When Mass Brands Use Luxury Aesthetics, the Meaning of Luxury Changes
Zara looks like a fashion house. H&M looks like a luxury campaign. Miu Miu’s buttons snap on camera. So what exactly are we buying now?
Today’s newsletter is a very lengthy essay, because I have a lot to say about this topic.
Recently I spoke with someone much younger than me who didn’t realise Zara was a fast-fashion brand.
They knew what fast fashion is. They knew the usual names. But Zara did not sit in that category for them. In their mind, Zara was “kind of a designer brand” – higher prices, considered photography, beautiful stores that feel more like galleries than hectic high street.
And I understood why. Yet it still blew my mind!
This made me immediately think, what does this mean for image-making? Building worlds are a big part of the art director’s job. Often we have to reflect what the brand stands for and its price point, so it speaks to the right people. But if that all becomes an illusion, what does that even mean?
If you step into one of Zara’s newer flagships, like the Barcelona Diagonal store with Vincent Van Duysen’s warm stone, soft lighting and domestic “rooms”, for example, the space feels closer to a luxury boutique than a fast fashion retailer. It has neutral palettes, heavy materials, sculptural objects, very little visual noise. Another flagship in Madrid is described as a “large, clean and neutral container” designed around new launches, beauty corners and an in-store café. It is the visual language of calm, expensive taste.
On social media, the same shift is happening for Zara. There are archive-inspired menswear stories framed like editorial casting calls. There are black-and-white portraits for collaborations such as SOSHIOTSUKI x Zara. There are product pushes that read like mini covers: “THE ITEM” stamped in bold type over close-cropped studio images. All of it sits in a visual register that used to belong to fashion houses, not fast fashion.
H&M is moving in parallel. The Holiday 2025 womenswear and Studio campaigns are described as “evolved minimalism” and “luxe fabrics, sculptural silhouettes”, with party-wear shot against mahogany-panelled walls and 1980s-inflected tailoring. Their Perfect Moment ski collaboration launches with cinematic doors, gilded interiors and a tone that feels closer to Vogue editorial than high-street lookbook.
So I keep coming back to the same question:
If high-street brands can now copy the surface of luxury so convincingly, what is luxury actually signalling in 2025?
To answer that, we have to go backwards.
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From made-to-order to mass-produced. How did luxury get its aura?
The story of luxury fashion begins long before global flagships and TikTok hauls. In the mid-19th century, haute couture in Paris evolved as a system built on slowness, rarity and intense labour. Designers like Charles Frederick Worth created custom-fitted garments for private clients, using unusual fabrics and hand-finished techniques that took hundreds of hours. Pieces were made to order, for individual bodies, within strict guild rules that protected standards and kept production small.
Craft and scarcity were inseparable. To belong to the couture world, a house had to maintain ateliers in Paris, employ dozens of artisans and present collections of original designs twice a year. Clothing was literally built around a specific person. Luxury was less a logo and more a personal relationship with the designer.
At the same time, technology was reshaping everything outside that bubble. The invention of the sewing machine and the rise of department stores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries made ready-to-wear clothing widely available. Factory production, standard sizes and central urban retail created the first true mass market. By 1915, “palatial” department stores were displaying industrially produced garments in environments that deliberately hid the reality of factory work.
From that point on, fashion split into two paths:
Made-to-order, small-scale, craft-heavy clothing for the few.
Ready-to-wear, standardised, trend-driven clothing for the many.
The gap between those two paths was where the aura of luxury lived.
It was a gap defined by time, labour and proximity. Luxury was slow. Luxury involved fittings and handwork. Luxury meant a direct relationship with an atelier. Mass fashion was fast, anonymous, standardised.
But the 20th century did something interesting: it collapsed these categories while pretending it hadn’t.
Ready-to-wear, branding and the illusion of rarity
As couture became economically unsustainable for most houses, luxury moved into ready-to-wear too. Designers like Paul Poiret in the early 1900s and a wave of European and American brands later in the century developed high-end RTW (ready to wear) lines that still traded on the idea of designer-led creativity but were produced at larger scales.
This is where branding starts to matter.
Luxury could no longer rely only on literal scarcity. Instead, it invested in symbolic scarcity. The designer name. The logo. The runway show. The photographed campaign. Luxury had to create an image world that separated its ready-to-wear from the rest of the ready-to-wear.
Psychologists describe this logic with the language of costly signalling. The idea is simple: humans use visible “wasteful” signals to communicate status. A luxury item is valuable because it appears hard to access – more expensive, more crafted, more selective – and that appearance influences how others treat the wearer.
Luxury stores became temples for this signal. Marble, thick carpets, staff who knew your name. Campaigns became cinematic stories starring celebrities in locations that felt remote from everyday life. Shows became seasonal myths.
What matters here is that image and experience were always part of luxury, but they were anchored by something underneath: slower production cycles, controlled distribution, specific ateliers, visible handwork. The status signal still rested on a difference in how things were made and sold.
Fast fashion then accelerated the other side of the split.
By the late 20th century, brands like Zara and H&M had perfected systems that could turn runway references into shop-floor product in a matter of weeks. Fabrics were cheaper, production volumes much higher, and trends rotated constantly. The appeal was clear: constant novelty at accessible prices.
For a while, the visual gap held. Luxury images looked one way, high street images another. You could feel the distance instantly.
That gap is where we now feel the blur.
Now Zara and H&M speak fluent luxury…
Look at Zara in 2025 and you see a brand that has absorbed the last decade of luxury visual codes and redeployed them at volume.
Architects and interior studios talk about Zara’s new flagships in Barcelona, Madrid, Nanjing and São Paulo in the same language used for museums and galleries: minimalist, neutral spaces, sculptural pieces, domestic lounges, “emotional engagement”. Interiors are designed as “clean and neutral containers” where clothes sit like curated objects. This is the visual rhetoric of “refined taste” that luxury invested in for years.
“If I put this candle in an all-white gallery space, it looks like a piece of art. If I put it in a garage, it looks like a piece of trash. I can either spend my time designing the candle or I can spend my time designing the room that it sits in,”
- Virgil Abloh
On image level, the same thing happens.
In recent Zara campaigns the photography feels expensive. The casting feels specific. Yet the product cycles remain relentless. Newness lands every two weeks, and many garments are conceived to live briefly on social feeds before being replaced.
H&M’s evolution mirrors this. They have a level of styling and art directing the casting, set design, lighting and everything else that sits of a level of high fashion campaign budget instead of simple product images.
Add in collaborations like Perfect Moment x H&M, where a niche luxury ski brand’s aesthetic is translated into a 28-piece capsule at high-street prices, and you get a clear message: the visual and narrative world of luxury is no longer exclusive to luxury.
For younger shoppers, especially those raised through TikTok, these distinctions are even looser. They see the imagery first, the price second, and the production conditions hardly at all. If the campaign looks like a campaign, if the store looks like a boutique, if the influencer looks excited, the category quietly shifts.
The surface has levelled up. But something deeper is also happening in parallel.
Luxury focused on being ‘relatable and authentic’ now..
While mass brands move upwards, many luxury houses were moving downwards in tone. Although you can argue that this is again shifting a bit!
On TikTok and Reels, brands that once protected their distance now lean into humour, low-fi content and personality. Loewe has become a case study: roast videos of shiny boots, playful mispronunciations of the brand name, models sliding down sand dunes instead of standing in marble halls. Luxury commentary pieces point out how these brands are swapping polish for playfulness to win attention in feeds that reward spontaneity over control.
Fashion shows used to be for the elite, now every one and their mother can livestream the show and ‘see it first’, as well as influencers are the majority of the guest list these days.
The logic is understandable. In a culture shaped by “authenticity” metrics and micro-creators, the old mode of glossy perfection reads as distant. If a brand wants Gen Z to interact rather than watch from afar, it has to enter the same language: meme formats, sounds, stitches, Q&As, confession-style storytelling.
The result is a strange double movement:
Mass brands move closer to luxury in visual sophistication.
Luxury brands move closer to mass culture in communication style.
They share creators, audio trends and humorous self-mythology. They share It-girls whose value lies less in aspirational distance and more in perceived relatability.
The only thing that does not move as easily is price.
And this is where the tension around quality and craftsmanship becomes more visible.
When the signal cracks: Wisdom Kaye and the Miu Miu buttons, the Row sample sale
In late 2025, fashion creator Wisdom Kaye shared a video unboxing around $18,000 worth of Miu Miu pieces. Within minutes of trying them on at home, two items failed: a zipper that would not close properly and a button that snapped off. Miu Miu reportedly replaced the garments, yet the replacements also showed faults. Clips of the saga circulated widely on TikTok and Instagram, sparking debates about the brand’s standards.
For many viewers, this wasn’t simply a customer service story. It struck at a deeper question: if a sweater or vest at that price breaks that easily, what exactly are you paying for?
Then there are ‘quiet’ luxury brands like the Row with such a cult following of people who can’t actually afford the brand, so they camp in front of the sample sale and shout from the roofs that they are wearing the Row.
The rhetoric around luxury still centres on quality, craftsmanship and longevity. Magazines describe couture gowns that take 1,300 hours to construct, or ateliers that maintain traditional techniques through generations. Yet examples like the Miu Miu incident reveal how uneven that standard can be in practice when you move away from pure couture into high-volume RTW.
At the same time, platforms make these cracks hyper-visible. Twenty years ago, a faulty button was an anecdote shared with a few friends. Now it is a visual narrative watched by millions, often cut together with price screenshots and reaction commentary, and entire Reddit threads and a potential ‘cancellation’ of the brand.
In terms of costly signalling, this matters. If a key part of the signal is “I value craft and permanence”, then obvious quality failures threaten the meaning of that display. It becomes harder to argue that the premium exists to pay artisans fairly and secure meticulous construction when the piece behaves like a rushed sample.
So what are we actually paying for?
If we strip everything back, there are a few pillars that have traditionally defined luxury:
Craftsmanship – visible skill, handwork, technical complexity.
Scarcity – limited production, controlled distribution.
Time – slower cycles, heritage, durability.
World-building – coherent visual and cultural universe.
Today, each of these pillars is under pressure.
Craft can be inconsistent, and social media exposes weak points quickly.
Scarcity becomes staged through sample sales, limited drops and artificial waiting lists rather than through actual small production.
Time speeds up as even luxury responds to micro-trends, TikTok aesthetics and constant product news.
World-building is now something mass brands can imitate visually, especially when they enlist top-tier photographers and art directors.
At the same time, mass fashion has become more sophisticated in terms of “image per euro”. A Zara campaign now carries a level of photographic authorship that once belonged to designer labels. An H&M holiday drop can produce imagery powerful enough to be shared as pure inspiration, separate from the clothes themselves.
From a consumer psychology perspective, we end up with layered signals:
Price still communicates wealth and access.
Brand name communicates cultural affiliation and taste.
Image communicates mood and perceived quality.
Behaviour – where you queue, what you post, which pieces you re-sell – communicates how deeply you participate in the system.
This is why a TikTok unboxing can damage a brand more than a bad review, and why a sample sale can turn into a cult event rather than a quiet clear-out. The audience is reading every movement as part of the signal.
So where does this leave luxury, especially from the perspective of image-making?
Two futures of luxury: performance vs depth
One way to think about the current moment is as a split between performance luxury and depth luxury.
Performance luxury is built on speed, communication and social presence. It leans into:
TikTok humour and relatability
fast-paced collaboration cycles
bold, meme-able imagery
visible “moments” like viral shows or campaign stunts
It thrives on attention, even when that attention includes critique. It shares tools and formats with mass brands. It often lives one step away from fast fashion in the feed.
Depth luxury leans in the opposite direction. It focuses on:
documented craftsmanship and traceability
slowness as a value, through small runs or made-to-order
strong internal visual systems that evolve rather than reset each season
less noise, more continuity
It might still use TikTok or Instagram, but the tone feels less like chasing trends and more like inviting people into a world that already exists.
The clearest opportunities for luxury, in my view, sit in this second category. Not because one is superior, but because depth is much harder to fake. A minimal store can be copied. A marble plinth can be installed in any flagship. A TikTok sound can be used both by Loewe and by a fast-fashion dupe account in the same hour.
What remains difficult to replicate is:
a pattern of care that shows up in construction over many seasons
an internal creative logic that extends from clothes to stores to campaigns to castings (which is challenging these days with so many creative director changes for big luxury houses)
a track record of pieces that age well in real wardrobes rather than just in lookbooks
a relationship with customers that goes beyond transactions and hype
This is where the original logic of haute couture still has something to teach us, even if we are far from that world. Couture treated clothing as a long-term proposition. It asked: how will this live on a body, in a life, in a photograph, in memory?
The challenge for contemporary luxury is to answer that question with the reality of global RTW structures and TikTok timelines in mind.
For art directors this means..
From an art direction perspective, this moment is both exciting and demanding.
When Zara and H&M look “elevated in every detail”, the bar for visual sophistication is raised for everyone. It is no longer enough for a campaign to look expensive. Many high street brands already achieve that, sometimes with the same photographers and stylists.
What actually builds distinction now is:
Conceptual depth – images that say something specific about a body, a culture, a way of living, rather than just showing a trend.
Consistency over time – a brand world that holds together across seasons, channels and collaborations.
Honesty about material reality – communicating care, repair, reuse, and the truth of how things are made, instead of hiding behind marble and soft focus.
Restraint in volume – giving images room to breathe instead of flooding every platform with newness.
For mass brands, the ethical aspect is important. If you adopt the aesthetics and language of luxury while keeping production speeds extremely high, there is a risk of creating what I would call aesthetic inflation: a constant demand for more image, more novelty, more theatre, without the foundations to support it long-term.
For luxury brands, the risk lies in dilution. When humour and relatability become the default tone, it is easy to forget that part of luxury’s power has always come from a certain slowness and conviction. Relatability is useful as a tool, yet when overused it can hollow out the sense of difference that made these houses magnetic in the first place.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I think this is a super important topic for anyone working in the creative- and fashion industry. Would love to hear your thoughts on how we can differentiate luxury more if fast fashion brands are using the aesthetics?
Love,
Zoe
Loved this. Mirror Palais had a series where the designer broke down each piece and the design choices behind it. I’ve found myself so drawn to brands that let us in on their creative process, the more intention I see put in, the more I’m drawn to buy. I feel luxury knowing I’m wearing someone’s authentic art, rather than a savy business product.
They adopt the same aesthetic without maintaining the same quality. Because they need to keep selling in large quantities. We also see many "luxury" brands adopting the same quality standards as fast fashion.
There's a deliberate ambiguity surrounding the luxury sector.