Kering’s latest material experiment points to a larger shift: what happens when emerging materials become the starting point for design, rather than substitutes for materials we already know?

LVMH’s retreat from its post-pandemic highs points to a larger question for the sector: how much of luxury’s recent growth came from stronger desirability, and how much from conditions that may not return?

As fashion moves away from animal fur, the creative opportunity may lie not in finding its closest replacement, but in asking which qualities designers wanted from it in the first place.

Bvlgari’s Serpenti installation in New York shows how a luxury icon can evolve through culture, place and creative interpretation, without losing the codes that made it recognisable in the first place.

As luxury searches for growth in a slower market, a deeper question is emerging: has the industry become better at identifying what works than at creating what does not yet exist?

As automation makes production more sophisticated, luxury may need to move beyond claiming craftsmanship and be clearer about where human knowledge changes the object.

Upcycling is usually framed as a way to reduce waste. For luxury, the more interesting question is whether scarcity, provenance and transformation can make previously used materials desirable in their own right.

Luxury once helped define the codes young consumers aspired to. Today, many of those codes emerge from youth culture first, leaving brands with a harder question: how do you participate in culture when you are no longer the one creating it?

As AI makes it easier than ever to produce sophisticated images, ideas and content, fashion is beginning to place new value on something technology cannot manufacture as easily: visible evidence of time, labour and human effort.