As a result, the luxury industry has seen clients leaning toward a quieter form of personal expression. Indulgence has become more selective, more inward-looking – a state of refinement measured not by what you acquire, but by how you choose to spend time and devote attention.
“It’s the opposite of conspicuous consumption,” says Ana Andjelic, brand strategist and author of The Sociology of Business newsletter. “Today, the true class distinction is behavioral, social and psychological. It’s reflected in nuance – in taste, knowledge, and how you live, rather than what you own.” In other words, indulgence in 2026 is much more about prioritizing individual discernment and curating a sense of taste than the trend-driven consumption and status signaling that has characterized the past 10-plus years of growth in luxury markets.
The data backs up Andjelic’s theory. The Business of Fashion and McKinsey’s collaborative The State of Luxury Fashion: Luxury 2025 report notes that growth in luxury goods is decelerating from an average of 5 percent per year between 2019 and 2023, to between 2 percent and 4 percent a year from 2025 to 2027. Meanwhile, around 80 percent of the 250 luxury spenders interviewed for the report intend to redirect their spending toward experiential luxury.
There are tell-tale signs of this shift across all the luxury sectors. In the fine-art market, for example, Sotheby’s reported a doubling of its losses to $248m in September last year, while Hauser & Wirth’s UK subsidiary reported an 87 percent decline in 2024 pretax profit.
The Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index (KFLII), which tracks growth across 10 collectible luxury asset classes, reported a 3.3 percent fall in The Wealth Report 2025, with fine art taking a particular beating (-18.3 percent), followed by wine (-9.1 percent), whisky (-9 percent), furniture (-2.8 percent), and colored diamonds (-2.2 percent).
With statistics like these in mind, it’s unsurprising that companies such as London-based fine wines and spirits merchant Berry Bros & Rudd had a tough start to 2025. BB&R reportedly trimmed around 7.5 percent of its workforce through redundancy consultations. But the company maneuvered intelligently throughout the year, introducing new service lines and opening its first US store in Washington DC in November.
“In the fine wines and spirits world, indulgence in a traditional sense almost equates to gluttony and overconsumption, but this has shifted quite dramatically,” says Geordie Willis, BB&R’s director of new ventures. “We’re seeing a new audience coming into the space from a collector’s perspective. They’re thinking less about investment, for example, and more about collecting in the traditional sense of ownership and experience […] the idea that wine and spirits should be fun.”
For a brand such as BB&R, this means investing in the experiences that sit around wines and spirits, as well as recomputing some of the demand drivers for purchase. The brand’s new auction business, which launched in October 2024, is a new way to exploit this.
“What people want is not necessarily something that is brand-new and shiny, they want something that has history, heritage, and a story behind it,” says Willis. “If you layer the heritage side of what we do with some of the bottles and the stories that those bottles can tell, the combination is quite a heady one […] sourcing something that may have been sitting in perfect cellar conditions for 50 years, stored by someone else.”
The ‘experience economy’ is, of course, nothing new. The term was coined by B Joseph Pine II and James H Gilmore in their landmark 1998 Harvard Business Review article. Regardless, investing in exceptional experiences, or in products that are wrapped up in a novel experience of some kind, still holds weight.
“Most luxury brands have already mastered the art of exceptional service; now they are moving into the domain of superior experiences,” says Andjelic. “Take, for example, Brunello Cucinelli’s townhouse, down the street from his store on Madison Avenue [in New York’s Manhattan], which is made to be an experience for his wealthiest clients.”
Other fashion brands are experimenting with similar concepts. In the UK last year, Burberry partnered with bougie Somerset hotel The Newt for a summer-long takeover with Burberry-themed afternoon tea, hot-air-balloon rides, picnics, and more. Elsewhere, Zegna launched Villa Zegna in 2024, a nomadic, invite-only members club for VIP clients, which pops up in different cities (so far these have comprised Shanghai, New York and Dubai) offering salons, dinners, talks, and exhibitions.
Likewise, the automotive sector has had to think carefully about the role it plays in an experience-driven luxury market. Marek Reichman, Aston Martin’s VP and chief creative officer, identifies indulgence as the opportunity to invest in real-world sensory experiences. “We live in an ever-more digital world, where digital gives us access to everything,” he says. “But it doesn’t give us the smell, or the touch, or the danger, or the rain that you might feel. And the more money we have, the more we can indulge in the real.”
Pursuing this, Aston has invested in communicating the visceral, sensory nature of driving its cars through the medium of its striking ‘Intensity. Driven.’ ad campaigns. These highlight the granular, human moments of high performance driving – from hairs standing on end to irises dilating – and articulate Aston’s philosophy on car-building. “All of the technology we’re deploying is not to divorce you from the driving experience, but to heighten your experience as a driver,” Reichman explains.
The brand is also thinking laterally, offering extensive car customization (the Q by Aston Martin service) to deepen client interactions with the brand. More than 50 percent of Valhalla customer orders now request Q customizations, while models such as the Valkyrie and Valiant often have more than 80 percent Q content. More lateral still, experiments such as the Aston Martin branded residences in Miami, which bring the brand’s distinctive tone and aesthetic to life in real estate, have been successful. “You walk in through the front door, and it feels like the ambiance of an Aston Martin,” says Reichman.
The shift towards experiences over products presents a huge opportunity for luxury hospitality, but it’s also forcing hotel brands to signal how they are delivering indulgent experiences in a new way. Raffles, the five-star, Accor-owned brand with 25 properties worldwide, launched its new global campaign, ‘The Butler Did It,’ in September 2024.
It was designed to reignite awareness of Raffles’ legendary butler as the ultimate marker of personal attention and uncompromisingly intuitive service. Not only does the campaign celebrate a key aspect of Raffles’ DNA, it also brings the brand to life in a playful and unexpected way, selling the dream of a unique and elevated experience to travelers in a bid to ‘inspire your imagination and elevate your soul.’
“Indulgence today is less about opulence for its own sake and more about the emotional resonance of an experience,” explains Raffles’ CEO, Omer Acar. “It has moved away from being defined by a product, a price point, or even a checklist of luxuries, and toward the way a guest is made to feel. Indulgent hospitality is not about doing more but noticing more.”
Leaning into Raffles’ iconic butler service is one way of doing this, while at sister brand Fairmont (where Acar is also CEO), the new positioning, ‘make special happen,’ is designed to demarcate Fairmont as a destination for those in search of memorable personal experiences. “Guests are increasingly asking for experiences that feel true to place — ones that connect them to the cultural heart of their destination. They also respond most to service that feels human, empathetic, and attuned to their unspoken needs,” Acar continues.
Luxury hospitality is also being shaken up by the rapid rise of wellness tourism, a sub-sector that the Global Wellness Institute estimates is worth more than $830bn. “Aman and Six Senses are doing a great job of emphasizing their simple, sensory experiences,” Andjelic says. “Erewhon is also associated with indulgence in healthy food, wholesome smoothies, and all sorts of magic potions. There are an increasing number of longevity clinics like Lanserhof and SHA that promise indulgence through longevity treatments.”
Another high-end hospitality brand, Kerzner International, the operator behind One&Only Resorts and Atlantis, launched Siro Hotels in 2024. Positioned as ‘your blueprint for living better,’ with destinations in Dubai and Montenegro, and with a pipeline of properties in the works, it offers guests access to body composition scans, fitness classes, personal training, and nutritionists, as well as specialist therapies and recovery treatments.
Access to destinations such as this, which enable you to work on your own health, personal performance and overall wellbeing, are being touted as luxury’s new, cutting-edge indulgence for consumers who prioritize self improvement over luxury goods.
“We’re only now beginning to realize that we are our most valuable asset. It’s you. It’s not the house. It’s not the car. It’s not your partner; it’s your body,” wrote Kerzner’s CEO, Philippe Zuber, in The Future Laboratory’s recent report, New Codes of Luxury: Longevity & Wellbeing Strategies.
Architect and developer Mike Spink, founder of London-based practice Spink, which creates private homes worth between $15m and $150m, sees the same shift playing out, although he approaches indulgence from the opposite direction. “I don’t think travel is an indulgence any more,” he says, citing the idea of spending time in a “plastic capsule” in the sky as the antithesis of luxury. “To make travel interesting […] you have to make it more of a journey, and make it slower,” he says.
For Spink, that means prizing simplicity and refined craftsmanship, like a house made with materials that age gracefully, and home tech that’s intuitive and analogue. “[Clients] want simplified control,” he says. “They don’t want to have things around them that require interaction with technical support.”
On his farm in the Chiltern Hills in South East England, Spink takes pleasure in rearing his herd of Pasture for Life Dexter cattle and establishing wild hedgerows. “We planted [our] first mixed species field hedges about 20 years ago,” he says. “Seeing them grow is so rewarding.” It’s an image that captures perfectly the direction luxury is heading in — moving away from noise and novelty, and towards care, patience and permanence.
Perhaps that’s where indulgence really sits today. It’s not concerned with scale or showmanship, but with discernment. It’s about paying attention to what really matters and taking the decision to ignore what doesn’t.
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The indulgent gesture now is a small but telling one: a butler who remembers how you take your coffee; the perfect finish on a bespoke steering wheel; the quiet satisfaction of investing in your own wellbeing. These are expressions of care, not consumption, through which luxury has reached a point of maturity. In 2026, indulgence isn’t about ownership or display, but about precision, the careful curation of personal taste, and, maybe, about knowing when to stop.