What consumers are revealing about luxury’s crisis and the decisions that helped create it A luxury purchase contains an act of trust. The customer cannot independently verify every hour of craftsmanship, every production decision or every claim about provenance. Part of what they buy is the belief that the house has protected standards on their behalf. This makes luxury unusually dependent on the relationship between what a brand promises and what its organisation actu

Florida, United States. 28 January 1986. NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center with seven people on board. Seventy-three seconds later, it broke apart. All seven crew members lost their lives. The previous evening, engineers and managers at Morton Thiokol, the company that manufactured the shuttle’s rocket boosters, had joined NASA officials in a teleconference about the unusually cold weather forecast for launch. Their concern involved the O-ri

An organisation can know an extraordinary amount about the quality of its products while knowing much less about the conditions in which they are made. Loro Piana offers a concrete starting point for examining this gap. At its 2025 exhibition in Shanghai, the maison presented a space dedicated to quality control, with Baby Cashmere shown under a microscope magnifying the fibre 35,000 times. It was a striking representation of the attention given to the material. In July 2025,

Kimono and yukata in luxury leadership An experience can be impeccably executed and still feel wrong. Every detail follows the brand’s standards. Yet the client feels uncomfortable, hurried or simply unseen. The organisation has delivered its approved version of excellence while missing what this particular moment required. A comparison between formal kimono and yukata offers an interesting starting point for examining that gap. Kimono encompasses a range of garments and leve

The meeting ends with a clear decision: make the client experience more exclusive. Everyone agrees. Retail starts developing a more personalised service. Marketing proposes more selective access. Operations redesigns appointments to give each client more time. Three reasonable responses. Three different interpretations. This illustrative scenario could occur in any maison. The misunderstanding becomes visible when the plans collide, although it began much earlier: inside a wo

Another meeting. Another approval. Another decision waiting for the CEO to become available. A crowded calendar can look like evidence of importance. The organisation needs your experience, your judgement, your ability to connect the dots. Yet it also raises a question: How much of that demand reflects your unique contribution... and how much reflects an organisation that has learned to depend on your presence? A CEO’s calendar tells us something about how the business works.

Before the train arrives, the Team is already waiting. On a platform at Tokyo Station, TESSEI cleaning staff stand in uniform, positioned along the track. As the Shinkansen, Japan’s high-speed train, pulls into the station, they bow together. Passengers step off. The staff receive their rubbish and prepare to board. Then the countdown begins. The train’s turnaround takes twelve minutes. Once passengers have disembarked and time has been allowed for the next passengers to boar

At the Milano Fashion Global Summit, two influential voices offered apparently different readings of the future of luxury. Renzo Rosso, the entrepreneur who transformed Diesel into a global icon and built OTB into an international fashion and luxury group, offered a deliberately provocative warning: there may be no real recovery if the industry continues to wait for consumers to return to their previous purchasing habits. Brunello Cucinelli offered a more optimistic interpret

What if the next mark of exclusivity were not only how rare a creation is but how many lives it is designed to have? Haute couture already contains many of the principles that circular fashion is trying to recover: creation on demand, exceptional craftsmanship, precious materials, repairability, emotional value and pieces conceived to outlive a season. Yet these qualities often remain implicit. The opportunity now is to make circularity visible, not as an environmental conce

At New York Fashion Week, protests against wool reopened a question many in the industry thought belonged to a different category from fur and leather: Should fashion stop using wool? At first, the ethical argument appears straightforward. Wool is animal-derived; therefore, removing it should reduce animal exploitation. But systems rarely respond in straight lines. Wool represents only a small part of fashion’s overall fibre mix, yet it is renewable, biodegradable, durable an

Jacqueline de Ribes was remembered as one of the most elegant women in France. But elegance may be the least interesting part of her story. Born into aristocracy, married at eighteen into a conservative family and celebrated first as a muse, she inhabited a world in which identity arrived almost fully designed. There were codes to respect, expectations to embody and boundaries that a woman of her position was not supposed to cross. Yet de Ribes did not simply wear what her wo

Nike is leaving the S&P 100 after almost eighteen years. Since its 2021 peak, the company has lost more than $220 billion in market value. Its shares have fallen to levels not seen in more than a decade, while younger competitors such as Hoka and On have gained ground among runners, athletes and consumers. It would be easy to tell this story as a familiar corporate tragedy: an iconic brand made the wrong strategic bet and paid the price. But that explanation is too simple

What if a transition designed to reduce one dependency simply created another? Europe’s energy strategy is often discussed in terms of emissions targets and competing technologies. Yet the deeper challenge is systemic: reducing carbon emissions while protecting energy security, industrial competitiveness, employment and strategic autonomy. A recent study developed by TEHA Group and Eni, Sustainable biofuels as a strategic lever for industrial competitiveness, energy security

Founded in Shanghai in 1997, ICICLE is a Chinese high-end fashion brand built around natural materials, understated design and its “Made in Earth” philosophy. Over almost three decades, it has developed a network of more than 240 stores across nearly 110 Chinese cities, established a creative centre in Paris and, in 2018, acquired the historic French fashion house Carven. In Hangzhou, ICICLE has opened its second Garden Store. But describing ICCF SHANSHUI as a new retail dest

When motivation disappears, organisations often look first at the individual. Is the employee disengaged? Resistant to change? Unable to adapt? Not resilient enough? But what if the individual is expressing something that belongs to the system? According to Gallup, only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025. Manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, while low engagement was estimated to cost the global economy approximately $10 trillion in los

Artificial intelligence is entering one of the most delicate human spaces: the conversation through which a person questions assumptions, encounters contradictions and discovers new possibilities. AI coaches can ask questions, recognise linguistic patterns, suggest goals and remain available around the clock. They may broaden access to developmental support and help people reflect between human coaching sessions. But coaching is not simply the delivery of good questions. Its

“Agentic” does not mean that the system possesses unlimited independence or human-like judgement. Different systems operate with different degrees of autonomy. However, a genuinely agentic system should combine several of the following capabilities: Capability Meaning Goal understanding Translates a general purpose into concrete activities Planning Determines which actions to take and in what sequence Tool use Interacts with email, databases, calendars and other software Memo

On 26 January 2026, France’s Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs, DINUM, officially announced the progressive rollout of Visio, a videoconferencing platform developed by the French State, across all government services by 2027. The objectives stated in the official release are clear: ending the use of non-European videoconferencing solutions, protecting the security and confidentiality of public communications, reducing strategic dependencies on external infrast

Consumers are not simply reducing their spending. They are rewriting the hierarchy of what deserves to be preserved. The OECD expects inflation across G20 economies to rise from 3.4% in 2025 to 4% in 2026. The IMF projects global growth of 3.1% in 2026 below recent outcomes and well below the pre-pandemic average. And Bain estimates that only 40%–45% of the potential luxury consumer base purchased personal luxury goods in 2025, compared with approximately 60% in 2022. These

Solomeo as a Systemic Luxury project By Elena Menichetti — Executive & Systemic Coach Luxury has always known how to create desire by drawing a boundary. Inside that boundary: rarity, distinction, privilege. Outside it: aspiration. But what happens when the most powerful expression of luxury is no longer the boundary itself, but the quality of the world created within it? This question becomes particularly relevant as luxury moves from exclusivity alone towards emotional mean