The Collapse of Prestige
It may seem to you that I am being overly dramatic. But the tendency that has been forming over the past ten years has already entered its terminal stage. What could once have been called an error of taste has now become a disease of the system. What yesterday seemed like a careless flirtation with the spirit of the times now looks like a voluntary renunciation of one’s own origin.
Perhaps, from your point of view, things look different. Here, of course, I must make a cautious allowance: I do not have the ability to look inside your head. Although, I confess, I am not sure that, if I did, I would find there the very sense of alarm that ought to arise in anyone responsible for the fate of once-great premium brands.
This letter — and your subsequent actions or inaction — will allow us to study the situation more carefully. No longer at the level of assumptions, not at the level of disagreements in taste, but at the level of facts, reactions, and direct testimony from those people for whom, as is generally believed, such brands were once created.
This is not simply about marketing. This is about the destruction of the very concept of prestige.
However painful it may be to acknowledge this, whether you wish to admit it or not, you bear responsibility for its decay. The attempt to justify what is happening as “adaptation to the spirit of the times” would hardly have convinced your founders. Moreover, I suspect that if they were shown today’s advertising campaigns, today’s ambassadors, today’s tone of luxury, they would see in it not development, but betrayal.
In pursuit of momentary profit, in a strange, almost humiliating desire to make the brand recognizable even among those who never belonged and never will belong to its natural circle, you have gradually lost what was the foundation of prestige.
You decided that a high price, in itself, preserves greatness. You decided that artificial scarcity, manipulation of supply, the arrogance of salespeople, and theatrical snobbery toward an unknown buyer are still capable of creating an aura of exclusivity.
But this is not prestige.
It is the scenery of prestige.
It is a poor performance staged for those who have never seen the real stage.
Allow me to remind you what prestige is.
Prestige is when a brand does not impose an identity upon a person, but proves worthy of the identity that person already possesses.
Prestige is when the name of a house appears in works that have become part of humanity’s cultural heritage — not as a loud advertising sign, but as a natural detail of a world in which people possess lineage, position, education, power, taste, and inner measure.
Prestige is not when a person becomes significant because he wears your object. Prestige is when your object becomes significant because it is worn by a person whose significance no longer requires proof.
That was the old hierarchy. The face of the brand was determined by those who chose it. Not the other way around.
Try to imagine a man explaining to Alexander I, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Duke of Wellington, Thomas Jefferson, Emperor Kōkaku, or Ranjit Singh that their stature in history would be enlarged by the watch, jewelry, or dress of a particular house. Such an idea would not merely have sounded absurd. It would have revealed the speaker as a lackey who had mistaken ornament for greatness.
Because great people did not purchase identity. They already were identity.
But today everything has been reversed. Today brands suggest to a poorly educated public that an object is capable of replacing origin, taste, upbringing, labor, power, courage, merit, and inner dignity. Today luxury goods are increasingly sold not as a sign of belonging to a certain world, but as a prosthesis for those who are deprived of that world.
And this is where the real catastrophe begins.
You began flirting with those whom the true aristocracy of former epochs would have called public little people: people who live by the attention of the crowd; drawing-room screamers of a new kind; creatures without lineage, without service, without deed, but with a remarkable ability to occupy the idle imagination of the public.
These are the people who now carry your names.
These are the people who tell the world about your legacy.
People without roots, without measure, without silent dignity. People for whom attention is currency, exposure is strategy, scandal is biography, and luxury is merely the decoration of their own emptiness.
And you call this modernity. You call this reach. You call this cultural relevance.
But all of this has another, far more precise name: decline.
When, together with those who departed long ago, the understanding of true prestige also disappeared, the very concept of identity was transformed. Brands that once served as a subtle sign of belonging to a closed world began turning into loud signboards for the crowd. What had once been an almost silent recognition of status has today become a scream on social media.
I do not know whether you see this. I do not know whether it matters to you. Perhaps what matters more to you is the quarterly report, growth in recognition, audience engagement, and several more dead words with which modern marketing conceals the absence of taste.
But we are interested in something else.
We are interested in how the truly wealthy and influential people of this planet regard this — those who have involuntarily become owners of things worth hundreds of thousands and millions, inside which the expensive material still shines, while the very idea of privilege is already decomposing.
If you think that our eloquence will not be enough to obtain their feedback, you are gravely mistaken. Over the past twenty years, we have learned rather well how to speak with people whom most of your marketing campaigns never even reach. We know how to ask a question in such a way that it receives an answer. We know how to turn silent irritation into a formulation. We know how to reveal what is usually not spoken aloud in polite society.
And now comes the moment of truth.
I kindly ask you not to take this as primitive manipulation. It would be better to see in it a simple test of the authenticity of your loyalty to traditions, heritage, and those very “founders’ values” of which you speak so willingly on the pages of Instagram.
We invite you to become a sponsor of an article that, in June 2026, will be sent to 10,000 of the wealthiest people on the planet.
In this article, we intend to speak openly about the crisis of the premium goods industry. We intend to remind people what luxury meant before it began to be measured by the number of views. We intend to show what prestige was before it was handed over to influencers, stylists, agents, reach managers, and other minor administrators of a great cultural funeral rite.
Perhaps we will also show examples of your achievements — expressed through the images of those who now proudly wear your brands. Sometimes the face of an ambassador says more about the fate of a house than any annual report.
Those who decide to become sponsors of this article will receive a chance at rehabilitation. Their presence will show — more precisely, we will show — that not everything has yet been lost. That there remain those in the industry who are not ready to sell their soul completely for millions of views. Those who still remember that luxury does not need to shout in order to be heard.
It is especially curious that this article will also be read by those generations of your employees who, at this very moment, are hammering the last nail into the coffin lid of your brand.
Do you hear it? Thud. Thud. Thud...
They are in a hurry. They are extraordinarily diligent.
At this very minute, someone is signing yet another contract with yet another celebrity barely capable of distinguishing culture from content. Someone is inventing another meaningless campaign in order to attract the attention of those who see in your brand merely a way to find themselves a richer sponsor, an object of sexual attention, or an occasion for yet another vain image of their own emptiness.
And all of this takes place under words about heritage, craftsmanship, authenticity, and eternal values.
What a strange, almost comic scene: people who have destroyed the temple continue to sell tickets for a tour of its ruins.
We are not romantics. We understand perfectly well the price of money, power, vanity, and the desire to be seen. We are not preachers of poor virtue, nor moralists dreaming of returning the world to an invented past. We are cynics.
But our cynicism, unlike yours, still defends the true tradition of prestige and luxury — not its Instagram version, not its cheap theatrical copy, not its shell sold in exchange for an expensive story about what was once truly great.
Below you will find the link to the sponsorship package.
We will send this message to the world’s largest brands and see which of them are still capable of distinguishing heritage from noise, prestige from price, luxury from mass recognition, and a true audience from a crowd that applauds everything that shines loudly enough.
You are free to refuse. You are free to disagree. You are free to protest.
But the internet already contains too much evidence of your decline.
Look closely at the faces of those who now represent you.
Listen to the language in which people speak about you.
Look at who now stands beside your name.
And ask yourself honestly: if a brand’s identity is defined by those who wear it, then what have you become?
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