LUXURY REDEFINED: Stop selling the dream. Start fitting into reality.
The luxury fashion industry spent the entirety of the 2010s educating customers, shepherding them into pastures of elevated taste and high price tags. Brands opened doors to become (slightly) more inclusive, and designers became as popular as pop stars or sports teams. For affluent shoppers, new worlds of possibilities opened: a hoodie could cost $1,000, jeans could be made of leather, you could dress like Jeff Goldblum if you really wanted to. Those who couldn’t afford the mainline could buy a downmarket collaboration – or a dupe.
Luxury fashion’s efforts to go mainstream worked. But the shoppers and fans who spent that decade consuming, learning, and evolving began to feel disenchanted by the luxury promise. It was a classic case of the student becoming the master. Luxury brands couldn’t consistently deliver the ingenuity and craft these savvy new buyers expected, and when they did, it came at an exorbitant price.
That’s what led to the creation of this White Paper, based on a survey of more than 6,000 luxury consumers and made in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group. Luxury shoppers are smarter than ever, and they expect the brands they buy to be as smart as they are – if not smarter. They see the ways fast fashion is mimicking luxury, and vice-versa. The crisis the industry is facing isn’t about demand for nice things; it’s about a growing aversion to outmoded ideas of marketing and selling those things.
For years now, Highsnobiety White Papers (made in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group) have tracked and analyzed our readers’ obsessions and perceptions alongside consumer behaviors at large. We’ve made it our business to know what’s happening in fashion now and who might best guess what’s next.
Within the entirely different markets and headspaces of 2025, we’re looking back at these and other studies while examining what has changed and what has stayed the same. Anecdotally, brands with more consistent storytelling, be they young or centuries old, are in. Novelty acts such as the aforementioned artist collabs and limited drops, less so.
This rejection of anything that may be considered a stunt speaks to, we believe, a reactive desire for stability and authenticity. Six years ago, we predicted that the future of luxury fashion branding was cultural credibility. Today, we see, through the lenses of research and instinct, that this is now firmly the case.
The next generation is over the hype. Instead, they crave connection. Brands that can evolve thrive, while those that don’t skirt irrelevance.
According to analysts, the luxury sector is flailing, losing ground with loyalists and prospective customers alike. This news served to guide our next set of White Paper questions: What do luxury consumers want their favorite brands to do differently? And maybe more importantly, are we living in a time of post- or peak-luxury?
