Luxury by Design
What fashion and luxury houses announce about technology, read against the evidence ladder using their own published documents. The method is public so you can check the advice against it.
Pick up a trench coat near a mirror and the mirror showed the garment being made or walking the runway. The tag identified the item and the content appeared.
Rung reached: delivered.
Read the full readBy February 2017 the full collection was in 80 stores and three looks in more than 300, online as shown.
Rung reached: delivered, and partly used.
Read the full readA WeChat mini-programme linked product information, appointments and a café, with social currency earned through participation.
Rung reached: delivered.
Read the full readThe annual report to March 2026 says the programme is in use to improve personalisation, engagement and retention. In May 2026 the company showed the associate tool and an AI-drafted outreach message; in July it said store productivity had improved through clienteling, among other things.
Rung reached: delivered, with use claimed.
Read the full readShown at VivaTech 2026: the hide is scanned, the cutting plan is proposed, and the artisan validates the cut before it is made.
Rung reached: delivered, as demonstrated.
Read the full readThe adviser keeps the relationship; the system holds what the adviser would otherwise have to remember or look up.
Rung reached: delivered, with use described.
Read the full readToo many technology decisions in luxury are made on the first rung of a five-rung ladder as if they had reached the fifth. Fourteen years of Burberry's own announcements show how far apart the rungs are.
Read the noteTechnology can carry a product's promise from one function to the next, or it can spread every inconsistency in it. Which one happens depends on whether a single, up-to-date product record sits underneath.
Read the noteIn the examples of AI in luxury that hold up, the system prepares, proposes or ranks, and a person decides. The design question is less about which model to buy than about who is allowed to say no.
Read the noteEvery technology a house buys for its product lands, eventually, on a factory floor. The costs that land there rarely appear on the business case, and the record the house is trying to buy is usually already there, in the hands of the people nobody asked.
Read the noteAlso
Talks and workshops
A two-hour session for a leadership or product team: the ladder, the five rules, and your own last three technology announcements read against them. Also given as guest lectures: Lectra, October 2026; Kingston University ([course], [month year]); London College of Fashion, November 2026.
Annual read
Once a year, the technology luxury houses have announced, read against the ladder using their own published documents: what was delivered, what is in use, what has shown a benefit, and what has shown nothing so far.
Newsletter
On Substack: fashion’s most overlooked role, and the unseen work that makes every product possible. Written for the people who do that work, and for the people who manage them.