Driven by social media engagement, the quiet luxury craze referred to a lifestyle and aesthetic focused on high-quality, timeless pieces largely free of branding.
Melwani argued that the beauty of the luxury sector is that it offers an aspirational goal to any consumer, and that the quiet luxury trend threatened to hamstring choice.
“I’ve always argued that luxury is connected to the underlying human emotion of accomplishment,” Melwani told the Milken Institute’s global conference on Tuesday.
Speaking on the panel moderated by Fortune‘s Diane Brady, Melwani continued: “When you really get it right you provide a product that a consumer, when they purchase it, they feel accomplished. That can manifest in different ways, but it’s fundamentally a feeling of accomplishment and it’s an inspiration.”
Customers of LVMH have many brands to choose from for that sense of accomplishment.
“One of the geniuses of Mr. Arnault is recognizing that consumers at this level are not monolithic in what makes them feel accomplished,” Melwani added. “Hopefully we’re past the term ‘quiet luxury’—that was getting pretty annoying—especially because it’s not new.
“If you ask Loro Piana, they would say, ‘We’ve been doing quiet luxury for 50 years.’ If you actually look at Fendi, Fendi’s had its periods where it’s been heavily logoed and monogrammed, and there’s been periods where less than 2% of the product line had any logo on it at all.”
The idea of quiet luxury began circulating most notably online, courtesy of the TV show Succession.
In one scene, a character attached to a wealthy family is appalled by a guest’s “ludicrously capacious bag.”
The bag in question features a well-known print from a designer brand, and is large enough to fit items such as a lunch box or “subway shoes” inside—neither of which would be needed by an extremely well-off individual.
The scene exemplifies how an item proudly worn by one individual may be viewed as gauche by another.
“It’s impossible for any one brand to truly give that feeling of accomplishment to everyone,” chimed in Melwani.
“By having a portfolio, and more importantly having maisons be independent and autonomous, allows each maison to use its own heritage to create that feeling of desirability, to create that feeling of accomplishment in the audience they’re speaking to and allow people to find what is it that’s going to make them have that feeling.”
Some 70% of the global luxury goods market is based out of Europe, and while this presents an outsize problem for the sector as a whole, it also gives the companies greater power.
“We would expect most European luxury companies to pass on the tariffs in the form of price increases to end consumers, who tend to be less sensitive to pricing and accustomed to regional price differentials,” UBS equity analyst Zuzanna Pusz wrote in a note earlier this year.
