Why luxury brands are getting serious about humor

Last year, Hermès released a home collection campaign in which a horse drags a sofa through a field as though it were a carriage. The horse, bred from a house whose heritage is rooted in equestrianism, is doing exactly as it pleases. The joke is quiet, confident, and over in seconds — and that, increasingly, is the point. Across the luxury sector, humor has moved from a peripheral creative risk to something closer to a strategic tool. The question is no longer whether it belongs in luxury. It is why it works and what it takes to do it well. Luxury has long maintained exclusivity through price and access. What is shifting is the mechanism. As ownership gives way to experience as the primary currency of aspiration, brands are increasingly competing on cultural fluency — the ability to signal belonging through shared references, sensibility, and taste. Humor, when executed with precision, functions as exactly that kind of signal. It creates communities not of people who can afford the product, but of people who understand it. Loewe’s Broken Egg sandal, shown during Jonathan Anderson’s tenure, divided opinion along those lines, separating those who got it from those who didn’t. Why humor matters now The cultural conditions making humor legible as a luxury strategy are not new, but they are acute. According to a 2022 study by Oracle and research firm Savanta, which surveyed more than 12,000 people across 14 countries, 45% of respondents had not felt true happiness in more than two years. Eighty-eight percent said they were actively seeking new experiences to make them smile or laugh. The philosopher Henri Bergson, writing in Laughter in 1900, observed that humor requires a momentary detachment from feeling — a stepping back that creates both relief and perspective. That function has not changed. What has changed is the emotional landscape into which brands are now speaking: one defined by ambient anxiety, social fragmentation, and a widespread appetite for levity that luxury, with its historical claim on the experiential and the escapist, is well positioned to meet. When brands dare to be playful The brands moving most deliberately in this direction share a willingness to play against their own codes. Jacquemus named his grandmother, Liline Jacquemus, as a brand ambassador — a choice that bypasses the conventional logic of celebrity endorsement and its associations with status and aspiration. The result is warmth rather than distance and a kind of tenderness that, paradoxically, reads as confidence. Hermès went even further in its home collection campaign. A brand with a heritage rooted in equestrianism depicted a horse autonomously choosing to carry a Hermès sofa. The humor is embedded in the product truth — the sofa is built to last — but it is the bravery of the self-reference that gives the campaign its authority. These aren’t brands experimenting with humor; they’re using it to show just how confident they are in who they are. The three pillars of luxury humor Pablo Salinas and Pablo Madrid, executive creative directors at Madrid-based agency Burns who work as a creative duo known as Los Pablos, have spent considerable time studying what separates humor that strengthens a brand from humor that weakens it. They conclude that successful execution depends on three conditions: time, craft, and bravery. Time refers to coherence — specifically, the distance between where a brand currently sits and where it wants to go. Introducing humor into a brand voice is not a single creative decision; it is a gradual recalibration of the relationship a brand has built with its audience. Disrupting that relationship abruptly, without laying groundwork, produces confusion rather than warmth. Cultural timing matters too. Humor deployed during a runway moment, when anticipation is already high and attention focused, lands differently than humor inserted into a message about structural brand change. Craft is the more demanding condition. It requires clarity about what emotional register the humor is meant to occupy. Not all humor seeks the same response: some invites the audience to feel intelligent, some invites self-recognition, and some transports them through surrealism. The distinction matters because it is what prevents brands from converging on the same comedic territory and losing the differentiation that humor is supposed to create in the first place. Poorly calibrated, humor becomes banal. Poorly timed, it erodes the very equity it was meant to build. Bravery is the variable most brands underestimate. According to the same Oracle and Savanta study, 95% of business leaders fear using humor in customer interactions — a striking figure given that 91% of consumers said they prefer brands that are funny, and 72% said they would choose a humorous brand over a competitor. That gap is where the opportunity sits. The brands earning the most from humor are not the ones being funny for its own sake. They are the ones willing to play with their own codes — equestrianism, celebrity, heritage — from a position of enough confidence to survive the joke. First movers get the laughs Humor, unlike most brand strategies, is sensitive to arrival order. The brands that establish a comedic language first set the terms by which all subsequent attempts are read. A brand that moves into humor after the codes have been established by others is not participating in a conversation; it is responding to one. For luxury houses accustomed to setting the terms of cultural engagement, that is a meaningful distinction. The mechanics of exclusivity are being renegotiated, and humor is one of the instruments doing the renegotiating. The brands that understand this earliest will not simply have funnier campaigns — they will have harder-to-replicate audiences. Carlotta 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.

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Why luxury brands are getting serious about humor