"Luxury is dead."
My dear deluded boy, do sit down before you hurt yourself.
Every few years, someone bleats out this exact announcement with the breathless enthusiasm of a 20-year-old model who's fallen madly in love with an 80-year-old billionaire (For his wit and charm, obviously).
“Luxury is dead! Consumers want AUTHENTICITY,” they herald in LinkedIn posts, on Medium and on whatever Twitter is called this week.
Let me tell you a secret, you demented hyena, luxury doesn’t die and it certainly isn't dead. It mutates and shape-shifts.
Luxury is like Madonna. It lives forever and reinvents itself every decade, whether you like it or not.
The ‘death of luxury’ is a fantasy paraded by people desperate to be thought leaders, pundits or insiders. The kind who adore hearing the sound of their voice.
But they forget the brain has simple tastes. It’s wired to believe that effort equals value, a bias called effort justification, the same way that it loves to link scarcity with superiority (commodity theory).
It's why people will cheerfully spend £3,000 to fly on the same plane, to the same destination, as someone who paid £150, as long as there’s a magic curtain separating them. Isn't it hilarious how that curtain has the shielding power of the Starship Voyager?
Luxury is never, and never has been, about logic, if it were, it wouldn't exist.
Luxury is about performance, emotion, and delicious decadence. Sure, you can watch Les Mis on YouTube, but it’s far more satisfying from a private box at the Royal Albert Hall, being plied with Krug by someone charming.
When someone says “luxury is dead,” they’re experiencing status anxiety, the cold, blind panic that happens when the symbols of status no longer align with their own identity.
What they really mean is “luxury has stopped signalling *me*.” They’ve mistaken a shift in aesthetic for an extinction event.
And yes, maybe profits are down in some places, so what? Luxury is thriving, it’s just not wearing the same outfit it did ten years ago. Don’t worry though, cone bras always come back.
Luxury now lives in the scarcity of time, not just the scarcity of things. It’s in the quiet ritual of cocktails at the Dorchester, as much as it is in getting your hands on a Birkin. It’s in the bespoke suit, not the mass-produced designer label.
Luxury isn’t dead.
It’s alive and well, and roaring with laughter at the ‘thought leaders’ who think it was ever just about the product.
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PS. For those breathlessly declaring the death of luxury, might I suggest Luxury Academy’s six-week Certificate in Luxury Foundations? It’s considerably less embarrassing than parading ignorance on LinkedIn. You'll find it on the website
.