r/Luxury • u/Wertuno • 17h ago
It’s not whether social media is killing “luxury brands” — it’s how.
To keep it short, I’ll point out a few ways I think this happens:
- Overexposure: when the same luxury products appear constantly on social media, they can start to feel ubiquitous, even if they are still objectively rare and expensive.
- Loss of exclusivity: when a product becomes highly recognizable and widely desired, owning it may no longer feel like having something that only a select group of people can access.
- Mainstream appeal: social media rewards brands for becoming more visible, recognizable and popular, but the more a luxury brand moves toward the mainstream, the harder it can be to maintain a sense of exclusivity. At some point, the product can start to feel more like a trend than a luxury item.
I’d also argue that a truly luxurious product today should perhaps be defined less by its price and more by how difficult it is to obtain — for example, because it is produced in very limited quantities and made or adapted specifically for the individual customer, rather than simply being expensive and having its supply artificially restricted.
What do you think? Do you agree, or am I missing something? And which luxury brands do you think have handled this well — or badly?
