Meaningful Luxury: Why the Runway is Fashion's Most Powerful Form of Content
Meaningful Luxury: Why the Runway is Fashion's Most Powerful Form of Content
FSW presents highlights from Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2025 and ponders luxury fashion's current and future state.
Milan feels like the center of the style universe during Fashion Week. Everyday chic Milanese blend with awkward tourists and the roving global luxury fashion crowd of brand professionals, buyers, journalists, influencers, and random celebrities.
The Fashion Strategy Weekly (FSW) team was on-site at Milan Fashion Week (MFW) mostly for client meetings for our parent agency but attended shows and press presentations when we could. This made for a different MFW experience than our usual rushing from show to show but proved one that offered some interesting takeaways, particularly from a luxury content strategy perspective.
Coming out of a relatively lackluster New York Fashion Week and London Fashion Week, JP Morgan cited concern that luxury fashion “new collections and product launches might lack the innovation, creativity[,] and dynamism needed to spark strong excitement among consumers continuing to show fatigue,” except Prada (interestingly, this quote came out before both the Gucci and Bottega shows).
Yet, in analyzing MFW after the fact, our FSW team has a slightly different take. To us, MFW Spring/Summer 2025 (SS2025) marked a smart evolution for many luxury fashion brands—most notably, Loro Piana, Marni, Prada, and Bottega, among others—toward what we can only call “meaningful luxury” or a more value-driven, focused approach. Except for Gucci, which still seems lost in a perpetual tactical mode (i.e. throwing paint at a wall to see what will stick), as represented by the Zara-like “casual glamour” of Sabato de Sarno’s latest collection.
Many publications keep trying to declare 2024 the year of “quiet luxury” (we seem to remember that this was a 2023 trend as well) with consumers rejecting the tacky, logo-driven ethos of maximalist luxury in favor of a less obvious, more conscious consumerism. At FSW, we cannot help but think consumers and brands have digested quiet luxury as a new, key pillar of luxury fashion but nonetheless remain eager for what’s next. Frankly, you know a trend has matured when it makes it into the pseudo-marketing speak of Netflix’s “Emily in Paris.”
One reason “quiet luxury” has gained ground is simply because many luxury fashion brands are trying so hard to keep up with trends and to be everything at once for everyone that they have lost their sense of brand self in the process. Luxury brands and consumers are equally tired from the onslaught of instant gratification fast fashion and the pressures of the always-on, always-changing world of digital content.
At MFW, we saw more than a few luxury brands treating a fashion collection as a form of content, a forum for taking a test-and-learn approach not only to creatively explore new ideas and re-present old ones but also to understand what their brand means in 2024 and what their customers truly need and value. This is the essence of what we’re calling “meaningful luxury.”
Loro Piana: Story through Textiles
Take Loro Piana, the darling of “quiet luxury,” a brand that is experiencing a well-deserved boon after years of consistent, value-driven quality and craftsmanship. We heard from more than one party at the press presentation that online sales of their line of bags were so rapid that they are capping production volumes. Yet, the Loro Piana SS2025 collection felt unrushed, careful, and perfectly attenuated to the coziness you’d want for any deep thinking about what’s next for luxury.
Loro Piana is, not surprisingly, all about story, centered around sumptuous textiles and subtle but impactful details. At the press presentation, the collection narrative was literally written out on a piece of linen fabric on the wall, which included this note: “[F]abric remains the start of the Loro Piana journey in shaping a vision that is both timeless and contemporary, and in which touch and texture are as important as the way clothes dialogue with the body and with life.”
Marni: Impish Consistency
Then there was the Marni SS2025 collection, which felt like the output of a designer who has fully found his voice, exploring new but familiar narratives in a delightfully mature way. As Vanessa Friedman noted for The New York Times, this Marni collection by Francesco Risso “was like a treatise on the humanities, performed at the commedia dell’arte and writ in cloth. One you actually wanted to wear.”
After several seasons of outright creative experimentation and locale hopping, this Marni SS 2025 was effortless and at once playful and thought-provoking. The first sentence of the collection linesheet says it all: “Beauty is a white rabbit scampering across your yard.”
Echoes of fashion past, present, and future blended into a narrative array of disconnected referentiality that just made sense. Risso mixed and matched 1950s and 1980s style prom and ladylike dresses with long jackets paired with an array of re-formed bucket hats in various shapes. Silhouettes were, for the most part, longer, with occasional mini-dresses thrown in for contrast. Given the overall muted approach to accessories, every accessory—like the lei-like cotton boas—added a meaningful flair. Indeed, even Risso’s decision to use cotton for the entire collection added depth and consistency, intended as a mode of creative resistance against the chaos of the world.
Bottega and Prada: Playful Order and Chaos
The tour de force of Milan Fashion Week was undoubtedly the Bottega Veneta SS2025 collection, which saw Mathieu Blazy straight up having fun with fashion while also executing seamlessly on the brand’s promise of quality and craftsmanship in a profound, masterful way. On the other side of the same coin, you had Prada, which offered a rich, quirky collection that felt as chaotic as it did true to Miuccia Prada and Raf Simon’s creative take on fashion, respectively.
In terms of Bottega SS2025, social media has been chattering about the audience’s animal beanbag chairs (which were supposedly carefully matched to the individual’s personality) inspired by the movie “E.T.” (the scene where Elliott’s mom doesn’t see the alien in the closet). But, the real star of the Bottega show was, shockingly, the collection itself, which was full of drool worthy, cool clothes. Blazy took risks. A lot of them. And they paid off. On the surface, it appeared like a deeply serious collection when, in fact, it had a touch of mad genius about it. There was a wonderful array of straight-up beautiful, wearable clothes (e.g. the bright orange draped jersey dress and dark maroon oversized leather jacket) with a touch of E.T.-inspired bizarreness, from models holding what looked like plastic bags (which were actually leather) and dresses adorned with metal frogs to Elliott-style long flannel-like shirts.
Similarly, only more to the extreme but equally playful, sat Prada’s SS2025 collection. This somehow magically re-expressed core brand codes through the lens of contemporary chaos and random, disconnected space-age metaphors and past collection references. If it seemed like the collection had no original ideas or was trying to make all ideas at once, that was the point. This Prada collection was a message that felt very, very relevant to the current state of the world and luxury itself. As Miuccia Prada told Vogue, “basically it seems that we are directed by algorithms, so anything we like and anything we know is because other people are instilling it into us.”
Meaningful Luxury: Brand and Consumer Centricity
What these MFW SS2025 collections shared in common was a lack of being constrained by commercial pressures (though much of them were quite sellable) and a strong and differentiated, yet brand authentic point of view.
The “problem” with luxury fashion now is a profound sense of sameness between brands. This is combined with a dilution in perceived quality and characterized by overpricing and oversaturation. The writing has been on the wall for a while. Frankly, the second it started to feel like luxury brands were trying to compete not on the quality of products or experiences but rather on the virality of external content or the salience of celebrity placements, we all should have begun to worry.
Viewing a runway collection as a form of content invokes our wider definition of “content” as “anywhere your target audiences encounter your brand messaging” and does justice to the creative expressionism of design as a foundational, if not essential, type of brand storytelling. In this light, the concept of “meaningful luxury” matters not just because of a sense of narrative; but also because it represents a brand expressing its vision through clothing in a way that is consonant with both its values and those of its audiences.
Taking a holistic approach to content, it is thus critical to incorporate runway collections into overall brand content planning and to build it into the fabric of a brand’s content strategy. This will ensure that creative vision retains its integrity, feels consistent with content on other brand channels, and unmistakably conveys fundamental brand vision and values.
Admittedly, holistic content strategy cannot fix many of the issues that luxury brands are experiencing at a corporate level and definitely cannot improve products and pricing policies. Yet, for luxury fashion brands, inasmuch as story is essential to the elevated nature of luxury, the emotional value of these stories and the aesthetics of how they affect consumers and their imaginations are what truly bring meaning and drive the luxury experience.