Luxury’s Overexposure Is Biting
The luxury industry has over-indexed on visibility. Few care and even fewer buy.
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Ubiquity risk is driven by “key styles appearing too often on the street and not by revenue,” Luca Solca wrote in 2023. “It is driven by the volume of goods in use at any given time, and not by its revenue, nor by the total volume of goods it produces.”
However, today, luxury isn’t experienced on the streets — because no one is on them. Data from The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in-person socializing in the U.S. has declined for both men and women, for all ages, for all ethnicities, and for all levels of income and education. Likewise, over the past 15 years, the share of people across OECD countries who meet others in person has steadily declined.
In 2026, framing the risk of overexposure in tangible terms — measured by the presence of physical goods on a proverbial street — discounts the forums consumers spend the greatest portion of their days in. Activate Consulting data finds that U.S. consumers spend 16% of their day consuming video (for context, they spend 16.2% on work related activities) and 40.5% of it consuming digital media or utilising tech. Now, luxury is primarily consumed through screens.
As a result, luxury is inescapable. Products are seen constantly; few care and even fewer buy. The 0.01% are not buying into widely available physical products and assets. Instead, they are seeking out money-can’t-emulate experiences. The Economist’s ultra-luxury-services index — an index measuring apex experiences with both global recognition and reliable price data over many years — has risen by 90% since 2019.
“Riching Right” Doesn’t Drive Sales
The omnipresence of luxury products and lifestyles on our screens goes far beyond advertising. Across the spectrum of spending power, consumers are fed a constant diet of the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. Turn-of-the-millennia shows like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s The Simple Life spawned a huge media subset enabling digital wealth tourism.
Luxury is now in every photocall, a regular plotline in popular media and, on social platforms, it acts as the evidence of innumerable creators’ self-actualisation arcs. As cultural mores shifted and polarisation accelerated, we became inundated with personal wealth being evidenced by luxury products.
Compare the walls of Birkins that audiences are so bored of seeing on reality TV to the approach of its namesake. Jane Birkin inspired a bag that was intentionally designed for her needs and used it constantly. That approach is aspirational. It can be emulated. High cost is balanced against regular use and consistent personal branding. Luxury has relied on that rationale for much of its modern incarnation. But over the past decade, its public image has been subsumed into ever more extreme wealth and consumer behaviour. The experience of the acquisition has gained primacy over the purpose of purchase. Use-cases are invented to re-engage with consumerism.
Now, contrast Jane Birkin with Becca Bloom, a fintech professional and influencer with private wealth and almost 5 million TikTok followers. Her video content includes insanely extensive Hermès hauls, GRWMs for events including a “cat baptism” or “a Parisian ball”, and unboxings of rare jewellery from Bvlgari and Van Cleef. Scroll through Bloom’s profile, and hundreds of luxury products are ubiquitous: one moment, a custom Kelly, next, a rare Birkin.
Due to the severity of the wealth polarisation we live in today, relative terms of value between the elite and the wider populus have ceased to exist. In Bloom’s content, everything is staggeringly expensive but acquired at no appreciable cost. Excess and expense abound. But the products are interchangeable. Always available and exciting to buy at retail, and yet not valuable or relevant enough for her to utilise regularly. There are simply too many to do so. The acquisition experience has replaced product use-case as a purchase driver.
Correlatively, Gab Waller, a U.S. Vogue columnist and luxury sourcing specialist who has worked with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Hailey Bieber, Lori Harvey, and Sofia Richie Grainge, among notable others, tells Matter: “My customers are still heavily driven by wanting the key piece of the season, and they want it first.”
What was once novel access into the luxurious sanctuaries of the 0.001%, is now a played out, aesthetic trope. It’s boring. It’s predictable. And in an era of increasing inequality, it’s gauche. Signalling personal taste has been replaced by broadcasting the intimacy of your relationship with sales associates. In digital channels, this is the luxury use-case broadcast most. But for all but the 0.001% of the population (some 56,000 people, who have three times more wealth than the poorest half of the world’s population) this is not a realistic use-case to aspire to.
What Bloom is selling is not product — but engagement with the spectacle of her wealth. “I want to live vicariously through you,” and “This is how you rich right,” are typical comments on Bloom’s videos. Another influencer sits in her wardrobe and reads out her bar receipts or monthly expenses that run to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s the entirety of the bit.
These displays of luxury are so excessive and so intense that, for the majority of aspirational consumers, they have fundamentally become nothing more than product porn, entertainment that fails to galvanise any real-world desire to purchase or emulate.
The shift was rapid, but pervasive. In 2023, Luca Solca wrote with regards to ubiquity-risk, “consumers can only use one bag at a time”, meaning that the more brands are able to sell pieces to existing customers, the more they can keep individual pieces out of circulation: “if a customer buys X bags, X-1 pieces will, at any given time, remain in their wardrobes.” Today however, the rich and influential film those wardrobes, and the bags within them, before professionally broadcasting them to millions, creating a constant loop of short form video app exposure.
Wealth Porn, Hollywood Style
The same sensibility can be found not only on our small screens, but on the medium and big screens too. “Influencers have made social media a platform for wealth porn, but their videos still fall short of what Hollywood budgets and finesse can offer — an experience that transports instead of merely tantalizing,” as The New Yorker put it recently.
It’s not just Succession and The White Lotus — more recent entrants like Kim Kardashian’s All’s Fair and ongoing blockbuster successes like The Real Housewives franchise showcase a (very literal) embarrassment of riches. Sai de Silva of The Real Housewives, a franchise which sees most of its season premieres reach 2.5 million viewers or more, recently told The Business of Fashion that “we are walking billboards for fashion and beauty brands.”
All’s Fair garnered 3.2 million global views in its first three days of streaming, becoming Hulu’s biggest scripted series premiere in three years. It features extensive product inclusion from brands including Valentino, Dior, Tiffany & Co., and Hermès. “The show is aspirational,” lead actor Naomi Watts said in a press-junket recently.
And perhaps buoyed by these fictional shows of wealth, certain real-life UHNWIs and HNWIs seem to be equally emboldened to share their lifestyles with the world at large. Evan Osnos, The New Yorker writer and author of The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich, told Vox that a distinct shift has occurred in the last decade: “It used to be… if you keep yourself out of sight, you stand less chance of attracting public outrage or the tax man. Today, the rich move differently.” From Jeff Bezos’ ultra-mediatised wedding in Venice, to the 1% who gladly agree to transmit their superyacht vacations to the world via pandemic-favourite reality show Below Deck, some of the wealthy are no longer in hiding.
Resale Steals Share
The problem with turning everything into an entertainment spectacle is that eyeballs are not enough: this is a fundamentally passive form of consumption. The overwhelming presence of wealth and its signifiers has not translated to sales. Gen Z is not buying into new luxury at scale: sales to Gen Z shoppers fell by 4% to 6% last year, compared to a 1% to 3% overall drop, as per Bain & Company.
Hyper-visibility is no longer a viable strategy for luxury’s growth. In fact, it is obscuring the real opportunity. Fortune reports an estimated $54 trillion in wealth will pass to surviving spouses by 2048 in the U.S., with more than 95% of these transfers expected to go to women. The specific average for an inter-spousal transfer is cited in recent financial reports as $1.4 million. The majority of those beneficiaries are of an age and media diet that is still largely ignored.
Decreasingly effective channels to consumers certainly play a part. Trust in influencers has plummeted over the last few years: 66% of consumers express low trust in celebrity influencers, and 87% of consumers believe it’s likely that influencers don’t even use the products they advertise, according to data from Wakefield Research.
Nearly 90% of consumers no longer trust paid-for-post influencers, as per The Drum, but, significantly, even organic content – like Becca Bloom’s videos or a storyline involving a Goyard travel case in All’s Fair – may drive views, comments, and fandom, but not actual purchases.
Increasingly, when Gen Z do buy luxury, it’s secondhand: the global secondhand apparel market is expected to reach $367 billion by 2029, growing 2.7X faster than the overall global apparel market, according to ThredUp’s 2025 Resale Report. 47% of consumers now consider resale value before buying new luxury, as per The RealReal. Resale value has climbed significantly: last year, Van Cleef & Arpels Alhambra jewellery increased by +20% and Louis Vuitton Speedy bags by +13%.
As one teenage Matter Intelligence Community member told Matter: “New luxury is just embarrassing”. The perceived need to purchase secondhand items with the appearance of newness is also in decline: sales of fair condition items on The RealReal increased by +32% this year and bags showing visible wear by +45%. Out of the box and fresh off the rack is absurd, especially to a generation with the economic outlook facing most of Gen Z.
Impulse Purchases Decline, Scrutiny Increases
And while social media, as recent Vogue Business and Archrival data shows, is certainly a source of inspiration for fashion and beauty purchases (three in 10 Gen Zs use social media for this purpose), crucially, many Gen Z consumers “aren’t buying products impulsively at the point of inspiration”.
Instead, “young people are increasingly using social media as a search engine, to research products they’ve seen online or IRL and hear from others about the item’s fit, quality, packaging and more”. This move away from impulse purchasing and into a far more active style of shopping is partly fuelled by this generation’s steadily growing interest in quality. Indeed, 71% of clients surveyed are primarily driven by a desire to own high-quality products, according to new data from EY.
This is not good news for the vast majority of luxury brands, whose products, when they are not being used as “wealth porn”, are being quite literally torn apart on screen and dissected for whether or not they are “worth the money”. For many Gen Z, it’s clear why luxury products feel more like entertainment vehicles than viable purchases.
Brands should also appreciate how a wider cultural shift in terms of status symbols is impacting luxury purchase behaviour – for HNWIs as well as aspirational consumers. Expenditure is now driven by lifestyle relevance rather than material acquisition. Just 32% of HNW clients state that they buy luxury fashion as a mark of status, as per EY data.
The uber-ubiquity of luxury, on a never-before-seen scale, has denigrated its value and, as a result, designer goods no longer operate as a stable signal of prosperity. “Buying a Prada bag [...] says nothing personal about the consumer,” Silvia Bellezza, an associate professor of business at Columbia Business School, told Fortune Magazine, “Since knockoffs are so accessible and clothing has become uninspiring, signaling self will be the next frontier.” Merch is still growing and is already hitting the UHNWI market, from €300 Ritz Paris slippers and niche, impossible to book restaurants’ caps, to yacht charter tees and country weekend paraphernalia. Wealth is now broadcast with IYKYK logos.
Indeed, the luxury industry’s over-reliance on celebrity campaigns and product placement, even as social media ensures brands no longer have any control over the ubiquity of their products, is not where brands should continue to invest in driving focus. Strategies should prioritise genuine lifestyle relevance to the merely wealthy through more nuanced identity markers, rather than allow product lines to become sources of entertainment, not aspiration.
Overexposure has always carried significant brand risk. It is capable of rapidly suppressing sales if a brand suddenly falls foul of the zeitgeist. Now, however, it is challenging the foundational value proposition of the industry.
Overexposure Negatively Impacts Consumers at Both Poles
For the 0.0001%, experiences that cannot be emulated or duped, and which grant a modicum of global renown, are the focus of their discretionary investment.
Any value relating to owning the key-piece-of-the-season is rooted in having it first, before it becomes ubiquitous. That means highly controlled distribution, minuscule product numbers to maintain exclusivity and perceived value, and astronomical prices to make it worth it. But it is a zero sum game. Because imagery of products can also accelerate ubiquity, the duration of a product’s relevance is shrinking for UHNW customers.
Only a handful of products can reach pinnacle status, and brands are more vulnerable to missteps becoming disastrous, be it PR, quality control or Goyard-type ubiquity (labour abuse scandals and human rights violations don’t seem to have an impact, sadly). But the middle-class late adopters that used to save up to copy them are now entirely priced out.
The next generation will continue to easily access consumer feedback at scale, compare and contrast products across competitors, select one, wait for a more foolish, older consumer to buy it and then acquire it when their favourite resale app sends a notification.
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The shift to IYKYK logos is the quiet counter movement. Wealth broadcast through insider codes rather than globally recognizable luxury brands. When the signal is ubiquitous, it stops signaling. The next frontier is signaling self, not signaling access.
Your point about status shifting from possessions to relationships is particularly sharp. If friendships are becoming the new marker of wellbeing, then it makes sense that the brands which facilitate connection — not just consumption — will become culturally relevant. In a strange way, the next frontier of marketing might simply be recreating the environments we lost: spaces where people can gather without an agenda.