What happens when luxury fashion stops impressing?

“How to photograph Sichuan’s provincial costume so it looks like something you can’t afford.” That is the premise of a Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote) video posted in mid-October. It plays out as a tutorial on how to make a luxury fashion campaign. At the center of it is a red-and-black checked apron with a teddy bear on the front, the sort Chinese aunties have worn in their kitchens for decades. Everything comes down to one idea, the narrator explains: things should not match. Find a location with nothing to do with fashion — wilderness, a rubble pile, the more desolate the better. Put the clothes somewhere they don’t belong, or throw them on the ground. Wear the apron under a suit, or back to front, because wearing it wrong is wearing it right. Add a large logo and a few English words nobody will understand. The fewer the words, the greater the impact. Then the model walks, straight ahead at first, before any movement that looks like the beginning of a fall. Many fashion covers, the narrator observes, are not far off someone who has had too much to drink. Close in on the fabric until every needle hole seems to lead somewhere else. Find an elderly man with a white beard and film him turning a piece of cloth over, as though he has given his life to this one garment. Return to the model for a deep gaze and “a resolute back view.” Finish on a rhetorical question, pitched so viewers feel they have missed something but would rather not say so. And the wonderful thing is that it works. Follow the instructions and, somehow, the apron begins to look expensive. Who needs Milan when you have Sichuan? Within two days, the video had attracted around 28,000 likes, nearly 7,000 saves and more than 2,300 comments. My favorite came from Chongqing: “Don’t you go making my apron more expensive.” Someone else posted a photograph of the same apron hanging at home. What does it mean for luxury when Chinese consumers know its visual codes well enough to parody them with a kitchen apron? Nobody in the comments needed an explanation. The empty landscape, the solemn expression, the suggestion that something terribly profound is happening just out of shot. Viewers recognized it all. I suspect it would have landed differently a decade ago. Western luxury houses still enjoyed a certain distance in China. They represented European taste and, for many, a rather visible measure of success. Today, those houses are part of everyday life in China’s larger cities. People discuss collections as readily as restaurants. They compare prices and scrutinize the stitching, then ask whether the purchase was worth it or just another IQ tax (智商税), as Chinese social media likes to call an overpriced mistake. Bain’s China luxury study, published in January, describes more selective consumers concerned with quality, exclusivity and practical value. Even the secondhand luxury market grew by an estimated 15%-20% in 2025. People are still buying luxury, but becoming more particular about what they pay for. For an industry that has spent decades cultivating distance, becoming so familiar is quite an achievement. But familiarity comes at a price. It is difficult to be intimidated by a language you can speak. Chinese consumers now speak it rather well. They know the codes, and can reproduce them with a kitchen apron and a smartphone. Recognition, though, is not the same as admiration. Knowing how the trick works does not necessarily make you want the product any less. It may simply make you harder to impress. You can covet a handbag and still wonder why every luxury fashion campaign seems to require someone gazing solemnly at a cliff. Some of the people laughing online at the apron probably own a designer bag or two. Few of them bought it because of the cliff. If Chinese consumers can see through the image a campaign is selling, what is it that actually makes luxury worth paying for? A funny video does not explain a market slowdown. Nor do 28,000 likes tell us much about the purchasing intentions of the people behind them. Consumer confidence and the property downturn have much more to do with that. Bain estimates that mainland China’s personal luxury market contracted by another 3%-5% in 2025, with leather goods down 8%-11%. It also points to repeated price increases and limited innovation. Price increases and limited innovation. In their different ways, Bain’s analysts and the commenters in Chongqing seem to be asking the same question: what exactly are we paying for? There is a difference between consumers who can no longer justify an expensive purchase and those who no longer feel the need to make one. Luxury has traditionally benefited from both kinds of customers. The latter may be particularly difficult to win back. Luxury long relied on three things to do the persuading: a high price, a European name and a beautifully produced campaign. All three still matter, but the campaign may be the most exposed. The apron tutorial moves from one house to another without changing much of the formula. When the same recipe works for every house, perhaps it was never a house code to begin with. Just the familiar language of luxury fashion advertising. In Shanghai that same week, there was an interesting coincidence. As the apron parody circulated,LVMH opened its 2026 Journées Particulières, which ran from October 16 to 18. For the first time, several of its houses shared a space at Maison LVMH in Zhangyuan. Steps away, at the Louis Vuitton Mansion, visitors could discover the work behind specific creations, from trunk painting to bag making. None of this was a response to a social media parody. But the contrast was striking. On Xiaohongshu, viewers were laughing at how easily luxury’s visual language could be imitated. A few kilometers away, LVMH was showing something rather harder to reproduce: the skills and design traditions that distinguish one house from another. Anyone can reproduce the mood of a luxury fashion campaign. Reproducing what makes a particular house distinctive is another matter. But there is another question. How much of that distinction can a consumer actually recognize in the finished product? And how much are they prepared to pay for it? Craftsmanship has its own catch. Filmed reverently enough, it becomes its own advertising formula. The gloved hands, the slow stitching, the hushed close-ups. I wouldn’t bet against a Sichuan apron being described as “hand-finished by our artisans” before long. Desire for status has not disappeared. Nor has the appeal of exceptional products. But consumers seem comfortable making their own distinctions between what deserves a premium and what is simply good marketing. Between desire and disbelief there is a space, and the apron parody captures it: liking luxury no longer means feeling obliged to be impressed by its presentation. Brands spent decades educating consumers how to recognize luxury. They learned rather well. They can admire the product, question the price and laugh at the advertising, sometimes all in the same afternoon. The apron, meanwhile, is still lying on its rock. It looks expensive. Whether anyone would pay for it is another matter. China State of Play is a strategic intelligence program from Jing Daily and Other Logic Partners. Marc-Olivier Arnold is co-founder of Other Logic Partners, where he advises CEOs and founders of premium brands on China and Asia, and Chinese brands on expanding internationally. He has worked between Europe and Asia for more than 20 years.

What happens when luxury fashion stops impressing?

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

Upgrade to Pro

Sectors

Insights

Company

What happens when luxury fashion stops impressing?

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