Many of you responded to my last post — “I am tremendously optimistic. Are you not?” — in which I spoke of premiumisation and “pricing power.”
Yes, price alone is not enough. Especially when it is high, or even exorbitantly so.
The period of crisis we are navigating — or of doubt, call it what you will — reminds us of this: true luxury cultivates the invisible: Trust. It is not the price that confers prestige, but the promise contained within it — a promise of mastered time, of uncompromising rigour, of rare emotion.
In wine, one does not merely purchase a Montrachet: one subscribes to a vision of the world, to a particular way of inhabiting the land and time itself. In cosmetics, the same subtle mechanics apply: a fair price translates patient science, unrelenting selection, the equilibrium of textures. A La Prairie cream — with its placental stem cell extracts —, Sisley — with its phyto-cosmetic synergies —, or Beau Domaine with its two patented active ingredients GSM10® et le ProGR3® does not sell a mirage of youth, but the rigour of research made manifest in matter. Here again, value is experienced in use, never at the counter.
Perfume, too, narrates this dialectic between promise and illusion. A fragrance signed by Frédéric Malle or Xerjoff transports more than it seduces: it rewrites memory as experience. What one pays for is not the precious flacon but the imagination it houses. Price becomes, then, an emotional covenant between the house and the one who wears it.
Even the cigar — that object of slow contemplation — reminds us that luxury is smoked in duration. Between a hand-rolled Habanos from Pinar del Río and an industrial cigar, the difference lies not merely in the tobacco, but in the patience it embodies. The price, here, consecrates a ritual: that of time reclaimed, liberated from the tyranny of contemporary speed.
In an interview with Paul Morand, Coco Chanel once said: “True luxury resides in the thing one does not notice immediately, but can no longer ignore once perceived.”
Luxury, at its core, does not subsist on the flamboyance of price, but on the fidelity inspired by its promise. Therein lies its greatness: in the moral accord between creation, matter, and the one who receives it. It is this alliance — far more than mere tariff exclusivity — that makes luxury a language unto itself: the language of true discernment, not of vanity.
What certain houses have understood — and what others have tragically forgotten — is that the trust of the luxury consumer is the most fragile of all assets. It does not survive betrayal.
Pierre Bourdieu spoke of “symbolic capital” as a form of social credit built over time and shattered in an instant. A luxury brand that cheapens its promise — that lightens its formula, industrialises its chain, outsources its savoir-faire — does not simply lose sales. It forfeits the very reason its price was ever justified. It becomes a hollow totem. And hollow totems, sooner or later, fall.
The lesson, therefore, is not a moral one. It is strategic, and almost Darwinian: in luxury, the brands that endure are those that have understood that price is not a social convention to be manipulated at will. It is a contract. And that contract is legible in every detail — in the weight of the paper of an invitation, in a first-quality cork stopper, in the staying power of a foundation at eighteen hours, in the draw of a cigar at its midpoint. These are promises that are either kept — or broken. And it is precisely from that integrity that status is born, sometimes. Never the other way around.
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