In the months that followed the Spring/Summer 2026 season, we have seen a series of new hires in the communications, marketing and design departments of all major houses. Our new series ‘Fashion’s Real Reset Starts Now’ looks at all these changes and how they will redefine the fashion industry in the years to come.
Late last year, 72% of Gen Z luxury shoppers told Vogue Business that they would rather own a Walmart ‘Wirkin’ than an Hermès Birkin bag. It’s a sign of the times: younger shoppers hold a different view on luxury goods, in part because they can’t afford them, but also because they find it distasteful to spend so much money on a single product.
The past four years of industry growth have been primarily driven by price hikes, says Colleen Baum, senior partner at McKinsey. Last year, this came to a head. Social media discourse about the mismatch between price and quality gained traction, “greedflation” became a key factor responsible for the luxury slowdown, and executives cottoned onto the fact that, perhaps, luxury prices have climbed too far out of reach.
In late 2024, Frédéric Grangié, president of Chanel’s watches and fine jewellery division, told Swiss newspaper Le Temps that the luxury slowdown would persist due to consumer fatigue. “Customers are tired of being bludgeoned by luxury,” he said. Still, prices soared well into 2025. Meanwhile, in an internal memo in November 2025, Kering CEO Luca de Meo reportedly said that the group needed to rethink its pricing and product range.
“In 2025, what we learned is that there can be a cap to luxury goods and that only very rare exceptions are immune to this pricing resistance,” says luxury consultant Robert Burke. “Whether it be unstable economic conditions or uncertainty, or tariffs — we can go down a laundry list of things — it caused the consumer to pause and think twice about what they were spending. We saw people start to question like they had not questioned before.”
Maurizio Catellani, CEO of price and market intelligence platform Competitoor, says that price increases have slowed down as a result. “In our monthly price analysis, handbags in particular had smaller increases [last] year,” he says. The post-pandemic ‘price elevation era’ is coming to an end, agrees Federica Levato, senior partner at Bain & Company.
The average price of Burberry handbags, for example, fell 12-18% year-on-year in 2025 across the UK, while the price of their Kensington trench coat rose 1-4% in the same period. “This strategy allows brands to protect their most aspirational pieces while using more aggressive pricing on other categories to drive volume,” says Krista Corrigan, senior retail analyst at trend intelligence platform EDITED.