From Eros to Kairos - what the GLP-1 moment is really revealing about luxury

Carlota Rodben and Diana Verde Nieto recently posed a sharp and timely question: what happens when we switch off desire? It is an important provocation. GLP-1s are clearly reshaping appetite, and appetite has long functioned as one of the underlying engines of consumer culture, including luxury.

What is less clear is whether what we are seeing is desire disappearing, or desire reorganising.

Luxury has traditionally been fluent in Eros - desire as pull, appetite, lack, and stimulation. Much of the industry’s language around indulgence, pleasure and aspiration is built on this logic. But there is another register of desire that luxury has always operated within as well - Kairos. Not hunger, but timing. The sense that something arrives at the right moment, and remains right over time.

If GLP-1s suppress impulse, they may simultaneously sharpen something else: discernment. When appetite softens, each choice carries more weight. Timing begins to matter more than volume. Context replaces compulsion. Desire becomes selective, situational, even seasonal.

Seen from this perspective, the current moment does not simply challenge luxury’s relationship with pleasure. It might be clarifying it. Luxury does not only operate on wanting more. It also operates on wanting rightly.

This distinction helps explain why certain forms of luxury appear structurally less destabilised by the present shift. Practices built around patience, craft-time, aging, seasonality, ritual and fit-with-life were never dependent on stimulation alone.

The task ahead, then, may not be to re-ignite appetite, but to articulate why something belongs now. Luxury has historically been fluent in this language, not “treat yourself” or “you deserve more,” but a quieter logic of rightness, that this moment is appropriate, that this object fits the season you are in, that it will still feel right over time.

Desire has not disappeared, but it has slowed. It feels less oriented toward pleasure as escape, and more toward time as an aesthetic condition. Living in season, finding beauty in its right moment. The GLP-1 moment may not be switching desire off. But it may be asking luxury to relate to it differently, through timing, precision and relevance rather than intensity.

This logic of Kairos has long been visible in luxury at its most mature. Véronique Nichanian’s 38-year tenure at Hermès, which came to a close on Friday in Paris, was organised around timing, proportion, material intelligence and the quiet evolution of everyday forms. It is a formulation that captures Kairos precisely. In that sense, Nichanian’s career stands as a reminder that some of luxury’s most resilient value has always been built not on intensity, but on taking one’s time.