61% of consumers desire intense emotional experiences from brands.
From hotels to houses, from spas to beach clubs - luxury today is no longer content to be worn, it must be lived.
In the past two years we’ve seen an acceleration. Louis Vuitton has opened restaurants in Paris and Saint-Tropez, with a full hotel on the Champs-Élysées to follow. Saint Laurent launched Sushi Park in the Paris flagship. Hotel collaborations have become a new status marker, from Sporty & Rich at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc to FRAME at Ritz Paris - collections that sold out as quickly as any sneaker drop. Seasonal pop-ups now set the rhythm of summer: rhode skin’s takeover in Mallorca, JACQUEMUS at Monte-Carlo Beach, Christian Dior Couture Spa’s wellness programs at Eden-Roc.
Not all of these players are luxury in the strict sense. Rhode or Sporty & Rich operate at a different price point, but what matters is that they borrow luxury’s experiential grammar: scarcity, setting, ritual.
The question isn’t why brands are moving into hospitality, but why consumers demand it. The figure: 61% of consumers desire intense emotional experiences from brands - is not about marketing. It is about the condition of modern life.
As sociologist Eva Illouz has argued, capitalism has colonised the emotional register: love, intimacy, and now intensity itself are mediated through consumption. In a digitised, frictionless world where everyday life risks feeling flat, consumers turn to brands as the curators of heightened experience.
Where religion once promised transcendence, politics collective passion, and art aesthetic rapture, brands now step in as the engineers of intensity. A Dior spa promises “moments of happiness.” A Jacquemus beach club becomes a dreamscape. Rhode’s Mallorca takeover is consumed not just in person but as a TikTok ritual of belonging.
Luxury is no longer content to adorn life. It scripts its crescendos.