BEAUTY’S MASCULINE TURN: DO MEN STILL NEED BEAUTY “FOR MEN”?
The evolution of male beauty is increasingly reflected in market performance. According to Euromonitor International, men’s grooming in France reached €1.86 billion in retail sales in 2025, growing by 2% year on year, despite declining demand in traditional shaving categories. Beyond overall market growth, the category is becoming more diversified. Mintel reported a 14.7% increase […]
DREAMFORCE 2026: WHAT AGENTIC AI MEANS FOR LUXURY CLIENTELING
Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual conference, took place in San Francisco in September. Among its 2026 announcements were AI agents designed to work across customer data and business tools, answer questions and carry out authorised tasks. Its commerce programme also showed how an agent might guide a customer from product discovery towards purchase. For luxury leaders, the […]
PARIS FASHION WEEK SS27: WHAT LUXURY IS ASKING ITS HOUSES TO PROVE NEXT
Paris Fashion Week’s Spring/Summer 2027 collections bring a demanding task into focus: turning creative direction into a distinctive proposition that clients can recognise, desire and live with. Paris Fashion Week is approaching its close. Across the collections already presented, the most useful question concerns what the clothes establish about the houses behind them. What becomes […]
TFWA CANNES 2026: WHERE BEAUTY’S GROWTH PLANS MEET THE MARKET
Last year, I attended TFWA Cannes with Parfums de Marly. Much of our time was spent presenting plans to retailers and distributors: what we intended to launch, how we saw the brand developing, and what a partnership could look like in their markets. The conversation was about far more than securing space on a shelf. […]
WHEN PRICE STOPS SIGNALLING VALUE: LUXURY’S ARCHITECTURE PROBLEM
Luxury has spent much of the past decade discovering how much pricing power it had. In 2026, a different question is becoming harder to ignore: how much of that additional value can the client still see? The distinction matters. BCG and Altagamma’s 2026 True-Luxury study found that 70 per cent of consumers had walked away […]
BEAUTY’S SEPTEMBER LAUNCH RUSH: WHEN NOVELTY TESTS BRAND CLARITY
September has always been an important beauty month. Summer routines give way to autumn colour, fragrance returns to greater prominence, retailers reset their shelves and the final commercial stretch before the festive season begins. Earlier this week, in The Luxury Rentrée: The Cost of Treating Everything as a Priority, we argued that the luxury rentrée […]
THE LUXURY RENTRÉE: THE COST OF TREATING EVERYTHING AS A PRIORITY
Luxury entered the summer with the first credible signs that demand was improving. September opens on a more nuanced picture. The recovery has not disappeared, but it looks more uneven than the headline numbers suggested, and the coming quarter will show how broadly it can hold. In late June, Bain & Company forecast that the […]
SMALL FORMAT, FULL LUXURY: WHY BEAUTY MINIS NEED A BIGGER STRATEGY
Summer has a way of making small formats suddenly indispensable. A skincare routine that feels perfectly reasonable at home becomes excessive once it has to fit into a cabin bag. A favourite blush needs to survive the journey from beach to dinner. Fragrance becomes something to carry rather than leave on a dressing table. Beauty […]
LUXURY IN H2 2026: FOUR TESTS OF DESIRABILITY
The latest results suggest that luxury is returning to growth. They also reveal a more selective market, rewarding houses that can make their value, identity and relationship with clients unmistakably clear. The latest luxury results arrived within the space of a few days. LVMH reported accelerating growth in the second quarter. Kering returned to comparable […]
AFTER CLEAN GIRL: WHAT THE RETURN OF COLOUR REVEALS ABOUT LUXURY DESIRE
At MakeUp in Paris last month, one conversation stayed with me. The conference, led by Natacha Bensimon, founder of Blossom ID, with Gen Z beauty creators so_loic and Eljix, asked a deceptively simple question: who is makeup for now? The official premise was revealing: from Gen Alpha discovering cosmetics through colour and play to adults […]