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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes, we dress to discover who we might become. Reading The Secret Language of Fashion, by Ida Galati, made me reflect on a less visible function of clothing. An outfit does not simply communicate an identity already formed. Sometimes, it creates a temporary space in which another identity can be tested. A more authoritative silhouette. A colour we have never dared to wear. A garment that changes the way we enter a room. Before becoming a message to others, clothing may

A cognitive visual journey through the invisible architecture of choice. Enter the mind of a Luxury consumer.

Imagine walking into a luxury boutique. You think you are shopping. Your brain might disagree. The door opens. ☎️ The Thalamus is already at work. “Everybody, one at a time please.” Light. Music. Colours. Textures. Movement. Voices. Most sensory information arrives at its desk to be relayed towards the appropriate cortical areas. Then a fragrance floats through the room. The Thalamus rolls its eyes. “Of course. Smell took the other route again.” 📡 The Tectum suddenly interru

A camera suggests that we capture what is in front of us. A radio tells a different story. Signals are already everywhere. The radio does not create them. It receives, selects, tunes and transforms them into something we can hear. Our brain is infinitely more complex, of course. Yet the metaphor opens an interesting perspective on Fashion & Luxury and on leadership. Every day, consumers are immersed in thousands of signals: shapes, colours, materials, sounds, images, stories

Luxury has always been extraordinarily skilled at creating desire. But cognitive psychology raises a more intriguing question: What happens before desire becomes a choice? We do not simply see an object and decide whether we want it. Perception first organises what is in front of us. Attention determines what enters our cognitive foreground. Memory connects it with previous experiences and associations. Motivational and reward systems contribute to what feels worth approachin

4.3 million vehicles recalled. Not because a technology didn’t exist. But because, when it mattered most, humans might not understand how to use it quickly enough. Nine automakers are involved in what has been described as China’s largest automotive recall, following concerns around emergency door-release systems that may be difficult to identify and operate when electrical systems fail. At first glance, this is an automotive safety story. But I believe it raises a much broad

In 1974, cognitive psychologists Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted an experiment that became one of the most influential demonstrations of how reconstructive human memory can be. Participants watched footage of a car accident. Then they were asked to estimate how fast the cars had been travelling. But the researchers changed one word in the question. How fast were the cars going when they hit each other? How fast were they going when they smashed into each other? Sam

Fashion is one of the most visible expressions of identity. And yet, behind something as apparently personal as choosing a dress, a jacket or a colour, there is an entire invisible system at work. Culture. Family. Gender codes. Social status. Professional environments. Belonging. The desire to be recognised — or sometimes, not to be noticed at all. We learn remarkably early what makes us “appropriate”, attractive, credible, powerful, elegant or acceptable. And over time, thos

The human brain is extraordinarily efficient. When different learned patterns compete for action, it does not reconsider everything from scratch. It selects. Some schemas are activated.Others are inhibited. Cognitive psychology calls this mechanism contention scheduling. And perhaps organisations do something remarkably similar. A fashion house develops its own schemas over time. A silhouette that sells. A recognizable aesthetic code. A successful merchandising formula. A fam

In his Recognition-by-Components Theory, cognitive psychologist Irving Biederman proposed that we recognize objects by breaking them down into elementary geometric components — geons — and, crucially, by perceiving the relationships between them. We recognise because the brain has learned configurations. A cylinder above a certain shape. A volume connected to another volume. A familiar proportion between parts. And within milliseconds, the mind says: I know what this is. Bu