Category: Luxury shift

Fifty million luxury customers walked away in two years. They were supposed to be loyal. What actually drove them away, and what should founders focus on instead?

Loyalty has been the luxury industry’s favourite word for as long as I have worked in it. The loyal client, the loyalty programme, the lifetime value model. Whole departments exist to measure it. And then the numbers arrived. According to Bain and Altagamma, the active customer base for personal luxury goods fell from a peak of around 400 million in 2022 to roughly 330 million in 2025. Claudia D’Arpizio, who leads the study, put it without decoration: fifty million luxury consumers have either opted out of the market or been forced out of it in the space of two years.

Fifty million people. That is not a soft quarter. That is a walkout.

So the question in the title is worth asking properly, because the industry’s instinct is to answer it with a tool. More CRM, more points, more personalisation, another app. Deloitte surveyed 420 luxury executives for its 2026 report and found customer experience and loyalty named as the single strongest growth opportunity, ahead of everything else. They can see the problem. I am not convinced they fully grasp the root of the problem.

Start with what loyalty in luxury actually was, because it was never what the spreadsheets said it was. It was not repeat purchase. Repeat purchase was the symptom. Underneath it sat a contract, mostly unspoken, between the brand and the client: you give me the feeling, and I will keep coming back. The feeling of distinction, of belonging to the few, of holding something that draws a line between those who understand and those who do not. The logo was the receipt for that feeling of exclusivity. The industry, being run increasingly by finance rather than by creative vision, made the classic mistake of confusing the evidence with the cause.

Silent Majority, an exclusive editorial collaboration with Louis Vuitton, 2025. Photo by: Kevin Alexander (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1276579880)

Then the receipt system stopped working. McKinsey and the Business of Fashion found that one in three American consumers had bought a dupe in the previous twelve months, and these are not the sad fakes of twenty years ago but extremely well-made look-alikes. Legal advisers now warn openly that overexposure to dupes and super-fakes degrades the perceived scarcity and exclusivity of the authentic article.

Meanwhile, Bain reports that prices of the iconic bags rose between 50 and 70 per cent from 2019 to 2025, while genuinely new hero products became rare. Hold those two facts together. The brands raised the price of the promise while the promise itself was being photocopied on every street corner. No loyalty programme survives that arithmetic. You cannot bill someone more every year for a feeling you are delivering less of.

And the feeling is the whole game. We discussed previously the biology of desire in the Building Luxury Brands pillar: people do not buy luxury rationally, and the moment a brand asks to be judged on usefulness and value for money, it has already left the luxury paradigm behind. Loyalty was never a rational calculation either, but an emotional state that happened to produce a facade of rational behaviour. Therefore, the question in the title is not completely accurate. Emotional engagement is not replacing brand loyalty. Emotional engagement is what brand loyalty was made of all along. What has changed is where people go to find the emotion.

That change is well-documented. According to Bain, this tectonic shift was detected as early as 2024: spending migrated from products to experiences, hospitality, fine dining, travel, and wellness. In 2025, personal luxury goods sat roughly flat at around 358 billion euros, while experiences continued to outpace the wider market.

There is respectable science underneath this. Research by Van Boven and Gilovich, running back to 2003, shows that experiential purchases make people measurably happier than material ones, that people revisit them in memory far more often, and, crucially, that experiences resist comparison. A handbag can be overshadowed by a bigger, shinier logo at the next table; yet a week that changed how you perceive your marriage cannot be overshadowed. It stays with you, part of who you are. Objects sit beside the self. Experiences get woven into it. If you are selling an emotion, that is a structural advantage, not a fashion.

Now add the generation that will decide the future of luxury to the formula. Bain projects that by 2030, younger generations will account for close to 80 per cent of luxury purchases. But the behavioural finding is already measured: these clients are less loyal in the traditional sense, and they evaluate brands on cultural relevance rather than status. They started buying luxury at fifteen. They have money to spend. And they are precisely the fifty million problem in embryo, because a customer who was never loyal to your logo cannot be retained by your logo.

A gathering at the TIMBRE wellness studio. Photo by Virginie Bichet (https://www.cosmos.so/e/394212145)

Here is the case that intrigues me, because there is one category where loyalty is not dying at all: watches. Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet all benefit from year-long waitlists, clients cultivating relationships with authorised dealers the way one cultivates a friendship, collectors who describe the years of waiting as part of the pleasure. Look at what is actually being sold there. Not a logo. A relationship, a ritual, an apprenticeship, an entry into a community of experts. The watch industry did not defend loyalty by defending the product. It defended loyalty by turning the product into an experience. That, to me, is the pivotal example. Loyalty did not disappear; it shifted the perception of the product, attaching it to relationships and rituals, not monograms.

Though the migration to experiences is a genuine development, it is worth noting what comes with it. Experiences commodify, too. Tourism researchers now document travellers scripting and timing their activities purely for shareability, and a luxury holiday performed for Instagram is doing exactly the social work a logo used to do, only with better lighting. If what really drives all of this is distinction, the old Bourdieu machinery of drawing lines between those who belong and those who do not, then the migration from logos to experiences is not an escape from the status race. It is the race’s next venue. Which suggests where the frontier already lies: the private, the unphotographable, the room you cannot post from. When everyone can screenshot the experience, the true luxury becomes the thing that leaves no screenshot.

So what does a founder in the first five years do with all this? Stop building loyalty programmes and start building the conditions for emotion. Loyalty programme points reward purchases; yet nobody ever feels celebrated by points. Ask instead what your client will feel at every interaction with your brand, what ritual you are inviting them into, what relationship you are offering that a dupe cannot copy and discount. Fifty million did not leave because the products got worse. They left because the feeling stopped arriving, and they found it somewhere else. Loyalty was never yours to keep. It was only ever the shadow cast by an emotion you were managing. Manage that emotion, and the shadow follows on its own.

Long before there was a single logo, there was fire.

A man who could make warmth where there had been only cold did not need to announce himself. The light did it for him. He was the one others moved toward in the dark, and the movement was the first status our species ever knew. Luxury, in the beginning, was not an object you owned. It was something you could do that others could not. Ease where there had been struggle. Warmth where there had been winter. The better hunter, the deeper well, the cave that did not flood. We have spent forty thousand years forgetting that this is what the word has always meant.

Comfort was the first luxury, and it was shown, because to be resourceful was to belong. The tribe gathered around usefulness. To hold the surplus was to hold a seat at the fire, a say in the hunt, a place in the line of the living. Status and survival were the same animal. There was no vulgarity in it yet, because there was nothing to falsify. You could not fake the warmth. Either the fire burned, or it did not.

Then, slowly, the warmth became a symbol of itself. The thing that signaled ease replaced the ease itself. We moved from what a man could do to what a man could hold, and from what he could hold to what others could not. Beauty now meant scarcity. The point of the object was no longer that it served you. The point was that another could not have it. The logos arrived to make possession legible at a distance so that the signal could travel faster than any conversation.

For a long time, this held, because a logo still promised quality. If it was rare, it was good. Then the promise broke. The logo went everywhere. The price climbed while the product it was fixed to grew simpler. And somewhere in the last decade, an entire generation began paying immense sums for objects that do nothing, hold nothing, and mean nothing, then performing peace about it for an audience that was doing the same. We called it taste. It was noise wearing the costume of taste.

Look closely at the last loud thing you bought. Underneath it sits a question you never asked aloud. Is it worth it? Not the money. The meaning. You bought it to be set apart, and ten thousand strangers bought the same thing to be set apart in the same direction. Anyone can copy a logo. That is the whole quiet tragedy of it. The product you reached for to be individualistic is what made you identical. The signal you paid the most for is the one that sets you apart the least.

An editorial for the Kith for BMW 2024 collection, featuring a vintage car from Ronnie Fieg’s personal collection (https://www.cosmos.so/e/902111897) 

What no one says, because it is uncomfortable to say, is this. Status does not die. It cannot. Status is energy. It is neither created nor destroyed. It only changes its shape. The man who swears he is humble is reading the room as closely as anyone, scanning for signal in others and in himself, because the mind is built for it and will not be argued out of it. So the question was never whether to want status. The question is, which form are you still chasing after, after the old one turned out to be embarrassing?

And it has turned embarrassing. In 2023, shelves in North America carried forty percent fewer heavily logoed goods than the year before. The quiet market, the one that refuses to announce itself, was worth $137 billion and is climbing toward $278 billion. Three in four aspiring buyers now place quality above exclusivity, above price, above any famous name attached to it. More than half of high earners would rather spend on an experience than on a thing. The crowd did not stop wanting status. The crowd is only learning, late, what the secure have always known. The supreme signal is the one you can send without explaining. Respect, without asking for it. Dominance, without showing it. Effortlessness returned.

I once watched two men across a single evening. The first described a thing his family had lived through, a real feeling, and the room went still and warm and forgot its phones. The second listed his cars. By the third car, the listing had become a kind of begging. I have not thought about one of those cars since. I think about the first man often.

That is the whole shift, in one room. A logo can be copied by morning. An experience cannot be copied at all. A friend of mine still keeps a bookmark from a hotel, a seemingly ordinary object, because the people there had noticed he read, had noticed he kept coming back across the years, and chose to show him they had been paying attention. He has told that story a hundred times. The bookmark became a sign of luxury. Not the marble. Not the price. The attention. The new status is made of knowledge, of art, of taste, of the things a person had to live in order to carry. You cannot buy the story. You had to have been there.

And the frontier is moving again, past the body, past even the mind. We live drowning in stimulation, lit by a thousand small fires a day, and in a world like this, the rarest possession on earth is a calm nervous system. The places that understand this are the ones the powerful now disappear into. An Aman. An Oberoi. A silence you can afford. They sell almost nothing you can hold. They sell the return of a person to himself. The final luxury is not a watch or a wing of a house. It is presence. The capacity to be here, unhurried, while the world claws at your attention and comes away with nothing.

So the old luxury wanted to be seen, and spent everything arranging the seeing. The new luxury would rather be known by the few who can read it.

Photo by David Martínez for El País Semana, n.d.l https://www.cosmos.so/e/858328335 

And here is where it closes. Status never left the room. It only found a harder thing to wear. The world has grown so abundant that wealth can buy almost anyone now, and almost anything. A name, an hour, a loyalty, a view. Everything carries a price, and most people quietly carry one too. The single thing that has refused to be bought is peace. You cannot purchase it, cannot inherit it, cannot fake it across a dinner. You can only build it slowly, or be given the rare conditions in which it is allowed to arrive.

That is the whole opening left for anyone who makes things. A brand no longer wins by adding to a person. It wins by adding to their peace. The car, the cloth, the room, the object, if it deepens the calm of the one who carries it, it has earned its place in this new order. If it adds noise, complication, one more small fire to tend, it belongs to the old world already, already dying, whatever the logo on it. So this is where status went. Not away. Inward. The calm man in the room is not above the game. He is winning a harder version of it. And the only luxury still worth selling, the one thing all this abundance can never flood, is a quieter mind.

Redefining Value In a World Saturated with Information

We are living through the largest democratization of information in human history.

Today, anyone with a smartphone can access more knowledge in a few minutes than most specialists would gather in days, only a generation ago. Naturally, this raises a question: if information is now effectively free, what remains valuable? Why invest years in learning anything when AI can explain almost everything?

The answer is that information was never a scarce resource. Judgment was.

AI has democratized access to knowledge, but it has not democratized the ability to recognise quality, authenticity, significance, or value. That ability, the essence of connoisseurship, is gaining value quicker than ever.

The anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence often assumes that expertise is primarily a matter of possessing information. If machines can access and reproduce knowledge at scale, what remains for human experts? Yet this assumption misunderstands what expertise has historically been and, in many ways, continues to be. For centuries, we confused expertise with information because information was difficult to obtain. Books and archives were expensive and inaccessible. Specialised knowledge lived inside institutions and professions. The expert appeared valuable because they possessed facts that others did not.

AI has shattered that arrangement almost overnight. As barriers to knowledge acquisition tumbled, people stopped turning to specialists and instead placed their trust in technology. Information became universal. Exceptional talent did not become less relevant; remarkably, it became more appreciated over time. Judgment was, and remains, its defining mark.

Connoisseurship is traditionally associated with art collecting; the term refers to expert discernment in matters of quality, authenticity, and taste. A connoisseur is not someone who possesses knowledge and information. A connoisseur is someone who has spent enough time looking, comparing, handling, tasting, observing, and evaluating that they can recognise quality when they encounter it.

This kind of expertise has always been difficult to explain because it does not exist primarily in language. A language model can describe the taste profile of Barolo. It can explain tannins, terroir, and vintage variation. It can summarise the opinions of critics and reproduce decades of wine literature. But none of this is the same thing as tasting hundreds of wines over twenty years and developing a sensory memory sophisticated enough to recognise a vintage blindly.

The difference seems obvious when framed this way, yet much of the current discussion around AI ignores it. What AI excels at is explicit knowledge: information that can be written down. Facts, definitions, explanations, summaries – these are the forms of knowledge that dominated education and intellectual status throughout much of the modern era.

Detail from the Hermès A/W 1998-1999 Collection by Martin Margiela, 1998. Photo by Marina Faust (https://www.cosmos.so/e/187787329)

Through his famous observation, “We know more than we can tell, ” philosopher Michael Polanyi argued that a great deal of human knowledge operates differently and cannot be conceptualized, almost like an instinct acquired through experience. A master violin maker cannot fully articulate every judgment that goes into evaluating a piece of wood. An experienced photographer often sees qualities in an image before being able to explain them. A jeweler notices details indiscernible to a novice. A chef recognises balance long before it can be reduced to a recipe. This level of insight is only cultivated through years of hands-on work in the retrospective field. And it is precisely this kind of expertise that gains visibility as informational knowledge becomes commoditised.

Historically, connoisseurs were valuable for exactly this reason. Nineteenth-century art scholar Giovanni Morelli became famous for attributing paintings by studying minute details such as ears and hands. Later, Bernard Berenson built one of the most influential careers in the art world through attribution and authentication based largely on cultivated visual judgment.

Their advantage was perception and experience, which wasn’t available to everyone. This distinction becomes increasingly important in the age of AI as we enter a world saturated with simulated knowledge. You can instantly access tons of information, essays, and recommendations. For the first time in history, information itself is becoming cheap enough to be taken for granted. When that happens, value migrates elsewhere. Luxury has always followed scarcity.

When books were rare, libraries were a luxury. When global travel was inaccessible, seeing distant places was a luxury. When expertise required years of research, knowledge itself functioned as a luxury good.

An artisan handcrafts a piece of Sophie Buhai jewelry in Los Angeles (https://www.cosmos.so/e/1052835843) 

In the modern day and age, information is no longer scarce. This may be the most important cultural consequence of AI. Far from destroying connoisseurship, it transforms it into a new form of premium value. Connoisseurship cannot be mass-produced. We can take the winemaking sector as an example. An AI model can summarise the history of Burgundy wine, but it cannot spend years tasting it, accumulating sensory memory, and developing preferences through experience.

The same principle applies far beyond wine. Watches, furniture, architecture, fashion,

photography, literature, gemstones, music, design, food, every field where quality must be recognised rather than merely described becomes more valuable as information becomes easier to generate.

In this sense, AI does not diminish expertise. It separates expertise from information and reveals what was always underneath. Possessing endless data and knowledge is no longer an advantage when AI assistants are accessible at a few clicks on a phone. The real advantage is knowing what matters.

In a world flooded with generated content, opinions, recommendations, and aesthetics, the more valuable people are the ones whose judgments others trust.

This is why connoisseurship should not be confused with elitism. A person of affected taste uses taste to signal status, while a connoisseur pays attention to details to develop understanding. The difference matters because connoisseurship is not a social rank.

The future belongs neither to those who know the most facts nor to those who generate the most content. It belongs to those who can exercise judgment in conditions of abundance. And that is why connoisseurship is not disappearing.

Ultimately, the question arises: what forms of understanding gain value precisely due to the existence of AI?

How New-Age Luxury Enterprises Construct Legitimacy

If we open any classic study on luxury architecture, it becomes immediately clear that heritage is the foundational element of a brand’s DNA. It is the historical background that creates the myth, constructs the brand legend, and separates true luxury from the premium segment. Heritage serves as a social validator, proving that a house has withstood the test of time and earned its status among the cultural elite.

For a young venture, this traditional requirement feels like an immediate dead end. When a brand is only a few years old, it simply lacks the chronological proof to support its positioning. At the same time, any attempt to mimic the aesthetics of a century-old house feels fabricated, failing to build any real emotional connection with the audience.

Consequently, the Archive Gap is not merely the absence of historical material; it is a structural rift in social legitimacy.

Yet legitimacy itself is not inherently bound to inherited time. While traditional luxury accumulated authority through chronology, emerging brands construct it through alternative forms of cultural capital. Broadly speaking, three mechanisms emerge: borrowing authority from place, manufacturing future heritage through product design, and building symbolic density around the founder’s personal mythology.

This means emerging brands cannot follow the old playbook. They have to build depth in real time, turning the lack of a past into an aggressive strategy. In this article, we will break down exactly how to construct that legitimacy from day one.

The Archive Gap: Why Mimicking History Fails

In The Luxury Strategy, Jean-Noël Kapferer establishes a fundamental law of the industry: time is the ultimate barrier to entry in the luxury market. Heritage houses leverage their longevity as a decisive competitive advantage, given that time is the only resource that cannot be bought or scaled through capital injection.

Kapferer notes that for an emerging brand, attempting to compete on the battlefield of tradition and mimic legacy luxury is a guaranteed losing strategy. Instead of trying to replicate the trajectory of century-old giants, new players must create fresh cultural codes and meanings here and now. Playing by the old rules only highlights a newcomer’s inability to recognize and respond to the shifts shaping the modern luxury market, whereas a young brand’s true strength lies in its ability to reflect the contemporary context.

This idea aligns perfectly with the sociological research of Marie Sicard, who breaks down the structure of the luxury myth. Sicard emphasizes that luxury functions as a system of signs and a social validator: consumers do not acquire an item for its utility, but to strengthen their status within the cultural elite.

However, this myth only functions when society recognizes it as authentic. When a young brand attempts to artificially construct a narrative around a non-existent heritage, the semiotic system collapses. A luxury consumer immediately detects the misalignment between the claimed history and the actual background. It is precisely this disconnection that creates the Archive Gap – the gap between the authority a brand attempts to project and the legitimacy it can genuinely claim. As a result, cultural legitimacy is lost before market position is even established.

Consequently, the Archive Gap is not merely the absence of historical material; it is a structural rift in social legitimacy.

A look inside the A.P.C. atelier at 39 Rue Madame in Paris, where collection prototypes are made. https://www.cosmos.so/e/1897621208 

Borrowed Ancestry: Heritage As an Ecosystem

When a brand has no yesterday, attempts to imitate historic depth often feel artificial. The new luxury paradigm solves this by shifting authority away from corporate chronology and toward the geography of production itself. If you have no past, your strongest asset becomes where and by whom you are created today.

Rather than inventing fictional legends or designing imaginary family crests, emerging luxury brands engage in spatial anchoring. This is the process by which authority accumulated over centuries within a specific geographic territory is transferred to objects produced within its boundaries.

Case study: Métier London

Founded in 2017, Métier London did not attempt to fabricate artificial London-centric heritage. Instead, the brand anchored its production in Italy, partnering with artisanal workshops in Florence.

Founder Melissa Morris spent years working alongside manufacturers specializing in complex custom leatherwork, structural construction techniques, and generational craftsmanship. Rather than relying on its own historical narrative, the brand leverages the accumulated authority of Italian artisan ecosystems.

This creates a fundamental shift in luxury semiotics. Even without fictional heritage, the product is embedded with real, verifiable craft traditions. Consumers recognize this authenticity because craftsmanship is materially legible in the object itself.

In this model, the brand performs a legitimate borrowing of territorial memory—transferring cultural and historical capital from place to product. Someone else’s lineage becomes embedded in its own identity.

The implication is clear: craftsmanship is the closest functional equivalent to time. By anchoring authority in place, emerging brands bypass the temporal barrier of luxury and gain immediate cultural credibility.

Yet geography is only one layer of substitution.

The Future Vintage

Some brands take a more radical approach: instead of borrowing history, they manufacture it in advance.

Here, the present moment is treated as an archive forming in real time. The product is designed not for seasonal relevance, but for future historical value.

This transformation is achieved through two mechanisms:

Raw Numbering

Edition marking turns the product into a collectible archive. Brands such as RSVP Paris emboss unique serial numbers on each piece (e.g., 012/500), while Maison Margiela uses systematic numerical coding as part of its identity language.

These markers position the object immediately within a finite historical series.

Limited Drops

Strict production limits ensure that items disappear permanently from circulation after release. Brands like Phoebe Philo use fixed editions that are never restocked, forcing products into scarcity-driven archival status.

Together, these mechanisms eliminate the need for brand history. The customer is no longer buying a seasonal item—they are acquiring a future artifact of fashion history as it is being written in real time.

Yet products alone are not enough. Luxury also depends on narrative.

Jewelry and accessories from the Jacquemus La Galerie collection. Photo by Yoann et Marco https://www.cosmos.so/e/719826189 

Personal Myth-Making: The Founder Fs a Legitimacy Source

If traditional luxury houses built authority through institutional memory, contemporary brands increasingly build it through personal mythology.

The locus of legitimacy shifts from company history to founder biography. Instead of inheriting a legend, the founder becomes the legend.

Case study: Jacquemus

Jacquemus demonstrates this mechanism with clarity. Rather than competing with the historical weight of Parisian maisons, Simon Porte Jacquemus constructed a personal narrative universe rooted in Provence, maternal figures, Mediterranean landscapes, and emotional intimacy.

These elements function not as marketing decoration, but as a coherent symbolic system. Consumers are not only purchasing products; they are entering a lived mythology with consistent emotional and cultural references.

This works because personal experience carries an authenticity that cannot be manufactured at scale. A biography cannot be faked retroactively, nor easily replicated by competitors. Over time, the repeated use of these personal narratives across collections, campaigns, runway shows, and public appearances transforms lived experience into symbolic capital.

Thus, personal mythology becomes a substitute for institutional heritage.

Conclusion: The Architecture of Instant Equity

The central mistake of emerging founders is assuming that luxury is a destination reached only through time. This mindset forces imitation rather than innovation.

In reality, luxury is not a function of time – it is a function of density; density of meaning, craft, and intent.

Modern luxury brands build trust and reputation by borrowing authority from place through craftsmanship and geography, embedding historical value into products designed as future collectibles, and transforming the founder’s personal mythology into a source of symbolic capital. Together, these mechanisms form what can be called Instant Equity: a system where legitimacy is not inherited but deliberately engineered from day one.

The implication is simple: luxury is a system of signs that society agrees to value. If those signs are embedded with enough precision, depth, and cultural intelligence, the market stops asking how old a brand is and starts asking what it represents.