No, luxury fashion isn’t okay — even if your favourite influencers say otherwise | by Holly Pittaway | Jun, 2023

Luxury fashion is once again rearing its ugly head. And this time it’s not the wealthy one percenters with more disposable income than your annual pay packet that are being targeted in marketing campaigns — it’s you and me.

As an avid consumer of social media, I follow my fair share of lifestyle influencers. Part of their appeal is that they often look and sound like me — they’re young, still figuring themselves out and living on a budget (though maybe a slightly bigger budget than I have). But recently I’ve noticed a rather insidious trend creeping through my timeline, as more and more of these relatable influencers partner with luxury brands that I thought we’d collectively cancelled years ago. They’re wearing gifted Chanel, attending Valentino runways and shooting ad campaigns for Celine.

But while the calibre of their content might have changed, their target audiences haven’t — if anything, they’ve actually had to tighten their purse strings more than ever. Thanks to a combination of economic recessions, COVID lockdowns, and nearly two decades of Tory incompetence, young people are worse off than their parents at the same age, with Londoners having earned £50,000 less in the last 13 years due to stagnant wages. For many, owning property is a pipe dream, and even the more privileged are almost solely reliant on inheritance if they hope to make this dream a reality.

And if you’re a woman you can count on having even less money, with the gender pay gap standing at 8.3% for women of all ages in 2022. Our financial prospects are already bleak — but luxury brands have put a target on our backs to make them even bleaker.

How are they targeting young consumers?

It’s not 2015. The concept of an influencer isn’t alien, and their prevalence in the public sphere has continued to grow. Lifestyle bloggers are no longer trying on drug store makeup brands and doing Primark hauls (Zoella, I’m looking at you). They’re sipping Aperol Spritz on the Seine and being gifted absurd designer bags from exclusive brands. The marketing is more subtle — rather than having products and discount codes [obviously] thrown in our faces, we’re seeing luxury items crop up ‘naturally’ in aspirational photos from influencers whose lives are wildly different from our own.

As an example, let’s take the evolution of one of my favourite content creator’s — Moya Mawhinney. While she began as a homely university student filming her ‘days in the life’ at Trinity College in Dublin, fast forward a few years and she’s living in a (frankly unaffordable) studio in Paris, doing regular brand partnerships with Dior, and wining and dining with executives from Ralph Lauren. We saw a similar thing happen with Ashley Rous, aka Bestdressed — she also started out as a student vlogger making videos about thrifting and upcycling, only to later abandon her long-form video content for aesthetic Instagram partnerships with luxury brands that simply seem to show off how different the rich live. Both Moya and Ashley’s audiences were, and still are, made up of Gen Z and Millenial women whose financial situations have likely worsened — yet now rather than being encouraged to shop secondhand and up-cycle what we have, we’re being told that our wardrobes don’t matter unless they’re stuffed with vintage Chanel and impractically small Jacquemus bags.

Is it working?

Unfortunately, yes. Gen Z and Millenials are the largest drivers of growth in the luxury goods sector, with the market predicted to grow 21% by the end of 2023. Even more worryingly, the average age Gen Z’s were found to be purchasing luxury goods was 15, which is 3–5 years earlier than Millienials.

Some have theorised that this is young people’s way of getting ‘revenge of the pandemic’ by splurging on luxury items and adopting more of a YOLO-attitude to life. Though perhaps it’s also influenced by the fact that luxury fashion has been not only normalised, but idolised by a new generation of social media celebrities, making us believe that romanticising our life is only possible when clothed head-to-toe in designer labels. But it’s all a lie.

The myth of sustainable luxury

The idea that luxury fashion is sustainable is completely unfounded. But many consumers are led to believe that high price tags mean higher pay and better working conditions for garment workers, when in actuality brands like Versace and Armani are made in the exact same factories as Primark and Tesco.

This shouldn’t be news — in fact, luxury brands have regularly come under fire for violating human rights and environmental regulations over the past 20 years. We probably all remember the 2018 scandal where Burberry were found to have burned millions of pounds worth of wearable clothing, accessories and perfume. And while this may sound rather extreme, it’s not uncommon for luxury brands to destroy goods rather than sell them at discounted prices in order to keep up the illusion of scarcity.

But partnering with trusted and generally sustainable content creators is giving luxury a new image. Looking back at the examples of Ashley and Moya, both have a history of advocating for making more sustainable consumer choices, such as buying secondhand or eating a vegan diet; both also have fiercely loyal audiences who rarely critique their decisions. By using unproblematic influencers as models for luxury items on social media, strategically placing products in aesthetic shots where the focus is on the individual and their aspirational lifestyle, luxury marketing is slowly making us forget its shady past.