Luxury used to be simple. It was whatever most people couldn’t afford. Gold, silk, cashmere, a car with a famous badge, a bag with a waitlist. Money was the gate, and if you were on the right side of it, you were in.
I think that definition is quietly breaking, and I’m here for it. Luxury now isn’t about who has money. It’s about who still has taste.
Money is everywhere now. So is the logo.
Look around. The logo bag is on every street, real or fake. Resale apps mean last season’s “exclusive” piece is a swipe away. “Quiet luxury” was so loud that you could buy the look on the high street within weeks. Influencers flash the same five designer items. Wealth has never been more visible, and that’s exactly why it’s become less interesting.
When everyone with a credit limit can own the same thing, owning it says very little about you. It says you had the money. That’s it.
Then AI made images, words and music cheap
Here’s the bigger shift. Creative work used to be scarce. To get a beautiful illustration, a poem, a song, a campaign, you needed a human who had spent years getting good at it.
Now you can generate a passable version of almost anything in seconds. I want to be careful here, because the democratisation of creative tools is genuinely good in a lot of ways. More people can make things. More people can try. That matters.
But democratisation and commodification are not the same thing. When creativity is democratised, more people get to express themselves. When it’s commodified, expression becomes a cheap, endless product made without anyone in particular behind it. AI has done a lot of the second. Our feeds are full of images nobody really made and text nobody really wrote. It’s smooth, competent and empty.
And what happens to anything that becomes abundant? It loses value. Which means the opposite becomes precious.
The rarest thing left is a person
A painting where you can see the brush hesitate. A dress where you can tell someone made a decision at every seam. A magazine that sounds like one specific person. A shop where every object was chosen by someone who would actually use it. A restaurant where the chef cooks what she wants, not what tested well.
That’s luxury to me now. Not the price. The presence of a real human mind, with real opinions, that took real time.
Interestingly, the oldest luxury houses already know this. The ones doing well are the ones that sell craft and patience, hand-stitched leather, workshops you can visit, people who’ve done one job for thirty years. The ones struggling are often the ones that leaned hardest into logos and hype. Even the industry press has noticed the shift, with craft, honesty and durability coming back as the measure of value.
Taste can’t be bought, only built
This is the part that makes me happy. Money can buy you an expensive object. It can’t buy you the knowledge to choose the right one. It can’t buy you the years of looking, reading, wearing and failing that teach you what you actually love.
That’s oddly democratic. You can have very little money and enormous taste. Some of the most stylish people I know dress almost entirely from markets and their parents’ cupboards. Some of the richest people I’ve seen look like a shopping catalogue had an accident. Taste doesn’t care about your bank balance. It cares about your attention.
A small warning
I’m aware “taste” can turn snobby fast. I don’t mean taste as in agreeing with a small group of fashion people about what’s correct. I mean having a point of view that’s genuinely yours, built over time, that you can stand behind. Your grandmother’s way of folding a sari has taste. A teenager’s bedroom wall of torn-out magazine pages has taste. It’s not a class. It’s a habit of paying attention.
The new flex
So here’s what I think luxury looks like now. Owning fewer things that you chose carefully. Knowing who made them. Supporting human artists in a world drowning in generated content. Having opinions that weren’t handed to you by an algorithm. Making something with your own hands, even badly.
Money will always buy nice things. But in a world where everything can be copied, generated and delivered tomorrow, the one thing that can’t be is you. Protect it. That’s the most expensive thing you own.
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