The feeling gap: Why connection is luxury’s most underserved emotion

Love is no longer the assumed path. It has become a deliberate choice, navigated in real time and in more forms than ever, with the conditions around it shifting faster than the industries built on feeling have registered. That matters for luxury. The business has always traded on emotion, yet the emotion people crave most today — and increasingly struggle to find — is connection in its many forms. The distance between that demand and what brands actually supply is the opening. In Beyond Luxury’s own conversations with 20 senior executives, 75% placed emotional resonance at the center of how they define luxury today — a reading that tracks the wider move away from possession and toward feeling and lived experience. Two moves are already visible in how brands are responding: reviving romance as storytelling and recognizing love in the broader bonds that carry it. Why are luxury brands betting on romance again? Dating itself has become a source of exhaustion. A 2024 Forbes Health survey found that 78% of dating-app users felt emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted by the apps. Even the platforms are reacting: Bumble’s new “Dates” feature opens with a private conversation with an AI assistant before any match, a bid to trade endless swiping for something closer to intention. Romantic storytelling has turned cautious, too. The optimism of the 1990s and 2000s rom-coms — their permission to idealize love and let characters be flawed — has faded. Audiences, though, keep rewarding the stories that still dare to make them feel: Korean romance dramas, Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, and Netflix’s global hit Young Royals. Brands have started to fill that space. Hinge’s 2025 "No Ordinary Love" anthology paired five couples who met on the app with five writers to retell the messy beginnings of real relationships — a wager that imperfection and wonder can coexist. Beauty has followed suit. The Ordinary’s recent Pride campaign leaned into early connection, highlighting the quieter, everyday moments that define the queer community year-round rather than just during Pride Month. Micro-dramas, once dismissed as brain rot, have become the format of choice for that feeling. Marc Jacobs built its Pre-Fall 2026 campaign, “The Scene,” as a scripted micro-drama written by and starring Rachel Sennott, turning tension, anticipation, and desire into a vehicle for the brand. Protecting space for wonder is the opportunity here — stories that let emotion unfold without having to justify itself. Sometimes a brand’s role is simply to remind people that romance still has a place. How is luxury redefining love beyond romance? People are not abandoning their search for love so much as widening it. British Vogue declared in 2025 that having a boyfriend had become something to be embarrassed about, and SELF followed by asking whether best friends had become the new boyfriends — pointing to friends who live together, buy homes together, open joint bank accounts, and even stage platonic wedding ceremonies to formalize the commitment. None of this replaces romantic love. Rather, love expands to include the care, reciprocity, and steady commitment found alongside it. Brands have begun to mirror the shift by building the conditions for those bonds rather than simply staging events. The work is not letting people into a room but shaping what happens between them. YSL Beauty made that literal in March 2026, taking over the historic Café Comercial in Madrid for a daytime block party with a local DJ in the lineup and a new lip launch, positioned inside a curated crowd. Club Avandra, which launched in October 2025, built an all-female members’ club around luxury solo travel and the company of like-minded women. The family has widened too and now routinely includes dogs. Bark Air, the self-described dog-first airline, and Hiramatsu Karuizawa Miyota in Japan, a luxury resort that offers dog villa suites with private gardens and gourmet meals, read less as eccentric outliers than as signals of how far people will go to nurture the bonds that make them feel something. Having children has become one of the era’s most loaded choices. Where the cost of living has made parenthood feel like a privilege rather than a given, the decision now carries fresh emotional and social weight — the ultimate expression of commitment for some, an aspiration out of reach for others. Brands that speak to that honestly, rather than picturing the perfect family, are entering territory most have avoided. Rebuilding the conditions for connection Claude Lelouch, the French filmmaker, once said he considered love the chief business of humanity. What has changed is not the search but the settings that used to support it. Romantic comedies supplied wonder; relationships offered certainty; stories gave shape to feelings before people had words for them. Those structures feel thinner now, and the feelings they once held are circulating without a home. As luxury defines itself more through feeling and lived experience, it edges into territory few industries can credibly occupy: helping people reach the emotions they are looking for. The work is experiential and relational — designing moments, spaces and encounters where anticipation, belonging, care, and wonder can surface on their own. Meeting people there is the real test. Brands cannot become relationship experts, nor should they try; what they can build are the conditions for connection rather than its appearance. The companies that manage it, in one of the more emotionally complex moments in recent memory, will hold something more durable than loyalty. Carlota Rodben is a luxury innovation specialist and author of “Beyond Luxury: The Promise of Emotion.” She previously led innovation at Chanel and now advises luxury brands on strategy and transformation.

The feeling gap: Why connection is luxury’s most underserved emotion

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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The feeling gap: Why connection is luxury’s most underserved emotion

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag