Author: sapere

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

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.

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.