Luxury Is Losing Its Soul

The luxury industry is facing a deeper crisis than any sales slowdown or market turbulence can explain. Beneath the polished PR statements and investor updates lies a systemic fracture. It’s not just about margins or market share—it’s about memory.

Luxury is forgetting what made it meaningful.

Once anchored in craftsmanship, coherence, and cultural storytelling, many heritage houses are now treated as portfolio assets—valued not for their vision, but for their velocity. If a brand underdelivers for too long, it’s “restructured.” If it doesn’t perform like Louis Vuitton, it’s quietly deemed expendable. This isn't long-term strategy. It's cultural short-sightedness disguised as portfolio management.

We are witnessing the rise of disposable luxury—where even brands with decades of artistic integrity are flattened into logo machines or licensing opportunities. What’s sold as “strategic realignment” is often little more than creative erosion. Investors celebrate agility, but what they’re dismantling is memory, nuance, and soul. Scandals across the industry are exposing this rot. Just recently, Loro Piana—a brand long associated with purity, discretion, and ultra-luxury—was placed under judicial oversight by an Italian court. While not criminally implicated, the house was found to have severely failed in monitoring labor practices within its supply chain. Authorities uncovered exploitative working conditions, illegally long shifts, and unregulated subcontractors producing high-end garments at a fraction of their retail price.

This is not an isolated case. Loro Piana joins a growing list of luxury brands—Dior, Armani, Valentino, and others—whose reputations are now shadowed by supply chain abuses. In an industry where provenance and ethics are part of the premium, these fractures strike at the heart of the promise luxury is supposed to make.

But these failures didn’t appear out of nowhere. They are the byproducts of a system that prioritizes speed over soul, efficiency over excellence. When cost-cutting becomes a silent goal—even in the realm of $5,000 coats—corners get cut, and integrity gets lost.

We’ve entered an era where private equity logic permeates luxury thinking. Creative directors rotate like seasonal products. Distinct brands are diluted into scalable formats. Identity is no longer a long game—it’s a quarterly metric, but heritage doesn’t work on quarterly timelines.

True luxury is built slowly. It’s made of vision, not volume, a brand’s value isn’t only in how many bags it can sell, but in the singularity of its voice—its ability to shape cultural desire while remaining coherent, consistent, and authentic.

So we must ask: Who protects the brands that are no longer cash cows? Who defends creative integrity when it's no longer immediately profitable? What happens when artistic ambition gets cut because it’s “underperforming”? The truth is, growth is not the only metric that matters. Not in luxury. Coherence, originality, and authenticity must count for more than quarterly earnings. Because once a brand loses those things—once it trades its character for short-term performance—it becomes just another product. And luxury without soul is just markup.

Luxury shouldn’t just be profitable. It should be principled. It should have memory, patience, and purpose. And if the industry continues down this path of optimization without introspection, it risks becoming indistinguishable from the very fast fashion it once sought to transcend. If luxury wants to have a future that means something, not just sells something, it must remember what it was built on: vision, integrity, and time.

Before it forgets itself entirely.