Considerations: Which one is it? Good taste, commercial infrastructure and/or hype mentality
Why understanding the difference can help strengthen your taste, change your behaviours and transform your style
You are not imagining it. The flood of options, the push notifications, the creeping sense that you’re perpetually behind. The subtle threat that your taste and style remain outside of the elite’s aesthetics. Your inbox a litany of urgent calls to action or risk losing the items or the discounts purportedly chosen just for you.
A study in 2019 found that in the UK, which buys more new clothes than anywhere else in Europe, approximately 40% of adults own items they have never worn, and nearly a third regularly buy clothes they ultimately don’t need.¹ These are not impulse shoppers or trend chasers by self-description, they are people who were successfully targeted by systems designed to manufacture desire faster than their identity can filter it.
None of this is accidental. Every scroll, every campaign, every shopping experience, every breathless editorial telling you what you need this season and the frictionless ways to purchase them are part of structural and strategic decisions designed to overwhelm your nervous system, controlling your ability to think clearly and behave rationally.
Hype Mentality
Hype is the noise layer. It’s the influencers posting Blazy mania, the carbon-copy aesthetics overwhelming our feeds, the waitlist that appears before the product does, the editorial declaring something essential before you’ve had a chance to form your own opinion. It operates on urgency; the fear that if you don’t move now, you’ll miss something that matters. It operates on exclusivity; the fear that you won’t be part of these worlds and benefit from the joy and excitement these items bring.
Social media didn’t create hype, but it industrialised it on a global scale. What was once confined to the pages of magazines or flagship stores curated to the tastes and culture of different geographic zones, can now reach you continuously, algorithmically and seemingly very personally. It knows your aspirations before you’ve articulated them.
The global fashion influencer market was valued at $6.82 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $39.72 billion by 2030.² That is not a marketing budget. The return on investment being measured here isn’t strictly media value, brand awareness or click-throughs; it’s conversion into transactions, it’s revenue, it’s customer retention and it’s growth. The global fashion influencer market is a commercial infrastructure investment.
At this year’s Coachella, Hailey Bieber’s invitation-only Rhode World experience generated $10 million in media impact value in a single opening weekend. YSL Beauty launched its new fragrance through a drive-thru event. The industry’s own analysts described this not as marketing spend, but as brand infrastructure — measurable returns in both media value and direct revenue.³ When a festival appearance becomes a commercial asset, you are no longer just watching a cultural moment. You are being placed inside a transaction.
The most important thing to understand about hype is that it has no loyalty to quality, longevity, or your actual life. You had an emotional response in the moment and behaved accordingly.
Commercial Infrastructure
Underneath the noise is something more structural, more considered, and in many ways more powerful precisely because it operates quietly: the commercial machinery.
By no means exhaustive, here are a few examples of commercial infrastructure in action. Every major luxury house has a hero product. The it-bag, the signature shoe, the one piece that carries the brand’s cultural weight and drives a disproportionate share of its revenue. These products are not accidents of creativity. They are carefully engineered objects of desire, maintained through controlled supply, strategic placement, and the slow accumulation of cultural meaning and brand heritage.
The Birkin is the most documented example of this in action. A California lawsuit brought Hermès’ distribution model into public view, accusing the company of exploiting the “unique desirability, incredible demand, and low supply” of its Birkin to artificially inflate the true cost of the bag.⁴
According to The Economist, Luca Solca, equity analyst at Exane BNP Paribas, estimates the production cost of a basic Birkin at around $800 — each bag taking a single craftsman up to 18 hours to complete.⁵ The bag retails from $10,000 to over $200,000 depending on its materials. The difference is not craftsmanship alone, it’s access, desire and scarcity. Scarcity is not a constraint. It is the product.
And the gateway into that world is deliberate too. A class action lawsuit reported by Business of Fashion and NBC News alleged that Hermès requires customers to build a purchase history, buying shoes, scarves, jewellery and homeware, spending tens of thousands of dollars before being offered the opportunity to purchase a Birkin.⁶ The entry-level products: the fragrance, the beauty line, the small leather good, is not an act of brand generosity. It is architecture. We’re seeing the same architecture now at Blazy’s Chanel: years of radical price increases stymied growth, now the house includes a wide selection of entry-level products to attract aspirant shoppers into the world of Chanel as a long-term commercial growth strategy.
You are being walked toward a larger purchase, on a timeline the brand controls. Bain & Company confirmed in their 2024 luxury report that beauty and fragrance were among the only luxury categories to grow during a period of broad market contraction, precisely because consumers gravitate toward accessible indulgence when the larger purchase feels out of reach.⁷ The industry knows this. It plans for it.
What all of these mechanisms share is a common purpose: they manufacture perceived value. They sell you not just a product but a belief about what that product means; about who you are, or who you could be if you owned it. Price becomes a signal of worth rather than a reflection of it. The gap between price and genuine value is now becoming visible in ways the industry cannot entirely control. In 2026, 91% of shoppers report awareness of price increases, and 83% are demanding transparency on what is driving them.8 Consumers are beginning to ask the question the industry has always preferred they didn’t: what am I paying for?
Good Taste
Good taste is the thing that makes both hype and commercial strategies lose their grip on you. Not because it makes you immune to desire, desire is human, and we’re hard-wired to lust after beautiful things, but because it gives you a stable point of reference that exists independently of what the industry tells you to want, need and place value upon.
Taste, properly understood, is not aesthetic preference. It is discernment. It is the accumulated knowledge of what works for you: your body, your life, your identity. It is refined over time through attention, curiosity and honesty. It’s knowing the difference between something you want because of its visibility, proximity and/or exclusivity, and something you desire because it pulls an emotional register with you. It holds practical and joyful value in your everyday, complex life.
The question of whether our taste is even our own has become urgent. In his 2024 book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka interviews a young woman who wonders whether “what I like is what I actually like”. She’s worried that her taste is so shaped by algorithms she can no longer trust herself.9 That anxiety is not an edge case. It is the defining consumer condition of our time.
The industry’s response has been to simulate genuine personalisation through technology. Two-thirds of luxury consumers are already using AI tools when shopping for fashion online, and brands describe their most advanced implementations as a digital atelier, learning individual preferences, context, and aspirational identity to deliver bespoke recommendations at scale.10 The ambition is real. But so is the risk: consumers who feel surveilled rather than served disengage rapidly. Algorithmic personalisation can mirror your behaviour. It cannot develop your taste. It cannot understand how it feels to live your complex life, in your body and your emotions. It can tell you what you have bought. It cannot tell you who you are.
This is not about spending less or rejecting luxury. It is about the experiential design of fashion, style and luxury for a discerning consumer. It is about spending with intention — changing behaviours to make purchases connected to your actual style, your actual life, and a considered sense of who you are. It is about buying into worlds which hold a different kind of value for consumers.
Your purchases holds their meaning because you chose it clearly, with full understanding of the forces that were also trying to choose for you.
Style Transformation
Understanding these systems, structures and strategies changes you as a consumer. Once you can see the hype layer for what it is, the urgency and exclusivity it manufactures begins to lose its hold. Once you can identify the commercial architecture beneath the product, you stop experiencing the pull as pure desire and start recognising it as a choice. That shift from passive recipient to intentional decision-maker is where style transformation actually begins. That’s incredibly powerful for us as consumers, and I personally want to see brands and retailers reimagining our experiences in their worlds to more strongly reflect this.
Because style, real style, is not what you wear. It is what you know about yourself. It’s your discerning taste. It is the accumulation of deliberate decisions made intentionally about who you are, how you live, and what genuinely serves both. It is built through honest inquiry rather than reactive purchasing; through understanding your body, your context, your complex life’s actual demands. Its moments of joy, your genuine deep-rooted desires. Through building a relationship with your wardrobe that is functional, expressive, and entirely yours, not borrowed from an aesthetic, not validated by elitism, not beholden to commercial drivers, that is when you’ll feel and see the transformation.
References
¹ Thought Clothing, UK consumer sustainability research, 2019. Reported in: ‘Brits Buy 972 Items of Clothing in Their Lifetime That They Never Wear’, responsesource.com. UK Parliament Environmental Audit Committee, 2020, cited in University of Glasgow / Adam Smith Business School, February 2022.
² Grand View Research, Fashion Influencer Marketing Market Size & Trends Report, 2024. grandviewresearch.com
³ Penningtons Manches Cooper / Vogue / Vanity Fair, ‘Couture at Coachella: How Luxury Brands Are Mining Festival Culture for Commercial Gain’
⁴ The Fashion Law, ‘How Hermès Turned the Birkin Bag into a Multi-Billion Dollar Business’, August 2025. thefashionlaw.com
⁵ Luca Solca, equity analyst at Exane BNP Paribas, as cited in The Economist / 1843 Magazine, ‘The Birkin Bag’, August 2016. economist.com
⁶ Business of Fashion, ‘Hermès Faces Class Action Suit Over Birkin Sales Practices’, March 2024. businessoffashion.com. See also: NBC News, ‘Hermès Lawsuit Claims Luxury Retailer Reserves Its Famed Birkin Bags Only for Its Biggest Spenders’, March 2024. nbcnews.com; NPR, ‘Hermès Accused of Antitrust Violations by Customers Who Tried to Buy a Birkin Bag’, March 2024. npr.org
⁷ Bain & Company / Altagamma, Luxury in Transition: Securing Future Growth, 2024 Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study. bain.com
8 Business of Fashion / Glossy, ‘US Tariffs Test Luxury’s Pricing Power: 71% of Fashion Executives Planning Price Increases’, May 2026. businessoffashion.com
9 Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Doubleday, 2024. Reviewed by The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal.
10 Deloitte / Business of Fashion, Future of Luxury During the Rise of AI, May 2026. deloitte.com
