Luxury is a value system – not an aesthetic
Trend-led labels like 'loud luxury' and 'quiet luxury' miss the point
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Our team was chatting about Glamour magazine’s predictions for 2025 in the office this week.
‘Quiet luxury’ is out, ‘loud luxury’ is in, says Glamour’s editorial team.
We don’t dispute that the prevailing aesthetic in fashion is shifting – it never stands still.
But, luxury isn’t a trend, or a ‘shoppable’ aesthetic. Even those brands who cater to what you’d conventionally think of as quiet luxury refute the concept: “We existed before quiet luxury and will exist afterwards; there are a lot of things [about the brand] that are not quiet at all,” Loro Piana’s CEO told The Business of Fashion, last year. The Row and Atelier Saman Amel both say the same.
Luxury isn’t quiet or loud – it’s a value system. One that only exceptional brands understand and the most discerning consumers admire. Consumers like Aris Fioretos, seen below. He’s a long-term Atelier Saman Amel client who features in the brand’s look books. He doesn’t shop with Saman Amel because the brand offers quiet luxury, but because it offers something rare and exceptional.
This is critical: Luxury is built on extreme rarity. Not artificially restricted supply, but true, authentic rarity. The rarity that comes when only a very small quantity of product, or an exceptional experience, can be brought to market. Because it takes time, skill and significant resources to make that thing exquisite.
Hermés’ Artistic Director, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, talks about this in terms of something that’s “costly”, because it costs a lot to produce, versus “expensive”, because it doesn’t deliver what it promises.
“An expensive object is a product which is not delivering what it’s supposed to deliver, but you’ve paid quite a large amount of money for it and then it betrays you,” he told 60 Minutes in December. Hermès’s impressive latest results reinforce his point.
2025, we predict, is a year that will separate the luxury wheat from the chaff. Brands offering something of rare quality will win. “Expensive” brands will lose.
This is a masterful reframing. Luxury as a value system — not a volume knob — is exactly the kind of clarity the industry needs. Rarity rooted in craftsmanship, not scarcity, is what makes something truly exquisite. Thank you for cutting through the noise with substance.