The new luxury is knowing who made it
Luxury has always been very good at telling us what something costs. Increasingly, it is being asked to explain what makes it worth the price. For years, the industry relied on familiar signals of desirability: recognizable logos, celebrity campaigns, exclusive launches, and impressive price tags. But as consumers become more selective about what they buy, the conversation is shifting. The quality of the material matters. The construction matters. And increasingly, so does the person who made it.
In a world where an advertising campaign can be generated in seconds, an image can be created without a photographer and trends can be replicated almost instantly, the human hand is becoming a particularly compelling selling point.
Perhaps the new luxury is not simply owning something expensive. It is knowing the work that went into making it.
The human touch
Artificial intelligence (AI) has changed the way fashion looks, communicates, and sells itself. Brands can now produce campaign imagery, experiment with designs, and generate content at a speed that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago. While these tools offer enormous possibilities, they also raise an interesting question: when everything can be reproduced, what makes something feel special?
Consumers are already becoming more cautious about the content they encounter. A September 2026 Gartner survey found that 65 percent of consumers believed brands were producing too much AI-generated marketing content, while 57 percent said it had made them less trusting of brand messaging overall. The research suggests that authenticity is becoming an increasingly important part of the relationship between brands and their audiences.
In luxury, this question extends beyond advertising. A beautifully constructed coat, an embroidered jacket or a leather handbag carries a different kind of appeal when its production involves specialist knowledge, years of training and hours of careful work.
AI can generate the image of an embroidered dress, but it cannot independently replace the accumulated skill of the person who knows how to create the embroidery itself.
The value of knowing who made it
Craftsmanship has always been part of luxury’s appeal, but it is becoming more visible in the way brands communicate their value.
Hermès, for example, has built much of its identity around leather craftsmanship, with its leather goods made by artisans in France. In 2025, 75 percent of its products were produced in France, and 55 percent were made in its own or exclusive workshops. The company continues to invest in training and production facilities, including a new leather goods workshop inaugurated in Loupes in April 2026, which is expected to create 260 artisan jobs.
Chanel has taken a similarly deliberate approach through Ie19M, its Paris-based centre dedicated to the métiers d’art. Founded in 2021, the space brings together 11 Maisons d’art and nearly 700 artisans and experts. Its programme has also travelled internationally: in September 2026, Chanel and Ie19M presented an exhibition in Shanghai celebrating craftsmanship and contemporary creation.
These initiatives make the production process part of the luxury experience itself. Rather than presenting the finished product as the entire story, brands are inviting audiences to look behind the scenes.
And there is a commercial reason for doing so. When customers understand the complexity behind a product, they may also understand its price differently.
The business of keeping craft alive
Of course, craftsmanship is not automatically synonymous with ethical production, sustainability, or superior quality. Nor does a handmade label guarantee that a product is worth its price. Luxury brands have long used heritage and artisanal language as part of their marketing, and consumers should still be able to ask questions about sourcing, working conditions and production practices.
There is, however, a genuine challenge behind the romantic image of the artisan workshop: preserving specialist skills requires people willing to learn them, businesses willing to invest in them and customers willing to pay for the results.
This is particularly important for an industry that has spent decades celebrating creative directors while often overlooking the people responsible for bringing their ideas to life. Designers may establish a vision, but pattern cutters, embroiderers, leatherworkers, textile specialists, and many others turn that vision into something tangible. Their contribution deserves more than a passing mention in a campaign caption.
The future is not handmade versus high-tech
It would be easy to frame the future of fashion as a choice between technology and tradition, but that is probably too simplistic.
Technology and craftsmanship do not have to compete. In fact, the most interesting luxury businesses may be those that use innovation to support the people and skills that make their products distinctive.
The real question is whether technology will make fashion more thoughtful or simply make it faster.
As the industry becomes increasingly capable of producing more imagery, more products and more content, the ability to offer something genuinely considered may become an even greater advantage.
The knowledge passed from one craftsperson to another, the judgement involved in selecting a material, and the precision developed through years of practice are much harder to reproduce.
Maybe the next time we consider buying something luxurious, the most interesting question will not be who designed it, who wore it, or how much it costs. It will be who made it.
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