Selling a $57 bag for $2800, after building your reputation for a century, signals one thing: the big brands are afraid.
They are milking you — the market.
When a brand that once produced high-quality products suddenly starts producing low-quality ones and is willing to burn long-term trust for short-term margin, it knows something. It knows the game is ending. They cannot sell luxury the same way they used to. And they are making as much money as they can before that becomes obvious to everyone.
Luxury is still exclusivity. But buying expensive things is no longer a signal of exclusivity the way it once was.
Luxury used to mean:
- Supercars and expensive watches
- 5-star hotels and private jets
- Horse polo and whatever else the old rich did
A lot of new-rich people, coupled with the ease of credit, can now afford all of those things. They give the same signal. And if there is one thing elites have never liked, it is non-elites mixing with them.
Post-Luxury
The discourse has a name for what comes next: Post-Luxury.
The idea is simple: how do you signal that you were born rich, are rich, and will remain rich for generations to come — in a world where money alone no longer tells that story?
Post-Luxury is not just expensive. It is:
1. Unorthodox
Can you do a major in Sculpting with a minor in Philosophy, in Greece? It's not that you can't — it's that it won't make sense for you to do it. It isn't rational. They don't care.
2. Time-Consuming
Can you cook your own food? Sew your own trousers and iron them? Take twelve weeks of skiing classes in the Alps? You can pay for time with money, but you cannot buy more time. Time is the new flex.
3. Privileged Birth
Do you know the subtle difference between Cambodian and Vietnamese cuisine? Why the Bauhaus movement mattered to mid-century architecture? Do you carry a 120-year-old great-grandfather's wallet — veg tanned by a South Italian tannery, your family crest engraved?
Taste can definitely be built. But being born into wealth provides a baseline that a common person has to work extraordinarily hard to reach.
While your brand is worried about the network effect, the Post-Luxury brand is worried about the snob effect.
Curious to see how these big brands take their last breath — unless they pivot and position themselves in this new phase.
The ones that figure it out will survive. The ones still selling $57 bags for $2800 won't.