Would You Sell Champagne at a Gas Station? Of course not

Yet luxury storytelling is unfolding on Big Tech mass platforms and not in their own universe. Luxury needs a stage, not just a story...

There’s a growing assumption in luxury circles that partnering with Hollywood and distributing through Netflix, Instagram, or YouTube is enough. That if the story is strong, the channel doesn’t matter. They believe that cultural relevance doesn’t require infrastructure, just strong stories. But that belief misunderstands what actually creates desirability in luxury.

Because in this sector, how a story is seen is as important as what it says. Context isn’t cosmetic, it’s a strategic moat.

Luxury isn’t just about message. It’s about medium, context, and aura. And today, the Big Tech platforms dictating that context: Netflix, Meta, Google, TikTok and others weren’t built for nuance, mystique, or refinement.

Big Tech and Hollywood don’t simply distribute stories. They shape them, compressing them into formats optimized for reach, speed, and algorithmic virality. They dictate:

• The pacing (shorter is better),

• The language (trending or nothing),

• The architecture (infinitely scrollable and swipeable),

• And ultimately, the framing (mass over intimacy)

The result?

Big Tech and Hollywood increasingly dictate the formats, rhythms, and emotional register through which stories are told. You’re not just collaborating with a distributor, you’re adopting their aesthetic codes, their user interface, their logic of virality. A Maison’s story is no longer whispered like a secret, it’s shouted into the scroll.

Even with incredible creative talent at their disposal such filmmakers, artisans, designers, set decorators, archivists, perfumers, artistic directors, luxury giants, whether LVMH, Kering, Chanel or Hermes are forced to flatten their narratives to fit someone else’s mold: algorithmically optimized, thumbnail-ready, and compressed into 30-second clips. The pacing is off. The audience is wrong. The codes are diluted.

Desire has a language, and it’s not the language of autoplay and trending tabs. The consequences are subtle but corrosive. The brand may still look beautiful - but it no longer feels exclusive, storied or revered.

Take a simple example: Dior would never sell a Lady Dior bag on Amazon. The context would degrade the object. And yet, the Dior & I documentary - an intimate film about the brand’s legacy and craftsmanship is currently hosted on Amazon Prime Video, lost between cooking shows and horror movies.

That’s the paradox: while Dior protects its retail palaces with obsessive control over every scent, decor, mood, spotlight, and velvet rope… it surrenders its stories to Big Tech platforms, Amazon in this case, that are optimized for the opposite values.

Would Veuve Clicquot sell champagne at a gas station? Of course not. Then why accept that its stories be streamed next to YouTube prank videos or TikTok filters?

It’s not a question of visibility. It’s a question of sovereignty. Because in luxury, the frame is part of the value. And Big Tech platforms are not neutral frames. They’re architectures of perception, and right now, they’re designed by someone else.

Because in luxury, visibility without control is exposure. And exposure, without the right frame, doesn’t elevate, it erodes.

Would LVMH sell Champagne at a Gas station?

Context Is Not Neutral: Platforms Shape Perception

In luxury, perception isn’t a side effect, it’s the product.

Every element of a Maison’s universe is deliberately orchestrated: the lighting in a boutique, the scent in the air, the texture of the invitation, the silence between musical notes, even the art on the wall that no one can purchase. These details don’t just frame the experience, they are the experience. Because in luxury, context is content.

Now contrast that with the chaos of an Instagram scroll.

In The Faustian Bargain, I argued that Big Tech platforms are not neutral pipelines. They’re cultural engines engineered to flatten difference, reward immediacy, and strip out mystique. Designed for mass attention, they treat rarity as a glitch and nuance as a friction point.

Their design logic is simple:

• Compress complexity to make it clickable.

• Prioritize speed over depth.

• Reward what explodes, not what unfolds.

Exceptional stories, crafted for emotional resonance and symbolic value are given the same treatment as memes and makeup tutorials: swipe, scroll, forget. The architecture of these platforms turns even the extraordinary into the ephemeral.

Anish Melwani, CEO of LVMH North America, captured the counterpoint beautifully during his 2025 Milken Institute appearance:

“Our stores have multimillion-dollar art on their walls. We’re not selling the art, but having the art in that environment creates this feeling of inspiration, it reinforces that feeling of accomplishment.”

That word: accomplishment, is at the core of luxury’s emotional economy and the fuel to desirability. It speaks to more than ownership. It signals arrival. But it’s a feeling that can only live in curated, controlled environments, not in viral clips or autoplay trailers.

High-net-worth clients are trained for context. They expect curation, not chaos. They gravitate toward environments that signal belonging and exclusivity:

• First Class & Private Jet lounges

• Amex Centurion clubs, concierge and cards

• Private clubs, country clubs, F1 Paddock Clubs

They don’t just collect luxury objects. They collect rare ambiences. When a luxury Maison tells its story inside someone else’s world, whether that’s a social feed, a streaming carousel, or a third-party app, it forfeits the ability to control the atmosphere that makes the story resonate. It trades authorship for access.

In doing so, the luxury Maison’s aura doesn’t disappear. It dissolves, quietly, into someone else’s algorithm.

What Owning the Ecosystem Really Means

Let’s be clear: owning a platform isn’t tech vanity for the sake of building data centers or writing lines of code. Cloud servers and tech stacks are commodities. This isn’t about engineering, it’s about authorship and cultural sovereignty.

In luxury, tech should not dictate the story. It should enable the Maison to deepen it.

At the same 2025 Milken Institute Conference, Anish Melwani, CEO of LVMH North America, offered a quiet but radical blueprint:

“We wisely avoided launching our own meme coins during the NFT craze... but we did embed chips into our bags to the blockchain and created digital product passports. We don’t even call them NFTs. But we now guarantee authenticity for every bag we’ve produced. That investment in technology is now a competitive advantage for our Maisons.”

The brilliance wasn’t in following a trend. It was in refusing the hype and quietly bending technology to serve something deeper: authenticity, transparency, trust. Not buzzwords but pillars of luxury.

This is exactly what owning a cultural ecosystem should enable:

• Cultural Sovereignty – Total control over how a story is told, who sees it, and in what format. No more algorithms dictating editorial logic.

• Data Intimacy – Understanding clients not through cookies or third-party trackers, but through memory, emotion, consent, and context.

• Ritual & Pace – Luxury has always been about patience. About harvest cycles, atelier hours, seasonal rhythm. Not push notifications and autoplay.

Desirability doesn’t scale through speed. It grows through atmosphere, mystery, and ritualized attention.

Imagine the possibilities:

• A Loro Piana short film capturing wool being harvested thread by thread in the Italian Alps, released each spring as a seasonal rite.

• A Rimowa documentary not about luggage, but about culture discovery, local customs, and the philosophy of travel - shot in Havana, Kyoto, and Dakar.

• A Moët & Cheval Blanc masterclass on the art of hosting, told as a cinematic poem of terroir, light, and conversation.

• A Pharrell Williams original series exploring the aesthetic codes of Black dandyism, filmed in Paris, Lagos, and Harlem, inspired by his Met Gala vision.

• A fictional series: mystery, drama, or romance where luxury is the background to Oscar-winning cinema, exploring contemporary themes with the same craftsmanship that goes into creating a new handbag placement.

• A travelling series following Anna Wintour as she travels to different Fashion Weeks across the globe, from Paris, Tokyo to NY, watching the fashion world in her lens.

This isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s a path for fearless luxury business and creative leaders to reclaim storytelling as THE strategic lever - where luxury Maisons become not just random storytellers, but have the infrastructure to be story curators, shape culture and make people dream. And with that, reignite the wells of desirability.

One senior marketing executive at LVMH who shall remain nameless for now said it best:

“Today, we have to pander to Hollywood, Netflix, Instagram - fit their mold. If we had our own ecosystem, we’d never have to dilute or pander again. Ever.”

Owning the platform isn’t about vanity, tech or cutting out the world. It’s about creating a stage where the world comes to luxury Maisons, on their terms, in their voice, at their pace.

Strategic Payoff: Platform as Infrastructure of Desire

Owning the platform is not a vanity project. It’s infrastructure - the cultural equivalent of a private terminal, a vineyard estate, or a bespoke atelier. Invisible from the outside, but strategically decisive. It’s what allows luxury Maisons to move with freedom, set their own pace, and shape their own values.

Dior’s newest retail palace, Gold House in Bangkok

And in the next era of luxury, desirability will not be manufactured - it will be staged. Not in someone else’s feed, but within an ecosystem purpose-built to express exclusivity, ritual, and refinement.

Here’s what that unlocks:

1. Restores pricing power

In true luxury, price is not determined by utility or competition, it’s governed by symbolism, scarcity, and story. A platform owned by luxury Maisons enables exactly that: to transform the product into a story, a symbol.

You’re no longer just selling a handbag. You’re inviting the client into an exclusive world:

• The backstory of the artisan who hand-stitched it in Asnières.

• The historical muse behind the silhouette.

• The ancestral château that inspired the color palette.

A digital platform under luxury Maison control allows that story to unfold on its terms, layered, cinematic, and intimate, not squeezed into 15-second trailers.

This is how symbolic capital translates back into pricing power. Not through margin manipulation, as we’ve seen too many luxury Maisons do and lose their customers, but through meaning.

2. Builds unshakeable desirability

Desire is emotional. It’s not data-driven. It’s not viral. It’s not even always rational. It lives in the space between imagination and recognition, the moment someone doesn’t just see a product, they see themselves in it. Big Tech’s platforms optimize for visibility. But visibility is not seduction.

By owning the platform, luxury Maisons regain the ability to whisper, not shout. To speak with emotional precision, in their own tone of voice, in their own rhythm.

Think of that Loro Piana’s harvest series, released once a year, at the same time, like a ritual. Or a Cheval Blanc evening series, not about wine, but about hospitality as a philosophy. This isn’t marketing. It’s, as the French say, mise-en-scène. It’s not about being seen, it’s about being felt.

3. Shield from brand dilution

Today, a Maison’s most poetic storytelling can be sandwiched between a TikTok prank and a Temu ad. That’s not just awkward, it’s corrosive. Algorithmic virality flattens. It favors the loud, not the layered. And the result is that luxury risks becoming just another input in a chaotic feed, stripped of mystique, gravity, and pace.

Owning the platform is a form of brand insurance. It safeguards:

• Visual codes.

• Emotional pacing.

• Associative context.

Just like a boutique carefully curates its music, scent, art on the wall, lighting, neighbours and flow, a sovereign ecosystem allows a luxury Maison to curate its entire narrative habitat.

Control the context, and you protect the desirability.

4. Becomes a cultural passport into the world’s imagination

In an age of geopolitical turbulence, algorithmic opacity, and rising protectionism, storytelling becomes more powerful than anything else. A Maison-owned cultural ecosystem becomes more than a media channel, it becomes a diplomatic asset.

When luxury storytelling is no longer just about campaigns but becomes an ongoing program of taste, heritage, and collaboration, it transcends the transactional:

• It becomes a tool of soft power and cultural signals, like drinking Cognac in Shanghai, or ordering a custom-made Louis Vuitton trunk in Houston.

• It creates bridges where tariffs threaten to build walls.

• It turns every film, feature, or docu-series into an invitation to cultural alignment.

This isn’t branding. This is cultural, narrative & digital sovereignty.

In that sense, the platform becomes not just infrastructure, but a passport to influence, desire and reverence. The luxury Maison doesn’t just sell to the world, it becomes the world’s curator of good taste and culture.

I call this Narrative Capital. And in today’s luxury economy, it may be more powerful than financial capital itself. We’ve all been watching the crumbling of luxury stock prices over the last year. Because while money buys an object, narrative builds meaning. And only one of those lasts longer than the season.

Don’t Just Tell the Story. Own the Stage.

In luxury, the question is no longer whether to tell stories, but where, how, and on whose terms.

Today’s Big Tech platforms: Netflix, Instagram, YouTube, are not neutral arenas. They are temples of attention, each with their own rituals, aesthetics, and logic. And when luxury tells its stories inside someone else’s temple, it prays at someone else’s altar.

It may still look like luxury. But it no longer feels like it.

Because in this industry, desirability is not about the message, it’s about the medium. It’s not just what’s said, it’s the frame, the texture, the slowness, the silence. It’s the art on the wall of a flagship you can’t buy, but will never forget. The dinner you’re invited to but can’t find online. The story you hear once, and never see again.

To preserve that magic, to scale aura without diluting it, you need to control the frame. You need an ecosystem that wasn’t built for clicks, but for reverence. One that protects rarity, paces attention, and rewards depth over reach.

That is what’s at stake: not just better content, but cultural sovereignty.

The luxury Maisons that own their voice AND the stage on which that voice is heard will define the next fifty years of luxury.

The rest? They’ll scroll by…

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