Try an experiment: ask ten people, maybe ten who love talking about luxury, professors, fashion victims, journalists, whether a particular watch, a bag, a certain piece of jewelry is “luxury”. You might get ten different answers, all delivered with the same confidence, and none of the ten will think to pull out a measuring tape. The reason is simple: it doesn’t exist, even if someone out there sells it anyway, perhaps in a four-thousand-euro weekend seminar, probably with a testimonial or two.

Then ask a bricklayer how long a wall is. He’ll pull out a tape measure, unroll it, give you a number, and the conversation ends there, because no one argues with a tape measure. With luxury, on the other hand, there’s always an argument, and everyone talks as if they had a yardstick in their pocket.

Ten Judges, No Law

The fact that someone can say “this is luxury, this isn’t” doesn’t mean they know where the line is. It only means they’re applying a rule, and the rules used to classify luxury are, in practice, of three kinds, only one of which is actually capable of defining that “line”.

There’s the courtroom rule: written criteria, checkable by anyone, independent of whoever is judging. In luxury there’s probably only one case this clean, Parisian Haute Couture, where the Chambre de Commerce puts in writing exactly what’s required to use the name, and whoever lacks those requirements is left out, no appeal.

Then there’s the coffee-shop rule: judging by resemblance to a mental prototype, “it has something that makes it look like a Birkin, so it’s luxury”. It works for the obvious cases, but the moment you move past what have by now become clichés, agreement evaporates, because everyone carries a slightly different prototype in their head.

And finally there’s the most convenient rule of all, the circular one: it’s luxury because it looks luxurious to me, it’s luxury because it costs a fortune. The judgment explains nothing, it just dresses itself up as an explanation. But it’s extremely convenient, because a circular rule can admit anything into the category, all it takes is finding someone willing to think of it that way, or to pay for it as if it were luxurious.

And that’s exactly how words like masstige and affordable luxury were born: not because they described something genuinely new on the market, but because there was no written rule standing at the door ready to stop them.

I suspect it’s precisely the third one, the circular rule, that gets used most often of all, redrawn in an elegant font and rebranded “framework”, sold as a method when it’s really just an opinion with an isosceles triangle around it.

Who Laughs and Who Pays

An industry without shared rules doesn’t just stay “a bit vague and trendy”. Sooner or later it starts sending the bill to someone, and usually to whoever expects it least.

The customer pays in a currency that shows up on no bank statement: competence. Once, when my mother bought a piece of clothing, she touched it, judged the feel of the fabric, the weight, the stitching, the buttons, and of course it also had to appeal to her and be fairly priced. Today you buy by looking at a photograph on a computer screen, sight has swallowed up all the other senses, and it’s sight alone that decides what an object is really worth. The aspirational customer, the one who allows themselves luxury once in a while and pays for a story, for the idea of belonging to a world, of expressing their own identity through that object, is the most exposed, because what they get back is often not real substance that justifies the price: it’s just the name, the outward sign, with no product behind it.

The whole industry pays too, not just the ones pushing their luck. Luxury works like a banknote: the more you print without reserves behind it, the less it’s worth, even in the pocket of someone who never printed a single extra one. It’s no coincidence that the sector’s average EBIT slid from 21% in 2023 to 17% in 2024, with 2025 estimates at 15 to 16%, a cumulative profit loss Bain puts at around 20% over two years: once the public starts to realize who deserves that price and who’s just asking for it, trust collapses across the board, without distinguishing the guilty from the innocent.

And it’s paid, personally, by everyone inside a company who has to defend a brand’s value armed only with experience and sensibility. In the collapses of Neiman Marcus, Matches Fashion, Bally, the same scene repeats almost identically: on one side a financial model made of precise numbers, on the other side someone defending the brand’s symbolic capital with arguments that, in the eyes of the first group, remain non-negotiable opinions. And almost always, whoever was right on the substance lost anyway, not because they were wrong, but because in that room they were speaking a different language, and their language wasn’t allowed at the table.

Careful: Too Much Order Doesn’t Save You Either

At this point you might feel tempted to run in the opposite direction and impose rules everywhere, as if discipline were an antibiotic to be sprinkled around at random. That’s wrong too, and luxury’s recent history proves it, causing more than a little embarrassment for many, precisely because for a long time they insisted that world stood still.

A perfectly ordered system, with codes frozen and never questioned, is no less sick than a chaotic one: it’s just sick in a different way, and the diagnosis arrives once it’s already too late. Frida Giannini’s Gucci was coherent, confident, flawless, and increasingly irrelevant to a younger audience, and also to mature customers who simply stopped looking at it. No formal rule could revive that flat revenue, because the problem wasn’t a lack of order, it was too much of it. So this isn’t a contest for who has the most rules: there’s a narrow, uncomfortable zone between freezing and dissolving, and staying inside it isn’t a goal you reach once and for all. It has to be found again and again, which means what’s needed may be a measuring instrument, not a slogan to recite from memory.

The AGG Method: Not a Yardstick, But Something Close Enough

This is where, with all due humility, I try to put something different on the table. Not another framework made of slides, the kind you get in a course, but the AGG Method, Anchor, Grid, Gradient: my attempt, in my book, to give luxury something that resembles a yardstick, knowing full well from the start that a tape measure like the one our bricklayer uses is something luxury will never have, and that anyone who promises otherwise is selling thin air, perhaps gift-wrapped in a certificate of attendance from some master’s program.

Before going into detail, it’s worth clarifying one point: who’s measuring, the expert or the customer, the real one, the one who actually buys? These are two different perspectives, and they need to be kept apart. The expert evaluates the object itself, using verifiable technical criteria: materials, craftsmanship, rarity. The customer, instead, judges from the brand in their own head, through the perception they’ve built up over time. In luxury, the value the customer perceives is completely different from the value built into the product in the strict sense. So the first thing to do is choose your vantage point. Confusing the two is the fastest way back to the circular rule I mentioned earlier.

In extreme summary, the methods for measuring something as sophisticated a blend of material and immaterial elements fall into three broad families: expert methods, where a specialist judges the object by objective criteria, independent of the market, like the bricklayer measuring the wall with a tape measure. Perceptual methods, where instead you measure what the buyer thinks and feels, through genuine research on the customer rather than intuition, market research, for instance, where you ask a meaningful sample of people something specific. And finally mixed methods, which put the first two in sequence instead of choosing only one, a good example being the appraisal of a collectible watch, which starts from a technical examination of the movement to set its price and completes it with data on real demand among collectors. The AGG Method belongs to this last family: it starts from an expert evaluation of the product and completes it with a perceptual evaluation of the brand, without pretending the two measures are the same thing.

The Anchor solves the zero-point problem. Since there’s no natural unit for luxury, you have to choose an explicit reference point, the product or idea in which luxury’s constitutive elements appear in their purest form, and everything else is measured as a distance from that point, not as an absolute quantity dropped from the sky. It’s a declared choice, debatable, and defensible precisely for that reason: the exact opposite of a dogma.

The Grid solves the circularity problem. Eight indicators, written down in black and white, that don’t amount to statements like “it feels like luxury to me” but instead define the product through extreme quality, creativity, a high price as a consequence rather than a cause, genuine scarcity, and others. A specialist can assess five of these just by looking at the object, without asking the market’s permission: that’s enough for an honest product assessment. Add three more, drawn from genuine research on the customer rather than personal instinct, and you move to a product-plus-brand assessment, because those three dimensions live in the buyer’s head, not in the object, and pretending to know them without data would mean falling right back into the same circularity you were trying to escape.

The Gradient solves the time problem. It measures, not once but over time, the distance between a product or line and the brand’s anchor, and makes it possible to spot a drift toward chaos, or a stiffening toward freeze, before the market points it out, usually with a very steep bill.

None of these three tools can have the objectivity of a physical tape measure, and that comes with the territory of this kind of measurement. Every anchor chosen, every weight assigned, every criterion in the Grid remains an arguable decision, never a revealed truth. But this is exactly the difference between the AGG Method and yet another framework good for the end of a semester and useless at the first real meeting: it doesn’t promise a precision it can’t have, it promises a shared, declared, verifiable language that anyone defending a brand can bring into the meeting room instead of relying only on their own instinct. And it’s the very same reason why, in physics, an actual measuring tape always beats an “it looks about right to me”: not because it’s more true in absolute terms, but because everyone in that room can check it the same way.

In the meantime, without a shared yardstick, the rest will keep being sold simply by calling it luxury, and the bill, as always, will be paid by someone else.