Not Louder, But Higher: Why Luxury Maisons must reclaim their Voice & Stage
Luxury made a deal with Big Tech, a Faustian Bargain. It gained visibility but lost authorship and weakened its desirability. A cultural reset is underway.
There was a time when luxury spoke in hushed tones. You didn’t stumble into it, you stepped into another dimension: a world of whispered elegance, curated silence, and craftsmanship that commanded awe without raising its voice. Even the air carried a scent of something rare, unplaceable, unforgettable. It didn’t need to explain itself. Its mystery was its power.
Today, that encounter is more likely to begin and end in the cacophony of a TikTok feed, sandwiched between a meme and a political rant.
Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH captures this so eloquently at the recent LVMH General Assembly 2025 in Paris when he said:
“We have never wanted to depend on a single channel of distribution or communication.”
Yet LVMH and other Luxury groups made a bargain: visibility in exchange for sovereignty. In the pursuit for ever-larger audiences, they surrendered their storytelling to the algorithms of Big Tech: faster, louder, easier. At first, it seemed harmless. Necessary, even. Visibility in exchange for virality. A wider audience in exchange for faster formats. Today, the cracks are beginning to show.
Luxury didn’t just borrow Big Tech’s microphone; it surrendered the stage. The stories once told like rituals: slow, sacred, meant to linger, are now compressed into swipeable snippets, wedged between ASMR facials and political meltdowns. What was once whispered is now shouted into the scroll. Luxury Maisons traded authorship for access to the vast digital audience and in doing so, allowed a quiet but significant erosion of their most valuable asset: desirability. Exclusivity, a cornerstone of luxury's allure, is flattened in environments designed for mass reach and viral spread. The very soul of a Maison risks becoming just another data point in a system optimized for attention metrics rather than enduring desire.
This is the Faustian Bargain.
Not a dramatic collapse, but with a steady erosion of authorship, aura and control of the stage.
And just as this dependence is showing its limits, reflected in the financial slowdown across nearly every major luxury group, something shifted. A landmark U.S. court ruling found Google guilty of illegally monopolizing the digital ad market, a decision that rippled beyond legal circles. It wasn’t just a regulatory tremor. It was a signal flare.
The architecture of Big Tech’s dominance is cracking.
And in that fracture lies opportunity for luxury Maisons, a potential rebalancing of power that could fundamentally shift the unhealthy relationship between Big Tech and the world's most coveted luxury Maisons. Within this moment of fracture lies a rare opportunity: to reclaim digital sovereignty, ownership of narrative, rediscover the slow majesty of desirability, and rebuild cultural influence: not by chasing the crowd, but by commanding storytelling and the owning the stage once again.
This is no longer about better marketing. It’s about cultural infrastructure. Luxury must stop renting attention and start building its own stage: frame by frame, story by story, Maison by Maison.
The question is no longer how to pay to play on Big Tech platforms, it’s how Luxury Maisons can build their own digital palaces.
The Problem: Luxury's Faustian Bargain with Big Tech
At its heart, luxury was never about reach. It was about altitude. Altitude between the everyday and the extraordinary. Between the accessible and the unattainable. That altitude, carefully guarded, deliberately measured, is where desirability is born.
Yet in the past decade, luxury has traded altitude for exposure.
In the race for relevance, many luxury Maisons surrendered their greatest assets: narrative capital, cultural sovereignty, exclusivity, in exchange for visibility. What began as a strategic adaptation to a digital world has quietly become a dependency.
How did it happen? How did we arrive at a point where the custodians of centuries-old heritage find themselves navigating the capricious algorithms of Big Tech platforms built for viral trends? As attention consolidated around a few dominant platforms: Instagram, YouTube, Google, Netflix, TikTok, the rules changed. The digital square became a gated empire. The algorithms became the architects. The very infrastructure through which consumers discover, explore, and desire was no longer neutral.
At first, these platforms promised amplification. But they’re not megaphones. They’re kingdoms.
And in these kingdoms, every click, every campaign, every video strengthens their ecosystem, not yours. Big Tech controls distribution, pricing, and perception. Luxury Maisons, despite generations of storytelling, now pay rent in someone else’s world just to be seen, by their own customers. From global luxury giants like LVMH, Kering and Richemont, to rising creators like Jacquemus or Polène, the trade-off is the same.
To reach their own customers, luxury Maisons poured hundreds of billions of dollars in the last decade, into digital advertising, buying visibility in a system whose pricing and outcomes are dictated behind a curtain, relying on opaque rules. And I’m not the one saying this: the US District Court said so on April 17th 2025. The landmark decision against Google reveals a landscape where the very infrastructure for reaching consumers online was, to a significant extent, rigged for the benefit of Big Tech – it was built not to serve the market, but to consolidate its control. This meant luxury brands, with their immense cultural capital, were operating within a system whose rules, pricing, and priorities were dictated by another and outside the laws of commerce and common sense.
Luxury Maisons, built on the slow accumulation of myth and meaning, have been operating inside a system that wasn’t built for them. A system optimized for speed, not depth. Volume, not meaning. And certainly not desirability. Luxury Maisons have become tenants in Big Tech’s casino where the dealer always wins.
Meanwhile, Luxury Maisons’ brand equity that took centuries to cultivate is being eroded, quietly at first, but now unmistakably. Just look at the markets. Monsieur Bernard Arnault, patriarch of LVMH was the richest person in the world barely a year ago. Today, he’s slipped out of the top 5 - surpassed by a new ruling class: Big Tech. The very platforms that once promised visibility are now eating luxury’s lunch.
And the consequences?
· Scarcity is flattened into ubiquity.
· Nuance is sacrificed for virality.
· Craft is reduced to content.
· Luxury Maisons become just another thumbnail between political meme and a gossiper.
Arnault himself points this out at the latest LVMH General Assembly, the importance of elevation:
“Plus l’entreprise est de grande taille, plus elle a besoin... de travailler avec la clientèle affluente... plus pérenne et durable.”
The price of this Faustian bargain is becoming too high. If Luxury Maisons continues on this path, they risk not only dilution, but dispossession.
The Turning Point: Antitrust Action and the Shifting Landscape
For years, the power of Big Tech felt untouchable, an invisible infrastructure that Luxury Maisons were forced to navigate. But that illusion is beginning to fracture.
In April 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a landmark ruling: Google was found guilty of illegally monopolizing the digital advertising market. This wasn’t a slap on the wrist. It was a seismic ruling that exposed how one Big Tech company rigged the architecture of the digital economy.
And Google is just the beginning…
From Brussels to Washington, the world’s regulators are finally drawing a line. What once passed as innovation is now being redefined as coercion. The era of unregulated platform dominance is facing its reckoning. Governments around the world are beginning to recognize what luxury has felt for years: when a handful of Big Tech platforms control access, distribution, and visibility: cultural & narrative sovereignty is the first casualty. These antitrust efforts promise more than just market correction, they signal the start of a more open, more competitive, and less algorithmically-governed digital future.
For luxury, this isn’t just regulatory noise. It’s a rare window: a chance to reset the terms of their Faustian Bargain…
Imagine a digital luxury world not dictated by algorithmic virality or mass-market logic. A world where craftsmanship is not compressed into swipeable content. Where access is earned, not gamed. Where the values that define luxury: exclusivity, intimacy, authorship, aren’t eroded by the scroll, but elevated, desired.
The digital stage is being rebuilt. The only question is: who will own the stage for luxury?
Path forward: Reclaiming the future of luxury
A shift is underway. With Big Tech’s dominance finally facing legal, regulatory, and cultural resistance, luxury finds itself at a rare inflection point, a golden opportunity: the chance to reclaim its voice and the stage.
Luxury does no longer needs to adapt to Big Tech algorithms. It needs to outgrow it.
Just as luxury once reshaped the physical world, redefining retail as ritual, and product as artefact, it must now reimagine the digital world on its own terms. This means more than presence on someone else’s platform. It means authorship. Ownership. Control.
Anish Melwani, CEO of LVMH North America understands this better than most when he said at the 2025 Milken Institute Conference:
It means building new cultural spaces where luxury’s deepest values: exclusivity, reverence, authorship, elevation, aren’t diluted by algorithms, but designed into the very fabric of the storytelling experience and the stage upon which it is told.
Four imperatives must guide this re-conquest:
Reclaim Distribution
Luxury must stop being a guest on platforms built for virality, not reverence. Instead of renting reach, Maisons must invest in sovereign digital spaces: curated, protected, and insulated from the noise of mass media. Platforms where discovery feels intimate, not incidental. Where storytelling is immersive, not compressed.
Rebuild cultural intimacy
Luxury doesn’t shout. It whispers, and the world leans in. In a culture addicted to immediacy, luxury must reclaim its tempo. Think Haute Couture: rare access, carefully orchestrated reveals, and a cadence that commands respect - not algorithms that demand endless content.Assert narrative sovereignty
Luxury must reclaim the right to tell its own stories - that cannot be compressed into a 30-second scroll, but unfold like theater: rich, layered, timeless. Narratives that elevate product into legacy, transform campaigns into culture, and clients into curators of significance.Invest in cultural infrastructure Just as Hollywood was America's cultural army, luxury must build its own cultural bastions. Not just campaigns, but lasting infrastructures of influence. A cultural operating sytem for storytelling, cinema, art collaborations, editorial, masterclasses, immersive events. Desirability built on beauty, intellect, and soul - not on clicks.
This is not just a tactical pivot. It’s a strategic reset.
By reducing dependence on external algorithms and redirecting traffic to owned platforms, Maisons unlock something far more valuable than likes: first-party intimacy. True knowledge of their audience. Emotional fluency. Personalization rooted in real relationships - not cookie trails. That is how desirability is created.
The opportunity lies in transforming passive digital visibility into active, engaged community building, where desirability is cultivated through authentic connection and exclusive access, rather than fleeting algorithmic reach. This is the moment for luxury to assert its independence, investing strategically in proprietary digital infrastructure and content creation to ensure that its future in the digital realm is authored by the Maisons themselves, not outsourced to the architects of mass attention.
This is the moment to shift from visibility to influence. From reach to reverence. From being seen everywhere to being felt deeply - by the few who matter most.
Because in the future of luxury, desirability won’t be bought. It will be built. Frame by frame. Story by story. Maison by Maison.
A last word
Luxury stands at a crossroads.
One path is frictionless, fast, and familiar: algorithmic validation, performative relevance, content optimized for the scroll. But at its end lies erosion of meaning, of authority, of the very aura that made luxury desirable.
The other path is harder. Slower. But infinitely more powerful. It requires vision. Courage. A willingness to stop renting the stage and start building the theatre.
We’ve been here before.
In the 1990s, Bernard Arnault understood what few others did: that selling through department stores and 3rdparties would eventually commoditize luxury. His answer wasn’t to fight retail: it was to reinvent it on his terms. Through vertical integration, flagship boutiques, and fully orchestrated brand worlds, he turned distribution into desire. He also said at the LVMH Annual General meeting last month:
“Our investments in owning our own boutiques were not expenses, but strategic choices to master the customer experience.”
Today, the same choice presents itself in the digital realm. It is no longer enough to simply show up where others dictate. Luxury must own the frame, not just the image. The platform, not just the post. The narrative, not just the moment.
This is not a defensive move. It is an offensive one. A declaration that luxury is not content. It is culture. That its power lies not in noise, but in nuance. Not in reach, but in resonance. Not in being everywhere, but in being unforgettable. And Monsieur Arnault offers a masterclass about this when he spoke about LVMH in 2019:
“I see myself as an ambassador of French heritage and French culture. What we create is emblematic. It's linked to Versailles, to Marie Antoinette.”
The choice is not between adapting or resisting. It is between fading or leading. The Maisons that dare to reclaim their narrative sovereignty today will not merely survive the coming disruption. They will define the next century of desirability.
Now is the time to speak again: not louder, but higher.
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