Can Luxury Rebuild Desire Without Repeating the Past?

Paris Fashion Week for Spring/Summer 2027 unfolded as the industry sought to rekindle desire. The Financial Times framed the season around the pressure on designers to restore excitement after weaker demand, particularly in China, and after a wave of high-profile creative appointments that had not automatically translated into commercial momentum. Responses varied widely. Schiaparelli leaned into theatricality, Anrealage into technological experimentation, and Balenciaga brought couture techniques closer to everyday wear, while other houses revisited glamour, heritage, craftsmanship and wearability. Chanel, Valentino, Hermès and Loewe offered their own interpretations, before Louis Vuitton closed the week on 6 October at the Louvre with a retro-futuristic collection that Nicolas Ghesquière said had been strongly influenced by Europe’s record heatwaves. What emerged was not a single new direction for luxury, but an industry testing different answers to the same question: how is desire created now?

Our View: Desire cannot be optimised into existence

Luxury rests on an unusual economic proposition. People do not need most luxury products; they must want them. Function explains why someone needs a coat, a bag or a watch. Luxury must explain why they want this particular one, at this particular price, from this particular house.

During the last growth cycle, several forces reinforced that desire at once: strong cultural visibility, rapidly rising consumption, brand momentum, social signalling, scarcity, celebrity influence, and an environment in which price increases could heighten the sense of exclusivity. Those conditions have weakened, as we explored in our reading of LVMH’s fading “feelgood factor”. The challenge now is not simply to increase demand. It is to rebuild the reasons to want.

Paris made that tension unusually visible. Some houses intensified the spectacle; others returned to craftsmanship. Some looked to technology and novelty; others to archives, couture techniques, and familiar code; and others still to clothes that felt more immediate, wearable, or emotionally accessible. None of these approaches is inherently right or wrong. What they reveal is that luxury is experimenting with different mechanisms of desire.

That matters because desire is often treated as a consequence of visibility. More attention creates more awareness; more celebrities create more relevance; a bigger show creates more conversation; a new creative director creates novelty. But attention and desire are not the same thing. People can notice a product without wanting it, admire a show without wanting to own anything from it, understand a brand’s heritage without feeling drawn to its present, and recognise that something is expensive without believing it is valuable. Part of luxury’s current challenge may be a conversion problem: turning attention into desire.

This is where reliance on familiar codes becomes complicated. Heritage is one of luxury’s greatest assets. An archive offers recognisable silhouettes, materials, motifs and stories that competitors cannot easily reproduce, and in uncertain times, returning to them makes strategic sense: they reduce creative risk, reassure existing clients and reinforce recognition. But recognition alone does not create desire. If the same archive is revisited again and again without a new emotional proposition, heritage slowly shifts from a source of creative authority to a source of familiarity. The customer knows what the object means. They may simply not feel compelled to want it again.

Luxury needs both recognition and surprise. Too much novelty risks a house losing its identity; too much familiarity makes it predictable. The most interesting creative work does not reject heritage. It changes what heritage can express, much as Bvlgari has done by taking Serpenti into new cultural settings. Several of the strongest propositions in Paris worked this way. At Loewe, ideas of craft and Spanish identity continued to meet new forms and material experimentation. At Valentino, Alessandro Michele played with glamour rather than reproducing it. At Chanel, Matthieu Blazy continued to reinterpret some of fashion’s most recognisable codes. At Louis Vuitton, Ghesquière looked towards a more futuristic and climate-aware idea of dressing. The aesthetics differ, but the task is similar: take something people understand and make them feel something new about it.

That may be where the next phase of luxury desire emerges: not by abandoning heritage, nor by endlessly reproducing it, but by creating enough tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar for people to rediscover.

It also explains why creativity matters more in a slower market. When an entire category is growing, brands benefit from rising demand. When growth slows, customers become more selective, and a brand’s success increasingly depends on giving people a reason to choose it over another. Differentiation is hard to achieve when every house responds to uncertainty with the same commercially validated codes.

This connects to a question we raised in our reading of luxury and optimisation. Data can tell a brand what customers already respond to; archives can show which codes have worked; competitor analysis can show where the market is moving. But desire often begins in less predictable places: a silhouette nobody expected, a material used differently, a new proportion, an unusual collaboration, a show that evokes an emotion people cannot immediately explain, a product that feels unfamiliar at first and gradually becomes culturally inevitable. Many of luxury’s strongest icons began this way. They were not responses to established desire. They helped create it. The objective is not only to identify what customers want, but to maintain the creative capacity to introduce something compelling enough that they learn to want it.

Strategic Implication: For luxury brands, rebuilding desire means moving beyond the assumption that heritage, visibility or a change of creative director will generate excitement on their own. Four priorities follow.

• Distinguish recognition from desirability. Brand tracking shows whether people recognise a house’s codes, and sales show which products move. Neither explains why someone feels emotionally drawn to the brand. Houses need a deeper understanding of the mechanisms creating desire around particular products, experiences and creative propositions.

• Treat heritage as creative material, not a finished answer. Archives should give designers codes to reinterpret, distort, combine or challenge, not templates to reproduce. The strongest heritage strategy keeps the codes recognisable while continually changing what they can mean.

• Protect productive unfamiliarity. Not every new proposition should feel comfortable straight away; some ideas need time to build recognition and meaning. If every unfamiliar concept is cut because early testing, merchandising data or commercial teams cannot validate it immediately, brands risk eliminating the very ideas capable of creating future desire. The discipline lies in distinguishing ideas people reject because they lack relevance from ideas they have simply not yet learned to want.

• Measure wanting, not just attention. Runway views, social engagement, celebrity reach and media impact measure visibility. The harder question is whether attention is turning into desire. Do people save the product, search for it, talk about it unprompted, visit stores to see it, join waiting lists, style it their own way, or return to it once the launch moment has passed? Those behaviours give a richer picture of emerging desire than reach alone.

The opportunity is not to manufacture desire through ever-larger spectacle, but to create propositions distinctive enough to generate genuine emotional and cultural pull. Luxury’s next growth cycle may depend less on giving people more of what they already recognise, and more on giving them something they did not know they wanted until they saw it.

Strategic Question: If people no longer respond automatically to familiar luxury codes, does rebuilding desire mean strengthening those codes, or giving people something they have not yet learned to want?

Source: Financial Times; The Zoe Report; Reuters (via Investing.com)