The public intellectual is China’s new luxury KOL

On July 23, when mathematician Wang Hong won the Fields Medal — the first Chinese woman to do so — the internet went looking for more than her proof, with Joshua Zahl, of the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture. It found her jewelry. Photographs from the ceremony showed Wang wearing a Clash de Cartier necklace in the small size, one she had also worn at earlier academic appearances. Within days, Cartier's mainland website listed the 18k gold and 18k rose gold versions as sold out. A Cartier customer service representative said that both the small and medium had gone, with no restock date, because the pieces are allocated from the brand’s European headquarters. Wang has no relationship with Cartier. She simply owns the necklace. Wang had lent Cartier something it could not have bought: a reputation for rigor and restraint, and a kind of intelligence that luxury marketing rarely gets anywhere near. The internet did the rest. That transfer of trust is what a growing number of luxury brands in China are now trying to engineer deliberately, by building relationships with scholars, writers, and public commentators instead of celebrities. Being seen vs. being understood “Working with a celebrity is more about solving the problem of being seen,” says Gao Ming, Senior Vice President at Ruder Finn, who advises luxury clients on this kind of collaboration. “Working with a scholar solves the problem of being understood.” It’s a distinction Gao returns to repeatedly. A scholar’s involvement, in his account, isn’t there to lend a commercial claim credibility by association — a de facto endorsement. It’s there to let that person’s knowledge and perspective reshape how the brand speaks in the first place. “We’re not asking the scholar’s ideas to backstop some commercial point,” he says. “We’re allowing the scholar’s knowledge and views to change the way the brand talks.” Zhou Ting, president of the luxury research institute Yaok, describes the same shift in structural terms. Public scholars, in her view, occupy a position no influencer can replicate: authority earned through sustained professional achievement, combined with the public credibility that comes from expressing themselves consistently and non-commercially over time. KOLs are built by and for commercial logic from the start — one distinctive trait, or a talent for holding attention, is enough to generate value. Scholars are the opposite. Their credibility depends on staying at arm's length from commerce; over-commercializing erodes the very authority a brand is paying for. Gao doesn’t present this as a new idea. What’s changed is the state of the alternative: celebrity endorsements and KOL campaigns have become so common and so formulaic that audiences have begun to discount them, leaving brands hunting for something that still works — and reaching for an old tool that now reads as new. What this looks like in practice The clearest way to see what’s happening is to line up the current wave of examples by depth of commitment. At the shallow end sits the one-off: a single, beautifully produced piece of content. For its 170th anniversary, Burberry partnered with China National Geographic on a documentary series, “Journey with Burberry” (与Burberry同行). The first episode follows brand ambassador Chen Kun through the Qinling Mountains with Li Shuanke, the magazine’s president and editor-in-chief, and Zhang Chenliang, deputy editor of CNG’s “Bowu” magazine and director of the group’s converged-media center, better known online as “Director Fox.” There’s barely a commercial beat in it. It reads as a nature documentary that happens to be brand-funded. One step deeper is the platform: a format built to be reused rather than staged once. Miu Miu Literary Club, launched in Milan in 2024, arrived at the Shanghai Exhibition Center on November 21, 2025 for an edition titled “A Woman’s Education” — three panels, one each on Simone de Beauvoir, Fumiko Enchi, and Eileen Chang, curated by Tongji University literature professor Zhang Pingjin and drawing more than 600 guests. The de Beauvoir session alone brought together Zhang, translator and scholar Cao Dongxue, and Yuan Xiaoyi, director of the Institute of Literature in Shanghai and professor at Normal University. That’s the more durable model: infrastructure a brand can populate with different scholars indefinitely. Deeper still is the personality-bound, recurring relationship. Songmont, the Shanxi-born leather goods label, built a standing podcast, “Voices from the Mountain” (山下声), and handed it to a single host: writer and documentary filmmaker Zhou Yijun, who has run it since 2024. Three seasons in, the show’s credibility rests largely on her. The most instructive case is Ralph Lauren, which runs two depths at once rather than picking one. For Chinese New Year — the Year of the Horse — the brand built “Chasing Dreams on Horseback” around its equestrian heritage: a drone show over Shenzhen’s Talent Park in February, and a short film to match. Light, fast, campaign-shaped. Three months later, at the first Ralph Lauren Polo Cup, held in Beijing on May 29, Liu Qing, professor of political philosophy at East China Normal University, did something with far more weight. In a conversation on site, he unpacked what horsemanship reveals about a “new chivalry” for the present — one built on courage, judgment, and discretion rather than gender or convention. The idea didn’t end when the cameras stopped. It carried into an episode of Liu’s own podcast, Night Thoughts (刘擎·夜思), where he extended the argument into a longer meditation on what’s worth rescuing from the old codes of chivalry. It’s close to a literal illustration of how this is supposed to work: not one piece of content trying to reach everyone, but several, layered, each doing what it’s suited for. Gao describes the same logic in general terms. “No single campaign covers all of the audiences,” he said. Brands build the effect cumulatively, campaign after campaign, until together they reach everyone they need to. Even the audience math is less settled than it looks. Scholar-fronted content skews toward an educated, culturally engaged middle class — influential, in Gao’s account, but not luxury’s biggest spenders on their own. He doesn’t see that as a flaw so much as a different kind of coverage. Much of China’s younger high-net-worth demographic is itself highly educated, which means the same content reaches them too, just not exclusively. Getting the casting right, getting it wrong Vetting a scholar, in Gao’s account, starts with the obvious — academic integrity — but doesn’t end there. His team checks a candidate’s public record on relevant issues, tests whether their expressed values line up with the brand’s, and looks for prior commercial ties that might read as a conflict. Then comes the harder, more subjective read: how much unscripted independence the collaboration can absorb. “We’re not trying to control everything they say,” he said. “We give a general direction: here are the points we’d love to touch on, say them your way.” Sometimes a scholar will take three of four points and refuse the fourth. Gao treats the refusal as the asset rather than the obstacle — the more carefully a scholar guards their own consistency, he argues, the more a brand gets from standing next to them. He’s walked away from clients who wanted every word scripted. “If you want that, hire an actor and shoot a commercial.” Yaoke’s Zhou sees the same problem from the other side, and calls it the field’s most common mistake: brands importing KOL logic wholesale into scholar partnerships. They chase the most famous name instead of the best fit. They select for personal flair over any real alignment with the brand’s substance. They reach for prestige so aggressively that the content alienates the audience it’s meant to move. And most damagingly, they treat the scholar as a compliant backdrop — rewarding cooperation, filtering out independent thought — which guts the entire premise. She expects scholar partnerships to keep growing without ever fully displacing KOL marketing: a complement for brands chasing long-term equity rather than short-term conversion. As trust in pure influencer marketing erodes and competition shifts from product function to cultural and intellectual territory, she sees the format moving from niche experiment toward standard practice, particularly for brands with sharply defined, high-end positioning. Could a brand manufacture what happened to Wang Hong — approach a scholar first and engineer that same trust transfer on command? “Something like Wang Hong is very hard to replicate. It was entirely organic,” Gao says. “We haven’t seen Cartier try to claim it, and I think that’s the right call. If they’d leaned in too eagerly, it might have invited criticism instead.” Cartier did not respond to a request for comment. What looks like luck, in his account, traces back to something much less glamorous: product. “All of this communications work is icing on the cake for a luxury brand,” he said. “How good the icing is depends on execution. But if the cake itself isn’t good, no amount of decoration saves it.” It’s a useful corrective to the premise of this story. A scholar’s endorsement, deliberate or accidental, isn’t a substitute for brand substance. It’s a magnifier of it. The healthiest version of this relationship isn’t a transaction but a loop: a brand strong enough to interest a scholar gains credibility from the association, which makes the next scholar more willing to say yes. Brands chasing “the next Wang Hong moment” through casting alone are solving the wrong problem. The scholars were never the trust. They’re evidence it already existed.

The public intellectual is China’s new luxury KOL

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

Upgrade to Pro

Sectors

Insights

Company

The public intellectual is China’s new luxury KOL

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag