The high-end supercycle is over: the decline of status symbols and the rise of unique experiences are redefining desires, identities, and new forms of contemporary exclusivity.
The high-end world is undergoing the most profound transformation in the last thirty years: it’s not capital that’s collapsing, but the model itself. Iconic goods are losing their aura and becoming replicable, while value is shifting toward non-reproducible experiences that are redrawing the geography of exclusivity. From quantitative easing to the Chinese slowdown, from HENRYs to the return of financial returns, this is how the perfect storm that is changing everything has formed.
For more than a decade, international luxury goods navigated an artificial tide of liquidity that swelled its margins like sails taut in a constant wind: zero interest rates, quantitative easing, and capital moving frictionlessly and weightlessly created an ecosystem where everything that seemed rare—a collectible watch, an iconic bag, a bottle of Bordeaux, or an apartment overlooking the Manhattan skyline—became an easily recognizable store of value, a social language through which to communicate belonging and distinction. Between 2019 and 2023, this world experienced its golden age: prices soared, profits tripled, and the sector’s growth naturally outpaced that of the global economy, in a dynamic that seemed destined to last forever.
Then the music stopped. Not for lack of wealth—billionaires are more numerous and more liquid today than at any time in the last twenty years—but because that system betrayed the principle on which it was built: exclusivity. When something was created to distinguish but becomes accessible, when a symbol intended for the few is replicated, photographed, resold, rented, or synthesized in a laboratory, it inevitably loses its aura. It is a slow, subterranean, but irreversible erosion.
The second-hand market, born as a niche, has become an accelerant of saturation. Rolex watches have fallen thirty percent from their 2022 highs, major Bordeaux labels have lost value as if time had suddenly contracted, Manhattan buildings and apartments remain on the market for months without finding buyers, while Bel Air mansions, once symbols of the unaffordable, are being marked down by millions in an attempt to recapture a lackluster interest. This isn’t a passing cold: it’s a perfect storm, a rarefaction in demand that only occurs in fragile historical moments like 2001 or 2008, and which returns today with equal force.
The myth of infinite growth has been shattered precisely because brands have chosen, in a haphazard crescendo, to raise prices much faster than quality, creativity, and service. Over the past five years, fashion icons have seen increases that in some cases exceed 50 percent, while the symbolic value of objects has no longer kept pace. Thus, while prices have soared, ateliers have filled with an ever-growing clientele, service has become impersonal, after-sales service has slipped toward mediocrity, and scandals related to underpaid labor have undermined the image of craftsmanship that the sector has continued to portray. This growing mismatch between promise and reality has created an unbridgeable gap that high-income consumers perceive without needing to read a report.
And so, as bags proliferate on the shelves and become recognizable everywhere—from Paris to Dubai, from Milan to Seoul—their true value has begun to shift elsewhere, toward those dimensions that cannot be bought, resold, or replicated. It has slowly shifted into that subtle zone where experience is worth more than the object, where presence becomes capital and participation becomes language, transforming desire into something that exists only in the moment and not in ownership.
It doesn’t matter how much a Chanel bag retains its aesthetic nobility or how much a bespoke jacket can still embody an idea of impeccable elegance, because true exclusivity now lies elsewhere: in the rare nights of Courchevel where the wind cuts through the silence of the snow, in the hidden corridors of the Venice Biennale where one enters not for what one owns but for who one is, in the Kyoto dinners prepared by a master chef who cooks for just eight people, moments that are not commodities and have no market, and which precisely because of this natural inaccessibility restore privilege to its purest form.
At the same time, the capital of the ultra-rich has begun to seek new directions: no longer watches, wines, or art as stores of value, but financial instruments with guaranteed returns, such as US Treasuries at 4%, or investments in infrastructure, private credit, and insurance, all the way to that new frontier—controversial and revealing—linked to passports, visas, media, stakes in strategic sectors, and experiences that open doors no object can ever open. Meanwhile, China, for years the driving force of the sector, is slowing sharply; the HENRYs—high earners not yet rich—who had supported aspirational demand are seeing their bonuses and stock options erode; and the most aspirational brands, those that had built their fortunes on the accessibility of the dream, are now the most fragile.
Amid this landscape, a few fortresses remain, as rare as unchanging stones: Hermès and a few other ateliers where time is still a living substance and not a cost to be cut; places where scarcity is not a marketing gimmick but the natural consequence of a process that cannot be industrialized without losing its soul. They are exceptions, not scalable models, and that is precisely why they endure.
The simplest and most uncomfortable truth is that the end of the supercycle isn’t an economic fact, but a cultural one. It’s the breaking point where the most conscious consumer—the one who has already seen everything, owned everything, photographed everything—no longer seeks a symbol to display but an experience to live; he or she desires to be recognized not for what he or she has, but for where he or she can be. It’s a new geography of privilege, shaped not by consumption but by presence, not by accumulation but by possibility.
The value of the future is measured not by possession but by access, not by quantity but by intensity; it is the transition from an economy of objects to an economy of history, where what matters is not what you wear on your wrist but what you have experienced.
And in this movement—slow but inexorable—we glimpse the fate of the sector: it’s not the most aggressive brands that will survive, but those that can restore substance to a world that has been content with superficiality for too long. The value of the future, simply, isn’t about having.
It’s about being in places where few can be, and letting that presence become an identity.
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Alessandro Sicuro
Brand Strategist | Photographer | Art Director | Project Manager
Alessandro Sicuro Comunication
Sure-com America 