Luxury’s Turn : Redifining Desire In The TikTok Era

In the unfolding narrative of luxury's future, we stand at the edge of a moment as confounding as it is captivating. The lexicon of luxury is undergoing a seismic shift, one that demands a dialectic between the traditional bastions of exclusivity and the emerging ethos of inclusivity, sustainability, self-affirming creativity and innovation.

At the crux of the exercise is luxury redefining and dimensionalizing its until now main trading currency: desire. In luxury’s new framework, desire is more inviting,  human, creative, engaging, subtle, and yes, more engaging and, if meticulously nurtured, everlasting.

Unpacking this new form of desire will be important as luxury tackles 2024’s headwinds and makes itself relevant to a new, more diverse, and younger demographic, without losing its essence.

When done right, this evolution in luxury can also teach a lesson to the rest of fashion and retail and other brands on expressing and protecting their value, not trying too hard, curating more thoughtful relationships with consumers, and commanding premium love.

Luxury Redefined: A Complicated Future

To fathom the future of luxury, one must first appreciate its complexity. Luxury, historically synonymous with opulence and exclusivity, is being recalibrated to balance prestige with meaningful accessibility, challenging the very notion of desire and indulgence itself.

Today's luxury is no longer defined solely by price tags or brand heritage; it's about adding layers of meaning, agency, and self-realization to the consumer experience. It is this  multi-textured richness that positions new luxury as an engaging life and creative philosophy. It puts luxury front and center as the perfect antidote to our hurried, always-on, marketing and social media frenzy, which is quickly proving unsustainable. New luxury can be more thoughtful, slower, yet more persuasive.

Brunello Cucinelli, for instance, makes amazing high quality designs, but it’s also a modern day humanist brand with a focus on employee rights, community, life philosophy, and creativity. That form of effective altruism is one of the ways luxury is expanding its exoskeleton for innovation, survival and growth.

Luxury As Humanist Vision Forward

As society tries to figure out a broader design to make sense of it all, we need big creative thinkers to inspire and point the way, and luxury with its focus on vision can help deliver this.

Think of Coco Chanel, who reimagined feminine power through fashion, or designers like Halston and Yves Saint Laurent who aligned their creations with the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s, empowering their audiences with radical innovation. Or most recently, the late Virgil Abloh and his focus on putting black and urban culture at the center of luxury’s aesthetic code.

New luxury brands like Telfar, with its democratic approach to luxury, and Stine Goya's commitment to representation and sustainability, are picking up where fashion icons of yore left off and are charting a course for a future where luxury is both disruptive and inclusive.

For these new luxury brands, their creative and cultural point of view and how they tackle new societal riddles, including how they become more human organizations,  become part of the design and brand code that connects them powerfully  to culture, employees,  and consumers.

Craftsmanship and Creativity at the Core

As society tackles new existential threats such as AI and sociocultural volatility,  new luxury can stand for  life affirming creativity. The likes of Dior, Balenciaga and  Marine Serre, challenge the norms of commercial scale and impersonal tech, pushing back against the algorithms that seek to define our tastes. Instead they focus on packaging a new form of cultivated desire on their own terms.

Product Is Queen & King

At the heart of the creator gravitas of luxury, is the focus on technical product, now requiring more radical innovation than ever as fashion tackles urgent challenges including fashion’s own environmental degradation.  Modern day consumers want both, superiorly engineered and crafted products that are made intentionally on every level.

"I design clothes that are meant to last. I believe in creating pieces that aren’t going to get burned, that aren’t going to landfills. That is the modern approach to fashion,” says Stella McCartney and she carries this ethos and its functional benefits to all aspects of the brand.

Pharrel

Culture as the Cornerstone

New luxury is emboldened by culture. In it these brands find creative ideas and create meaning and connectivity, giving us all the super power for self preservation and realization in the age of robots.

Brands like Bottega Veneta and their collaborations with artist Caetano Pesce turn into the Arts to express the human condition, answer urgent societal themes, and invigorate their products and brand DNA with something deeper.

New luxury  also opens up to diverse cultures and the outliers for representation and to serve up fresh concepts and experiences. The ones that do it well, do it right, with representation at the core, and turning diversity into a creative and competitive advantage. Louis Vuitton clearly understands this by putting a cultural creator like Pharrell at the center of its creative ecosystem.

A Disruptive Spirit of Innovation

Smart luxury stays timelessly fresh. They do this by harnessing the disruptive vision of the original maisons and by taking that singular focus on executional excellence into other arenas. For instance, they approach data, AI and code as a new form of elevated craft, and make trust and security new forms of luxury craft.

This spirit of bold innovation and creativity carries to how brands show up, how they experiment and how they design systems for brand learning. LVMH, for instance, is pushing the boundaries in how luxury maisons play, having just signed a new contract with Epic games to explore new deeper narrative and brand showcases through video games.

Digital and immersive technologies, including the new Apple Pro-Vision,  present great opportunities for luxury brands with a rich narrative to create new immersive experiences. All this while also knowing when to slow down, listen, and give their consumers the luxury of time and space. In going against the over-marketing grain, luxury brands find the softer powerful side of desire.

Conclusion: The Indomitable Future of Luxury

As we navigate extraordinary times, the future of luxury is unequivocally complicated but undeniably exciting. It requires a reimagining of what luxury means, moving beyond mere material wealth to encompass a richer, more textured understanding of value.

This new luxury is visionary, challenging, and deeply human, a testament to the power of creativity and innovation in forging a vision that is discerning yet inclusive.

It is this creative vision, with its rich and messy belongings and provocations, delivered with uncompromising craft which will serve up a new form of timeless desire, which is the inspired and empowered self. That is a foundation all brands, luxury or not, should aspire to.