Luxury is no longer about what you own, but who you become

Luxury has always been in the business of desire. Leather, gold, and thread count were only ever the vehicles for it. What is changing is the thing desire attaches to. For most of the industry’s history, it was ownership. Now, it is shifting toward the person a client is trying to become. Bain & Company’s research points the same way. In the spring update to its annual luxury study with Altagamma, published in June, the consultancy found that what luxury means to consumers is moving away from social validation toward “self-actualization,” with personal fulfillment replacing the wish to be admired. Market data tracks the same shift. The number of people buying personal luxury goods fell from 400 million in 2022 to around 340 million in 2025, according to the study’s November 2025 edition. That edition also described a “tectonic shift” toward experiences such as hospitality, cruises, and fine dining. So far in 2026, consumer sentiment toward experiences is growing 1.5 times faster than sentiment toward physical goods. Claudia D’Arpizio, the study’s lead author, said the industry faces “a broken price: value equation.” Scarcity has moved, and desire has moved with it. Since the pandemic, what feels rare to wealthy clients is time, attention, privacy, and a sense of belonging. Brands kept raising prices while their stores grew harder to tell apart, and the object stopped feeling special. Walk down any flagship street today and try to say what makes one house feel different from the next. Earlier this year, I described the model I expect to replace pure ownership as earned intimacy. It means desire that costs something to reach, whether that cost is money, time, effort, or the slow work of developing taste. Who luxury sells to is also about to change. Cerulli Associates projects that $124 trillion in wealth will change hands in the US through 2048, with around $105 trillion going to heirs. Brands will need to understand those heirs well before the money reaches them. The top of the market holds a paradox. People who can buy anything are chasing what money has never reliably bought: an unhurried afternoon or the feeling of being known by someone who is not paid to know them. Why brands need connection, not just personalization Personalization and connection get used interchangeably, but they describe different things. Personalization is a data operation, an algorithm serving you more of what you already clicked. Connection is human. It happens when someone notices something about you they did not have to notice. Curation belongs on the human side of that line. Editing endless options down to a few that mean something is beyond the reach of an algorithm built for engagement, because meaning and relevance are two different measures. Six Senses Place, the members’ club that opened above the lobby of Six Senses London at The Whiteley in March, is one example. IHG, which owns the Six Senses brand, pitches the club around reconnection and community. As I read it, the space is built around human attention and time more than personalization at scale. Coach is testing a version of the same idea in retail. Most Coach Play stores dedicate 10–15% of their floor to experiences such as customization stations or a coffee shop, while the Coach Play APW store in Malaysia allocates half its space to them. Shoppers often stay four to eight times longer in Coach Play stores than in a standard Coach store, Giovanni Zaccariello, the brand’s senior vice president of visual experience, told Glossy last year. Time spent making something by hand, in a room with other people, says more about a client’s attachment than any recommendation engine can. Make the mythology mass, keep the object rare Most luxury strategies have scarcity backwards. Accessibility does not have to mean ubiquity, and rarity does not have to mean exclusion. A brand can let millions of people take part in its mythology while the object itself, or the highest tier of access, stays rare. That tension feeds desire. Jane Birkin’s original Hermès bag, which she carried almost every day for nine years, sold at Sotheby’s Paris in July 2025 for €8.6 million ($10.1 million), the most ever paid for a handbag at auction. Its value came from closeness to a person and the story attached to her. Behavior and desire are different things, and the industry keeps confusing them. Behavior can be measured, and an algorithm knows what you clicked yesterday. Desire is discovering something you did not know you wanted, and no dataset has produced that feeling on command. Underlying needs, such as belonging and recognition, change slowly. What moves fast is how culture lets people express them, which is why luxury always has something new to say. Desire can never quite be satisfied, either. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued that once we get what we thought we wanted, the want moves somewhere else. French philosopher René Girard argued that we learn what to want partly by watching what others want, which he called mimetic desire. Social media has turned that mechanism into an industrial process. When everyone can see an object and copy it instantly, it stops feeling worth wanting. Brands that do well from here will let the mythology travel and keep the real thing scarce. What luxury sells next Right now, status means showing as much of your life as possible, from where you travel to how busy you are. I think that flips. I have written about privacy as the new status symbol and about the gap between living longer and living well. Boredom may be next: an empty calendar with nothing to optimize, at a moment when people who can afford anything struggle to remember the last afternoon they spent doing nothing. If the people who have everything are reaching for the most basic human things, then what luxury sells now is a way back to themselves, the feeling the object was always standing in for. Luxury is now in the business of becoming. Carlota Rodben is the founder and CEO of Beyond Luxury Group, a new media platform and strategic advisory group that guides top brands and leaders on where the luxury industry is heading.

Luxury is no longer about what you own, but who you become

TUMI’s new growth playbook: From travel expertise to lifestyle performance

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Luxury is no longer about what you own, but who you become

TUMI’s new growth playbook: From travel expertise to lifestyle performance