to an architect or interior designer as a separate, later workstream. If the person designing the space doesn’t understand what the brand is trying to say, the environment will inevitably communicate something else.

    Design is where strategy becomes tangible. It is the point at which every decision made in the boardroom becomes visible to the customer.

    Luxury, Aesthetics, and Design Are Not the Same Thing: Confusing Them Is Where Founders Go Wrong

    It’s worth being precise about three terms that get used interchangeably.

    Luxury defines the values and aspirations a brand wants to embody. Aesthetics is the visual and emotional vocabulary through which those values become perceptible. Design is the discipline that turns that vocabulary into physical reality: the layout, the material choices, the lighting plan, the choreography of movement through a room.

    The distinction matters because it’s possible to get the aesthetics right and the design wrong. A space can look expensive (the right materials, the right palette) and still fail to function as a luxury experience, because design isn’t concerned with how a place looks: it determines how customers interpret it, navigate it, and ultimately remember it. Aesthetics are surface-level. Design is the system. Founders who conflate the two tend to over-invest in finishes and under-invest in the underlying logic of the space, and it shows.

    Aesop’s second Collins Street store, designed by Clare Cousins, 2023. Photo by Peter B. Bennetts (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1137370889)

    Heritage Is a Brand’s Most Valuable Asset. Design Is How You Make It Legible.

    Unlike a product or a collection, heritage cannot be manufactured on a timeline. It is accumulated over years, sometimes generations, and it is precisely what separates a brand with genuine equity from one that is simply well-marketed. Design is the mechanism that gives that heritage physical form, so customers recognise it instantly, without being told.

    Louis Vuitton’s recurring use of the hot-air balloon is a useful case study. On the surface, it’s a decorative motif tied loosely to travel. Its actual function is more deliberate. In the nineteenth century, the hot-air balloon represented a genuine technological frontier: exploration, optimism, the belief that new inventions could change how people experienced the world. By threading that symbol through its visual language, Louis Vuitton isn’t just referencing its origins as a trunk-maker. It’s reconnecting its heritage to the pioneering spirit of early modern travel. The heritage isn’t presented as nostalgia. It’s presented as innovation, remembered, which is a far more useful story for a brand to tell about itself.

    The takeaway for founders building something new: heritage doesn’t have to mean history you don’t yet have. It can mean the founding idea, the original obsession, the reason the brand exists: encoded into a symbol, a material, a spatial gesture that gets repeated until it becomes recognisable. The mistake is waiting decades to start doing this deliberately. The brands that do it well start on day one.

    Design Also Engineers Behaviour, Not Just Meaning

    The decompression zone is the clearest example of this. It’s the transitional space just inside the entrance of a retail environment: the area that, to an untrained eye, looks like wasted square footage that could otherwise hold product.

    In practice, it’s doing real commercial work. Customers arriving from the street need a moment to disconnect: their eyes adjust to new lighting, they filter out the street noise, and they orient themselves in an unfamiliar setting. The decompression zone manages that transition while simultaneously setting the brand’s first impression. From there, attention moves naturally from the whole of the space to specific focal points, a wide shot narrowing to a close-up, and only then does the customer start engaging with individual products.

    For a founder deciding how to allocate a limited retail capacity, this matters directly. The instinct to fill every square foot with product is usually the wrong one. What appears to be empty space is, in reality, one of the most commercially productive areas of the entire store, not because it sells products directly, but because it prepares customers to perceive everything that follows. This is the kind of decision that looks like it belongs to an architect but is really a commercial call, and it should be made with the same rigour as a pricing decision.

    The interior of a Natasha Schweitzer boutique. Photo by Natasha Schweitzer (https://www.cosmos.so/e/679729374)

    What This Means in Practice

    Three things follow from treating design as strategy rather than decoration:

    First, design should enter the conversation at the same stage as brand positioning, not after it. If a founder can’t yet articulate what the brand stands for, no designer can encode it into a space.

    Second, every material, symbol, and spatial decision should be traceable back to a reason. If a founder can’t explain why a finish, a motif, or a layout choice is there, it’s aesthetics without design, and customers tend to sense the difference, even if they can’t name it.

    Third, resist judging a space only by how much of it is commercial. In luxury retail, some of the most commercially effective spaces are those that do not sell anything directly; they make everything else feel more credible.

    The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong

    Brands that treat design as an afterthought don’t usually fail immediately. They open, they get attention, and the photography looks good. What they don’t understand is the true purpose of design: a space that customers read correctly, without needing it explained. That gap, between looking luxurious and functioning as luxury, is where a great deal of promising brands quietly plateau.

    The founders who understand this aren’t simply building stores, hotels, or restaurants. They’re designing meaning, on purpose, from the first decision onward. Everyone else is just decorating a strategy they never finished writing.

  • History of Exceptional Marketing: Why Diamonds Are Still Winning

    History of Exceptional Marketing: Why Diamonds Are Still Winning

    A diamond is not rare. That fact alone could end most conversations about its value, yet it rarely does.

    Diamonds have occupied a central place in Western consumer culture for nearly a century, yet their dominance is difficult to explain through physical properties alone. Other gemstones like sapphires, emeralds, and rubies are much rarer and, in many cases, even more visually striking. What separates diamonds is a narrative constructed and sustained over several decades that had little to do with the stone itself. 

    In the 1930s, De Beers faced a straightforward commercial problem: supply exceeded demand, and the American market showed little appetite for expensive stones during a recession. The company’s response was to commission an advertising campaign that would rebrand diamonds as not just a luxury product but a romantic gesture and a cultural obligation. The result was one of the most studied cases of manufactured cultural norms in marketing history, and it raises a question: how does a commercial product become a social expectation, and what does it take to sustain that position across generations?

    Diamonds inspected at a De Beers facility in London. Photo by Jack Orton (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1755006488)

    The strategy behind De Beers’ positioning itself as a monopoly lies in its understanding of artificial scarcity. Cecil Rhodes incorporated De Beers Consolidated Mines in 1888 with a clear understanding that diamonds, once discovered in large quantities in South Africa, would lose their value if allowed to flood the market freely. The solution was vertical integration on a scale rarely seen in commodity markets. De Beers moved to control not just mining but distribution, regulating how many stones entered the market at any given time. By the early twentieth century, this system had produced a commodity that behaved unlike any other. 

    At the same time, prices for most raw materials fluctuated with economic cycles. Diamond prices crept steadily upward, decade after decade. Ernest Oppenheimer, who became chairman of De Beers in 1929, inherited this architecture and faced the additional challenge of stimulating consumer demand during the Great Depression. His decision to engage the American advertising agency N.W. Ayer marked the point at which supply control alone gave way to something more ambitious – cultural perception.

    N.W. Ayer produced an advertising campaign that was a coordinated effort to reposition diamonds within American social hierarchy. The agency’s research found that Americans in the late 1930s viewed diamonds as luxuries reserved for the very wealthy, which meant that any straightforward pitch about the quality or beauty of the stones themselves would reach only a narrow audience. Diamonds were placed on the fingers and wrists of film stars and socialites, with 125 newspapers arranged to cover these appearances as fashion rather than promotion. Designers were paid to speak publicly about the trend toward diamonds, and a lecture series on diamonds and engagement was organized across American high schools. Between 1938 and 1941, American diamond sales rose by fifty-five percent, which was enough to confirm the direction but not yet enough to achieve what De Beers actually wanted: a world in which a marriage proposal without a diamond felt incomplete.

    What makes the De Beers case worth examining beyond its commercial dimensions is what it reveals about the durability of manufactured social norms. Lab-grown diamonds are now physically identical to mined stones, certified by the same gemological bodies, and available at a fraction of the price, and yet a significant portion of the market continues to treat them as categorically different.

    Model Rachel Fox wears jewelry featuring VRAI-created diamonds, 2024. Photo by: VRAI (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1272103602)

    De Beers itself responded to this by launching Lightbox in 2018, a lab-grown jewelry line positioned explicitly as affordable fashion. The move was designed to preserve the premium perception of natural diamonds by placing synthetic stones in a separate, lower-status category but Lightbox shut down last year, unable to sustain that separation. The fact that this distinction requires active maintenance suggests that the value of a natural diamond was never entirely self-sustaining. It has always depended on a continuous effort to define what a diamond means, who should buy one, and on what occasion. 

    That effort has now been running for nearly ninety years, long enough for the construction to disappear entirely behind what it constructed. A generation that grew up watching their parents exchange diamond rings, that absorbed the idea of a Tiffany solitaire proposal through films, magazine covers, and Instagram announcements, does not experience the diamond as a marketing decision. They experience it as the obvious choice that anyone would make.

    This is the more impressive achievement. De Beers produced a situation in which not buying a diamond requires an explanation. The person who proposes with a sapphire, a moissanite, or nothing at all will spend some portion of their engagement answering questions about it. Remarkable, when you consider that the whole tradition is younger than commercial aviation. 

    The diamond industry succeeded not by making its product indispensable, but by making its absence conspicuous. And that, more than any slogan, is what keeps the market alive.