From maps to masterpieces: Luxury needs a tour de force, not tinsel

December 9, 2025

Amy Nelson-Bennett is CEO of Positive Luxury

I was sitting in my local London pub last week — cosy fireplace roaring, tinsel everywhere – when my friend Lucy barged in with a story so perfectly absurd it felt like a parable for today’s luxury industry.

She and her Gen Z panto camp theatre troupe (long story) had been given “practical tools” for a month-long U.K. school tour: a white van and two hulking print road atlases. Yes, actual atlases – those brick-thick A–Z road map tomes your parents kept in the car for emergencies.

The troupe leader, raised on smartphones, looked at them like archaeological artifacts.

Luxury Has Lost the Plot — And Consumers Know It
After spending half an hour teaching her how to “read” these relics, Lucy was convinced no sane human had ever used one in real life. And yet someone somewhere believed this was a viable solution in 2025.

It struck me: luxury brands are doing exactly the same thing. They’re handing their teams – and their consumers – beautifully bound, but totally outdated rulebooks and insisting they’ll still get everyone from A to B.

Spoiler: they won’t. The narrative is flat.

The Comfort of Tradition Is Killing Innovation
Luxury has always thrived when it runs ahead of culture, not behind it. When it invented, provoked, dared. But the past few years have seen many brands regress into nostalgia – clinging to the “tried and trusted,” mistaking tradition for strategy, and confusing risk-aversion with wisdom.

The result? Inertia disguised as excellence.

I’ve said before that luxury likes to mythologise its great icons. But today’s luxury boardrooms operate in direct opposition to the creative bravery those figures embodied.

The industry that once defined the future is now in danger of becoming the museum gift shop of consumer culture: charming, polished and irrelevant.

2025: The year reality caught up
This year was supposed to be hopeful. Instead, AI blew up search, rewired consumer research, and forced every industry to rethink how it communicates.

ESG – which was supposed to mature – hit political turbulence, investor scepticism and rising scrutiny. Consumers armed with legislation and ChatGPT-level intelligence finally began checking receipts, hangtags and marketing copy, exposing greenwashing with ease.

Meanwhile, too many luxury brands reacted exactly as expected: selective disclosure, impenetrable impact reports, internal committees – but little that the consumer can see, much less believe in.

The say–do gap isn’t the consumer’s problem. It’s luxury’s.
Across the industry this year, one refrain echoed: “Consumers say they want sustainability, but they don’t buy it.”

This is the wrong conclusion drawn from the wrong data.

Consumers aren’t voting against sustainability; they’re voting against brands that can’t communicate it. Or choose not to.

Against claims with no evidence. Against sustainability pages hidden three clicks deep.

Against stores where sales staff can’t answer basic questions. Against brands that treat ESG like an obligation instead of a source of value, creativity and differentiation.

The say–do gap isn’t about consumer hypocrisy. It’s about industry invisibility.

If you’re doing the work, why can’t anyone find it?

If you’re investing many thousands or millions, why isn’t it driving equity?

If your craftsmanship is extraordinary, why isn’t your proof?

Luxury has always justified high prices through quality, artistry, rarity and responsibility. ESG is simply today’s vocabulary for those very same pillars.

But instead of owning it, too many brands bury it in PDFs, in jargon, in polite silence.

Luxury Is Losing Consumer Trust and Loyalty
Is it any wonder that the value gap is widening? That younger affluent consumers increasingly feel luxury “isn’t worth it”?

That brand loyalty is eroding? Luxury has spent too long talking to regulators, investors and each other, rather than its audience.

It’s a plot devoid of intrigue. And when the consumer becomes an afterthought, the brand becomes an echo chamber.

A beautifully useless map to nowhere.

This Is the Reset Moment
Enough. Luxury does not survive by playing safe or small. It never has.

Brand teams are still being forced to operate under the constraints of an old world – risk-averse boards, outdated rulebooks and rigid definitions of brand “purity” that stifle relevance. These constraints are not preserving luxury’s magic; they are accelerating its obsolescence.

Affluent consumers have made their expectations unmistakably clear: responsibility, transparency, creativity with conscience. They don’t want lectures.

They want proof. They want modernity.

They want meaning. The brands that win the next decade will give them exactly that.

The ones that don’t will quietly fade into polite irrelevance.

Time to Walk – and Talk
If you are taking meaningful action, it’s time to talk about it with the same boldness you invest in your product stories. Luxury should be a tour de force of craft, responsibility, and proof—not an ornate atlas relic nobody can follow.

If you’re not taking action, the clock is ticking.

In luxury, silence isn’t graceful anymore. It’s dangerous.

Tradition is beautiful – but only when it fuels the future, not freezes it. Anything else puts your business on the arc of obsolescence.

It’s time for luxury to do and say.

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From maps to masterpieces: Luxury needs a tour de force, not tinsel

From maps to masterpieces: Luxury needs a tour de force, not tinsel

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