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Guest perspective by Laurent François.
Time spent on social media has reached a plateau.
The Financial Times reporting based on GWI data noted that global time spent on social platforms peaked in 2022 and then began to decline, while DataReportal’s 2025 overview also points to only marginal growth in overall online time and lower social time among some younger cohorts.
At the same time, the public conversation around loneliness, disconnection, and the quality of online life has only intensified.
The End of More
Brands and social media strategists are experiencing this shift on a daily basis: the old rules of social media are struggling; the assumption that more visibility meant more relevance, more content meant more intimacy, and more time spent meant more cultural power, is over.
Social platforms were treated as open-ended growth machines, capable of generating attention, community, desire, and conversion all at once. That era is ending.
The Bliss Point Against the Algofluence
This is the contradiction at the heart of our moment: never have platforms been so optimized, and never has the emotional promise of digital connection felt so fragile. Social media did not simply become crowded; it became less innocent. Less utopian. Less human in its governing logic.
Feeds are no longer primarily social spaces. They are entertainment systems, recommendation engines, and behavioral architectures. They do not just connect people; they sort, rank, redirect, and extract attention.
We’ve entered the algorithmic influence era (or “algofluence”).
From Always-On to Precision
This transition is already being felt inside the industry. As former digital and communications lead at Dior Beauty, Andrea Colaianni puts it:
“We’ve moved from the era of ‘always-on’ social media—where content was produced to fill the silence—to a model driven by bursts of visibility designed to cut through noise. Today, even that is no longer enough. What matters now is precision.
Social influence and retail experience are no longer separate touchpoints; they must operate as a single, coherent storytelling system anchored in a clear cultural point of view. Every expression of the brand—no matter how small—must serve and reinforce that perspective. Otherwise, inconsistency is no longer hidden; it is immediately exposed by an increasingly literate and discerning audience.”
His point lands with particular force in luxury, where fragmentation is reputationally corrosive.
Luxury’s Visibility Trap
For luxury brands, this shift matters enormously.
Luxury has historically thrived in environments where meaning is carefully staged and where access, texture, rhythm, and interpretation matter as much as the product itself. Yet much of luxury’s social media playbook over the past decade has been built on the opposite logic: speed, repetition, scalability, and algorithmic legibility.
In trying to remain visible inside platform culture, many brands accepted a flattening of their own language. They produced more, explained less, and often traded mystery for exposure.
Apart from Bottega Veneta, which left Instagram in one of the boldest moves in 2021, most brands stayed on dominant platforms without actually owning a real relationship with their audiences. At a tangible level, we now see that most users worldwide overvalue messenger apps and messaging systems; yet a very limited number of luxury houses convey strong storytelling through them, except for VVIC management, mostly handled by client advisors.
As a noticeable example, Snapchat remains incredibly underused, largely because many luxury leaders do not fully understand it and hesitate to enter the space.
The Problem of Semiotic Inflation
The result is not necessarily overexposure in the classic sense. It is something subtler: a decline in perceived value caused by semiotic inflation.
When everything is permanently visible, instantly remixable, and equally formatted, distinction becomes harder to sustain.
Scarcity is no longer only about product. It is about meaning. It is about the feeling that entry into a brand’s world offers access to a richer frame of interpretation, not just another stream of assets.
A Post-Naive Internet Emerges
That is why the next digital chapter for luxury should not be about retreating from the internet, but about embracing its future shapers.
We are already seeing signs of a more realistic, post-naive digital culture. The mood has shifted from blind faith in scale toward questions of structure, governance, ownership, and quality of experience.
Across the wider tech landscape, there is renewed interest in smaller communities, more intentional online spaces, decentralized or protocol-based networks, and digital environments built around people’s actual interests rather than mass performative broadcasting. Mozilla continues to frame its mission around an internet that serves the public interest rather than private walled gardens, while Bluesky explicitly presents its architecture as a move “from platforms to protocols,” giving users more control over data and experience.
Even outside these infrastructures, the broader cultural movement toward digital gardens, private channels, and interest-based spaces suggests that users increasingly want online environments that feel inhabitable, not merely addictive.
Luxury’s Opportunity: Build Worlds, Not Feeds
This is where luxury has a historic opportunity.
If mass social media has become less social, luxury can help prototype forms of digital experience that feel denser, slower, and more meaningful. Not moralistic. Not nostalgic. Simply more substantial. That requires a return to value proposition in the strongest sense of the term: not just what a product costs, but what a brand reveals, organizes, and makes perceptible.
In the naive social media era, many brands sold fantasy through surface—beautiful campaigns, aspirational casting, mood-first content, a permanent choreography of desirability. That model still works to a degree, but it is no longer sufficient.
The scripted fashion shows might still generate hearts and likes on top influencers’ posts; but conversations on WhatsApp groups and text messages are far less generous. No one is duped. Real.
From Impression to Conviction
Today, audiences are not only asking to be impressed. They are asking, consciously or not, to be convinced that there is real intelligence, real taste, and real depth behind what they see.
It’s not enough to be viewed; luxury customers want a higher quality of digital liveness with the brand—a real feeling of presence.
What It Looks Like in Practice
The most compelling luxury activations increasingly answer that demand.
Maison Margiela’s 2026 “folders” project, which opened internal Dropbox archives containing timelines, working documents, images, and press materials, was striking not because it made the brand more transparent in a corporate sense, but because it gave form to process. It transformed backstage material into a cultural interface.
It suggested that value is not only in the finished object, but in the architecture of creation.
Miu Miu offers another version of that intelligence. For its Spring/Summer 2025 show, artist Goshka Macuga created The Truthless Times, a physical newspaper tied to a wider narrative work around truth, manipulation, and media.
This was not content designed merely to circulate. It functioned as an interpretive device, inviting an audience into a conceptual universe rather than pushing out another branded post. It rewarded attention instead of merely harvesting it.
Re-Becoming an Information Maker
These examples point to a broader lesson: luxury brands should not try to out-platform the platforms. They should build digital experiences the platforms cannot naturally produce.
In a sense, re-becoming a price maker by re-becoming an information maker. That could mean creating environments that privilege sequence over feed logic, initiation over reach, interpretation over virality. It could mean reviving old web principles that social media displaced: exploration, slowness, hyperlinks, archives, editorial voice, hidden layers, durable worlds.
It could mean prototyping digital spaces that feel more like salons, libraries, ateliers, or clubs than like content pipelines. The point is not obscurity for its own sake. It is the restoration of asymmetry, texture, and effort in a landscape dominated by frictionless sameness.
The Return of Distance
Luxury, after all, has always understood something the platform economy forgot: desire is not produced by total access.
It is produced by calibrated distance, by a sense of discovery, by the impression that one is entering a world shaped by intention.
The digital future of luxury should therefore be less about permanent broadcasting and more about world-building under new conditions.
A Smaller, Stranger Internet
This may be the best possible moment for such a renaissance.
Audiences are more digitally literate than they were ten years ago. They understand recommendation systems. They sense the emptiness of overformatted intimacy.
They are not against digital life; they are against low-quality digital life. That distinction matters.
The era of endless exposure is beginning to feel exhausted. For luxury, this is a return to first principles: not visibility, but meaning; not access, but allure.
The brands that understand this will - on their own terms - remake, not retreat from the digital world.
Making magic using logic.
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