Invisible Dynamics

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

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

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