Transcription
So there's a there's a phrase that luxury brands have been using for so long that it's essentially become invisible, and that phrase is the word aspiration. The whole industry runs on it, doesn't it? Or thinks it does, anyway. And this assumption that people buy expensive things because they want to be seen as the kind of person who owns expensive things. And the entire psychological engine behind luxury is fundamentally social. Someone sees you with the bag, the watch, the coat, whatever it is, draws the appropriate conclusions, and that external validation is what justifies spending four months' rent on something that you could technically live without.
And it's true. Like, you know, I'm not I'm not dissing it. My grandmother understood this instinctively. By the way, she'd walk through Harrods with the absolute certainty that every single purchase that she made was a public communicate. And she wasn't wrong, because her generation and her world thought like that.
But I have been noticing something with younger affluent clients, especially the the Gen Z clients, you know, the ones in their late 20s and and even into their late 30s who are spending serious money, but it's that the social engine seems to have gone rather quiet. Actually, they're not necessarily buying things to be seen. They're barely even talking about other people when they describe why they bought something. What you hear instead, with a lot of consistency, is language that's entirely internal. "I just needed something beautiful." "It made me feel calm." "I wanted something that made, you know, that felt mine."
Now, of course, that sounds faintly therapeutic, I suppose, if you if you're used to the traditional model. And and I think that's because I think that's because it is faintly therapeutic, which is a double-edged sword. And what appears to be happening, and there's a good deal of evidence behind it now, is a shift from conspicuous consumption to what's called hedonic self-regulation, which is the use of consumption to modulate your own emotional state rather than to communicate anything to anyone else. And the audience for the purchase isn't who it used to be, which is external. It's now entirely internal.
So you're not buying, or they're not buying, the Loro Piana cashmere because someone at dinner is going to clock the fabric. They're buying it because the texture does something. The how you feel when you wear it in in the afternoon when you know when everything else that's going on that day is is ghastly. It's closer to a coping mechanism, I think, rather than a status display, which actually sounds barking mad until you look at the literature on cross-modal correspondence and how sensory input affects emotional regulation, at which point it then becomes rather well-supported.
The question though is why? And I think the answer has to do with the collapse of stable aspirational hierarchies. So the traditional model assumes that there's a legible social ladder, a shared understanding that certain objects communicate certain positions, and that buying luxury is how you announce which rung you're standing on on that ladder. And you know, that worked when there was broad agreement about what the ladder actually looked like. But if you're 32 and you've made a lot of money in tech or finance or whatever bloody category we're calling it this week, you don't experience a single hierarchy. You see dozens of hierarchies overlapping. And what you also see is partially contradictory status systems. And the idea that a particular handbag communicates your position in any one of those particular hierarchy or status states, I suspect, becomes slightly absurd in that situation because there's there's no fixed destination to arrive at, really, is there?
So the whole aspirational framework, the "buy this and you'll be seen to be having made it," you know, that pitch, it doesn't necessarily land anymore. It's not that they reject aspiration out of hand, you know, they don't, or even out of some philosophical principle. I mean, that that's not true either. It's that the structure of aspiration and how it develops has dissolved almost underneath them, which creates a rather spectacular problem for brands built on that model.
If your buyer isn't trying to signal anything to anyone, then all the language of exclusivity and belonging to a world of X and joining an elite world of Y, it's kind of missing the point, isn't it? In fact, it's not just missing the point. It's actively alienating. You're selling them a story about other people's perceptions when they actually came to you for something entirely private. It's rather like trying to sell someone a a meditation app by telling them how impressed their friends are going to be with it.
And I think the brands that have clocked this, and there aren't that many to be quite honest with you, have started emphasizing that the object actually, or what the object actually does to the person who owns it, rather than what it announces to everyone else. The thing is, that's a much harder thing to market because it's internal and it's subjective and it doesn't photograph well for an ad campaign. But it is where the psychological center of gravity has moved to for this particular cohort of consumers. And I think the brands that are still flogging desperately aspiration, people who aren't aspiring to anything external, are going to probably find themselves having an increasingly difficult or increasingly difficult conversations with their best customers because their customers are changing.
That's not to say aspiration doesn't still exist, and it doesn't to say that status chasing doesn't exist. It does. Of course it does. But the younger generation that's coming up now, the Gen Alphas and the Gen Zs, they're not chasing it as much as millennial, Gen X, and boomer generations. Just something to keep in mind if you are selling a luxury product.