By Léa ITZKOWITCH, Sarah ITZKOWITCH, Mélanie Florence BONINSEGNI, Giuseppe CATENAZZO
At first glance, luxury and low-cost could not be more different. Yet in the age of social media, these two worlds now coexist on the same digital ground — free and accessible to all. Faced with these changes, luxury and low-cost brands are adopting radically different approaches.
On one side, low-cost leans on accessibility, virality and responsiveness. The goal: capture attention and generate engagement. Luxury, by contrast, favours rare, aesthetic and carefully controlled communication, built around storytelling and emotion. The primary aim of this approach is to cultivate heritage and preserve an image of exclusivity and prestige.
Low-cost brands have fully embraced digital codes. Their strength lies in agility. They spot trends, produce content quickly and push it out at scale. Their communication is direct, participatory and often humorous. They rely on influencers, user-generated content and viral formats to maximise visibility. Low-cost engages and brings people together.
This model fosters a strong sense of closeness with consumers, who become participants in the brand. Their ability to interact with consumers, adapt rapidly to trends and use contemporary cultural codes allows them to strengthen ties with their audience.
Unlike low-cost, luxury has been built on distance. Luxury embodies an aspirational universe, grounded in distinction, product scarcity, media restraint and codified communication designed to maintain a form of symbolic inaccessibility. Luxury must inspire and make people dream.
However, on social media, this strategy has to be rethought. Luxury brands can no longer simply remain invisible; they must exist in the feed without becoming ordinary. This creates an unprecedented tension for luxury brands: how can they preserve an exceptional image in an environment dominated by virality and immediacy?
The result is a selective digital presence, where every post is designed as an event, featuring artistic videos and prestigious collaborations. Luxury continues to tell a story through formats adapted to new platforms. The risks to avoid at all costs are, above all, excessive proximity, too many posts, too much interaction or the use of popular formats, all of which could weaken the aura of exclusivity.
The line between the two worlds is increasingly blurring. Some low-cost brands are borrowing luxury codes such as aesthetics, storytelling or collaborations, while some luxury houses are placing greater emphasis on interaction and transparency.
This hybridisation is giving rise to a paradoxical form of low-cost luxury: a model in which accessibility and desirability would no longer be mutually exclusive. Accessibility now coexists with aspirations to prestige. Between scarcity and virality, distance and proximity, prestige and accessibility, the two models now coexist within the same attention economy, where each is redefining its own codes.
Beyond the presence of luxury brands on social media, this shift reflects a deeper transformation: that of consumer expectations. In this attention economy, success no longer depends solely on visibility, but on the ability to create an image that is coherent, credible and adapted to new usage patterns.
The challenge is therefore clear: find the right balance between differentiation and adaptation, between heritage and modernity. Because on social media now, it is no longer just the product that makes luxury; it is the way it is told.
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