Beyond Luxury

This week on Deep Dive, we’ve gone inside a Kintsugi moment. The Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold has followed Carlota Rodben from the stage at Vogue Forces of Fashion in Kyiv to a room of luxury C-suite leaders in Barcelona. Each leader held a piece of porcelain, broke it, then rebuilt it with gold.

That same thinking now sits inside the fourth season of La Culture de l’Écart, L’Oréal Luxe’s documentary series, “Luxury is dead. Long Live Luxury!”, released on October 8, 2026. Carlota’s answer to the question in the title is that desire is intact. What luxury is being asked for is coherence, held the same way whether anyone is watching or not. The crack is the gap between promise and delivery. The gold is integrity, execution and time.

Inside the piece: the four forces the season is built around, why Gen Z reads as luxury’s correction, and why a dupe works as a stress test for the original.

Read the full piece on Substack.