In an excerpt of her new book ‘Luxury Unlocked’, author Susanna Nicoletti discusses the challenges the luxury industry is currently facing and how the market can refocus its efforts on growing in a healthy and meaningful way, transforming its vulnerabilities into strengths and solutions.
Book: The Key To Mastering Luxury Brands In A Disrupted Age
Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
In an excerpt of her new book ‘Luxury Unlocked’, author Susanna Nicoletti discusses the challenges the luxury industry is currently facing and how the market can refocus its efforts on growing in a healthy and meaningful way, transforming its vulnerabilities into strengths and solutions.
Considered one of the most-thought-provoking fashion and luxury writers, Susanna Nicoletti is an author, professor, speaker and consultant. She has worked in leadership roles within the top three luxury groups as well as established and renown global fashion and luxury brands in the development of their strategy, marketing approach and digital transformation as well as in their business growth.
Susanna is a consultant for global brands and senior professionals helping them to stay ahead of the curve in terms of digitalisation and brand strategy, sustainability and e-commerce and drive business in uncertain and fast changing times.
She is also the founder of Hangar, a think hub focused on digital transformation, innovative retail and ground-breaking business development offering tailor-made solutions to fashion and luxury companies and professionals.
As a professor, her mission is to help students develop knowledge and skills to act on their greater strengths and become estimated professionals in the marketing innovation and digital transformation. She is also a mentor to fashion and luxury start up developing innovative sustainable business using state-of-the-art methodologies. As an author she collaborates with Luxury Society, writes her own blog The Fashion Dispatch.
Below is an excerpt from her latest book ‘Luxury Unlocked’, which focuses on 20 key issues impacting the long term performance of fashion and luxury businesses and how these can be turned into lasting solutions.
From “LUXURY UNLOCKED The Key to Mastering Luxury brands in a Disrupted Age”
Author Susanna Nicoletti, available on Amazon in paper and Kindle version
Published September 2020
“The (fashion and luxury industry) industry, so severely hit by the coronavirus global emergency, can focus on growing in a healthy and meaningful way transforming its vulnerabilities into strengths. Creativity, curiosity and exploration are the fuel to open a new chapter in the history of fashion and luxury. It is time to turn markets into society, consumers into respected human beings, volumes into excellence.
Now we can raise awareness of a precious ecosystem that not only makes feel good people but also uplift their spirit, empower their moves, and makes money. I was inspired to write this essay in the first months of 2020 and decided to publish it to share my experience and my view with my community, my colleagues and all the fashion insiders willing to make the industry shine again with good values and strong personality.
This is not a handbook, it’s an essay. It delivers my view on an industry I got to know very well in depth in more than 20 years of work as an insider in the most relevant companies of the world. It is not a cold academic point of view nor the classical “quick fix” offered by the most prestigious consulting firms, it is a broader contribution to the rebuilt of a too much neglected industry.
Fashion and luxury are not mere money‑machines delivering profits to shareholders.
They are much more than that. They are rich of ingenuity, brilliance, savoir faire, taste, vision, passion, inventiveness. This industry deserves much more than to be treated like a cash cow. And it can give a great contribution to raise new talents, reach new frontiers as well as respect and protect the environment, the animals, the nature and all its workers. And to make the world a more meaningful, fulfilling place.
Fashion and luxury can lead a new movement becoming a mindful business playing an integral role in the effort to make the Earth a better place for every creature on the planet.
As fashion professionals, it is time to contribute to this evolution and to start making it a reality.
And we can do this if we are well aware of the flaws of the industry and are able to turn them into strengths and weapons to conquer a new chapter of the industry history.
Staff, Luxury Society
Luxury Society is the leading resource for luxury professionals across the world. A trusted content resource for industry executives, Luxury Society offers a global perspective on all things luxury with studies and features by in-house experts at DLG (Digital Luxury Group); curated news articles from leading media outlets; as well as in-depth interviews with business leaders. Luxury Society is a division of DLG, an integrated marketing agency that provides a diverse range of digital services for luxury brands.