"Stuff" Doesn't Signal Status Anymore
For status-signalling and identity-making, consumers are skipping luxury goods.
Download Matter’s 2026 Intelligence Opinion: Undoing Overexposure, Navigating a Polarised World here, and subscribe for weekly analysis and executive advice in your inbox.
“Today, what counts as scarce and rivalrous has changed profoundly,” reports The Economist. After all, experiences and services are unique, unreproduceable commodities: “You can resell a watch, but you cannot ‘resell’ a day spent on Centre Court at Wimbledon.”
The lack of scarcity and specialness in luxury today is taking its toll.
Status Signalling in 2026
Bain reports that no “hero” purchase has emerged to boost or even buoy luxury product sales. Instead, one overarching theme, across markets and cohorts, emerged in end-of-year luxury reports: consumer spending is shifting towards experiences.
Bain and Altagamma data finds that car spending is down -4% and fine art spending -7%. Meanwhile, spending on luxury cruises rose +12%, spending on private jets and yachts +11%, fine dining +7%, and luxury hospitality +7%.
This is consistent with the findings of The Economist’s latest instalment of its ultra-luxury-services index, which includes “experiences with global recognition — not just nice, but the best of the best” including a Super Bowl ticket or a table at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. The index has risen +90% since 2019. Consumers are also pivoting increasingly towards spending their discretionary income on wellness, with the market forecast to reach $794.5 billion by 2029.
What is crucial for executives to understand, however, is that the real shift has occurred in consumers’ understanding, perception, and placement of value.
Telegraphing one’s identity is no longer achieved by owning the latest “it” bag. The status of products has been significantly eroded by price increases, quality dips, dupe culture, resale, and the promises and distractions of other industries.
An Altiant survey published in October 2025 identified stark differences in the evolving attributes associated with luxury products by different generational cohorts. Gen Z and Millennials place personal status and identity as the third attribute most associated with luxury, after quality and craftsmanship (which come in 1st and 2nd across the generations). For Gen X, elegance and timelessness, uniqueness, indulgence and extravagance — all precede personal status and identity in association with luxury products. Personal status and identity does not feature at all in the attributes Boomers and the Silent Generation most associate with luxury.
Younger consumers today are orientating around culture rather than aspiring to archive material possessions. Arguably, the “it” product of the year amongst urbanite young people was toting a matcha latte in-hand – the global market is expected to jump from $4.23 billion in 2024 to $7.86 billion by 2033 and demand has caused prices to double for first flush tencha in Kyoto, according to the Financial Times.
If brands were once in-markers of aspirational subcultures of customers, their mass availability and extensive product-line expansions to service all consumer needs, have dulled the potency of that signification to others.
It’s not just resale and dupe culture reducing barriers to entry for interchangeable goods: the real, enduring issue is that, by selling identity very widely and across spectrums, the brands once synonymous with specific identities are no longer telegraphing anything at all.
Taste Becomes Relevance
In 2025, 71% of Gen Z surveyed by Vogue Business and Archrival agreed that “taste has become flat; everyone buys the same brands”.
One respondent, a 21-year-old student, reported buying a blue Longchamp for the first day of school: “On the first day of school, literally hundreds of other girls had the exact same bag. It was really weird because it’s a specific brand in a specific colour. It almost looked dystopian.” She told Vogue Business that she no longer uses the bag.
This generational fear of losing one’s identity has been magnified by the general consumer population’s reception to online aesthetics. Many brands now telegraph nothing but mass taste – others have more negative connotations, albeit still rooted in a loss of meaning. In response, today, the acquisition of unique-enough products relevant to your peer groups, showcasing taste developed by more than algorithmic content, insider knowledge, exclusive access – are now the tenets upon which signification of status rests.
Brands like Miu Miu and Salomon once responded to this need, but now both sell individualism en masse: commercial success has undone the ability to telegraph a conscious, meaningful choice. As the New York Times recently pointed out, Salomons “sat on the shelves of the stylish Parisian boutique The Broken Arm” before being canonised as status symbols, but “now, you can hardly walk through any major city across the globe without spotting at least half a dozen pairs of Salomons on a given day.” (The author saw 18 pairs in a single trip to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice this December).
“A Depop seller with sharp styling and particular taste – “1990-2004 New York nightlife energy only” – moves culture as much as an editor once did,” writes Ana Andjelic in her Substack, The Sociology of Business. “The RealReal listing that starts, ‘This is the exact Dior Homme cut Hedi sent down the runway in 2003’ doesn’t just sell a blazer but changes the value of an entire silhouette.”
The ability of studied, informed resale purchases to broadcast a person’s unique identity is far greater than any new luxury product: scarcity, quality recognition, understanding of the nuances between the eras and designers of a brand’s history, ownership of special edition or limited release items. Resale also imbues product with significant experiential value – to the point where, as The RealReal now reports, sales for timeworn bags are up 45%, with patinaed styles including Chanel Classic Medium Double Flap up 68% YoY and Hermès Togo Birkin 35 up 73% over the same period.
For the very rich, who can buy anything, speed is everything. 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.”
Any value relating to owning the key-piece-of-the-season is rooted in having it first, before it becomes ubiquitous. Matter explores this further in Luxury’s Overexposure, coming in the next few weeks.
Lived Experience, Exclusively For Us
As a result of product ubiquity and the diminishing social status attached to them, consumers are broadcasting their lived experiences as identity-markers.
The wealthy now telegraph their concrete material status through far more abstract, IYKYK signifiers than a Louis Vuitton or Christian Dior bag. There is nothing effective about wearing a mass-produced, mass-available, and mass-exposed luxury product, no matter the price tag. Broadcasting lived experience and inclusion in an exclusive, exclusionary, and connective ingroup, however, wields significant value for consumers, who are still using fashion purchases to broadcast their alignment with certain kinds of people.
This new tribalism is centred on privilege, exposure, connections, memories, and access. Where one spends Memorial Day Weekend, for example, and how one then goes on to telegraph that experience through merchandise.
“Aspirational 20-somethings are creating personal brand equity playing logo bingo with private clubs and experiences rather than chasing the latest designer bag release. A San Vincente Bungalows camera privacy sticker on the back of your phone signals aligned-taste long after the party. They are waiting in line at Charleston’s Chubby Fish for the hat as much as the food. You’ll score a lot more points with an un-geotagged photo of the Lyford Cay Club pool than a Prada Re-Edition purse,” explains CaraCara chief executive, Sasha Martin.
Aspirational consumers are also increasingly invested in niche, tribal, access-driven telegraphing. Wi Spa shorts, an item from the eponymous Korean spa in Los Angeles, are not available to purchase – only to steal. “If you don’t know what Wi Spa is, then the shirt just looks like random merch for a spa called Wi. But if you do know what Wi Spa is, then the connotations of the shirt run deep,” writes Viv Chen, author of The Molehill on Substack.
The spa itself is accessible – admission is $30 – but, as Chen writes, “from the vantage point of the ‘iykyk crowd,’ its allure is that it can’t be bought. In that sense, it’s anti-merch merch… it mythologizes the Wi Spa patron-thief as a sort of chaotic wellness queen, a reluctant klepto who loves relaxation.” The shorts have been spotted on Charli XCX’s husband, and a matching t-shirt was worn by a character in Rachel Sennott’s new television show, I Love LA.
The Healthier, The Wealthier
McKinsey & Company data found 84% of U.S. consumers say wellness is a “top” or “important” priority. In the UK, 79% do, while in China it is an incredible 94%. It also found that nearly 30% of Gen Z and Millennials in the United States report prioritizing wellness “a lot more” compared with one year ago, versus up to 23% of older generations.
Gen Z places a higher priority on appearance than other generations: in the U.S., “better appearance” shifted from the sixth-most-important dimension of health and wellness for Gen Z consumers in 2023 to the third in 2024. Gen Z in other markets also placed a greater emphasis on appearance.
In recent years, serious exercise expenditure has become a mass phenomenon. No longer only the prerogative of professional athletes, amateur runners and cyclists are telegraphing their fitness via specialised gear, subscriptions, technology, and training. Notice that nobody refers to themselves as “a jogger” anymore: these days, everyone’s a runner.
This desire to broadcast one’s ability to run, cycle, hike, and lift more, further, and faster, is redirecting share of discretionary income. Add up $80 a month on a supplement such as Athletic Greens, $349 for an Oura ring plus $69.99 a year for app access, $79.99 a year for Strava Premium, $300 a month for a gym membership to Third Space or Equinox, $350 a session for shockwave therapy, and that’s all before including the cost of cycling equipment or marathon fees.
Increasingly, consumers are choosing facilitating being in good shape over buying a new Louis Vuitton windbreaker. The former is simply more valuable as a status symbol: on Wall Street, marathon times are a well-publicised flex, as Bloomberg recently reported.
Indeed, racing across categories is on the increase, with marathon participation growing an average of 8% over the last year. Gen Z, specifically, have increased race participation by 39% since 2023. On Strava, Gen Z is 75% more likely to say their main motivation to exercise is a race or event, according to the platform’s Year In Sport trend report for 2025. The platform also saw a 5.8x increase in hiking clubs and a 2.8x increase in cycling clubs.
Referral-only classes and memberships, like Liana Levi’s Forma Pilates in New York and Los Angeles, are far more inaccessible, and therefore, far more desirable. Clients include Hailey Bieber, Addison Rae, both Jenners, and Ariana Grande, with group sessions priced at $75 an hour and private sessions coming in at $500. But the actual expenditure is beside the point. Bieber has posted selfies coming to and from class. The sessions are exclusive and status-wielding: membership is granted only with a referral, or if an individual shares Instagram friends with Levi. The real flex today is not spending $2,000 a month on pilates classes, but rather on achieving a taut body whilst surrounded – at least by association – by the equally taut bodies of your favourite celebrities.
Indeed, the rich are now showing off their wellness expenditure as frequently as their product collections. Paris Hilton filmed a video tour of her “high tech wellness and beauty spa” for Allure, including a cryotherapy chamber, a red light therapy bed, and radio frequency machines, while Kim Kardashian posted extensively about her medi-spa trip to South Korea.
Proximity to youth has long been a valuable status symbol for the rich, but the rate of development in longevity tech has supercharged this mode of expenditure. “I would describe it as the Fountain of Youth,” Hilton said of her home spa, “and basically, a longevity, wellness, and beauty center.” In 2026, the Bling Ring might be more likely to steal her $75,000 cryochamber than a similarly-priced Birkin.
Read more of Matter’s latest analysis:
'In' & 'Out' Groups End Consumer Consensus
Cultural identity is becoming a zero-sum equation: Us, because of Them.
This really clicks. Experiences, wellness, and access feel way more telling than any logo right now, especially when everyone owns the same stuff. Do you think brands can ever reclaim meaning, or is identity officially post-product?
Really compelling! Thank you so much for sharing