From AI backlash to influencer drops - What “the maker’s hand” still means in luxury

Anne-Liese Prem, Head of Cultural Insights & Trends at LOOP® put language to something many of us have been feeling with her Human Threshold framework - especially in light of Valentino’s De.Vain moment. Her “Danger Zone” for AI in luxury lives where visibility and emotion are highest, campaign imagery, brand storytelling, models. That’s where Kapferer’s dream formula breaks down.

Luxury is built on heritage, craftsmanship and human intentionality, the mythology of the maker’s hand. Campaigns don’t just show product, they perform that mythology. When AI moves from tool to creator in this zone, it cracks Kapferer’s symbolic contract. The aura of rarity-of-creation collapses.

Then I read Diana Pearl’s The Business of Fashion piece, “Why There Are So Many Influencer Collaborations Right Now?” On the surface, it’s about efficiency and reach, creators as easier partners than brands, with built-in audiences and data on what converts. But there’s another layer here, influencer capsules quietly borrow luxury’s structural promise. An influencer collaboration stages a micro “maker’s hand”, a named person, a specific life, a wardrobe, a family, a place. It also borrows scarcity, limited capsules in time and volume that feel closer to luxury’s rarity of creation than to mainline product. In a moment where AI blurs authorship, collabs reinsert a visible human author.

Underneath all of this sits fandom. Ogilvy’s “Fandom Flux” report by Reid Litman describes how Gen Z and Gen Alpha treat brands and worlds they love as something they co-own, not just consume. This emotional co-ownership becomes a distributed version of the maker’s hand, a shift from the atelier as sole author to Gen Z authoring their place inside the brand world through symbol. For younger consumers who don’t yet have the funds to participate in luxury through product, that emotional ownership is the real entry point. You can see the same logic in spaces like Snap Inc., with Bitmoji fashion and luxury partners such as Prada, a low-cost, highly social “entry product” where what’s owned is the image and the affiliation, not the material good. It’s adjacent to how Gen Z turned the “counterfeit” into the “dupe”, an image-first way to participate in a world through symbol rather than substance.

Luxury has long used hospitality to stage aura, now digital-first retailers are stepping into that space. Hospitality becomes the macro expression of the maker’s hand, an authored world where aura comes from the orchestration of time, space and human presence. Mytheresa’s partnership with Luxaviation Group, starting with flying clients into an immersive Maison Mytheresa world in St. Moritz, is not just another event. It may be among the earliest moves by a digital-first luxury retailer into full hospitality-level experience design.