Every few years, a heritage brand concludes that it has a problem.
It is admired but no longer desired. Respected but rarely discussed. Its clientele is loyal, ageing and - from the perspective of a growth plan - finite.
So it does the thing that most resembles decisive action.
It chases the trend.
No recent example is clearer than Tiffany & Co.
For most of its history, Tiffany was the American house of quiet inheritance. The robin's-egg box. The engagement ring passed between generations. A brand associated less with fashion than with permanence. Its power was that it did not change.
When LVMH acquired it in 2021, that permanence was reframed as a liability.
The repositioning was fast and deliberate. The opening move was a campaign titled Not Your Mother's Tiffany - a line that did not merely court a younger buyer but publicly distanced the house from the very clientele that had sustained it for over a century.
What followed was a sustained bid for cultural velocity. Beyoncé and Jay-Z, photographed with a rarely seen Basquiat and the 128-carat Tiffany Diamond. A collaboration with Nike. A drop with Supreme. CryptoPunk pendants. Later, the Titan collection with Pharrell Williams.
Each move was engineered for the same thing: to be talked about.
And it worked. The brand generated an extraordinary volume of earned media. It re-entered the cultural conversation. By several internal measures, the spectacle sold - high jewellery revenue rose sharply, and the renovated Fifth Avenue flagship became one of the most productive luxury stores in the world.
If the objective was attention, the strategy succeeded.
But attention was never the real objective. Relevance was. And this is where the logic of the trend begins to work against the brands that trust it.
A trend can be rented. An identity has to be owned. The problem is that most brands cannot tell the difference until the lease runs out.
Borrowed Relevance Versus Built Relevance
There are two ways for a brand to appear culturally significant.
It can borrow the significance of others - a celebrity, an artist, a movement, a moment - and stand next to it long enough to be photographed in its light.
Or it can build its own significance slowly, through decisions that accumulate into a recognisable point of view.
The first is fast, expensive and immediately visible. The second is slow, patient and almost invisible until, one day, it is the only thing competitors cannot copy.
Tiffany chose speed.
The difficulty with borrowed relevance is that it never fully belongs to you. The credibility on loan from Beyoncé, from Basquiat, from Supreme, remains theirs. When the collaboration ends, the audience it attracted leaves with the name it came for. What remains is a brand that has spent heavily to feel current, without necessarily becoming more itself.
Meanwhile, the clientele it distanced does not always come back.
Not Your Mother's Tiffany was, in this sense, an unusually honest slogan. It named the trade precisely: the future was to be purchased at the cost of the past.
What the Competition Did Instead
The most revealing part of the Tiffany story is not what Tiffany did.
It is what its closest rivals did not do.
Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels spent the same period doing something far less dramatic. They did not chase a new demographic by disowning their old one. They did not stage a reinvention. They deepened what they already were - the same codes, the same craft, the same unhurried sense of belonging to a longer story than any single season.
They refused the trend.
And when the luxury cycle tightened - when aspirational buyers pulled back and only genuine conviction held its value - it was the houses that had stayed consistent that gained ground, taking share and attracting precisely the wealthier clients that a trend-led strategy tends to unsettle.
The numbers made the divergence concrete. In 2023, Tiffany lost roughly 0.7 percentage points of its share of the global branded luxury jewellery market, according to Euromonitor, while Cartier gained around four points over the same period. By mid-2024, LVMH's own chief financial officer acknowledged that Tiffany was "under pressure." The house that had generated the most noise was quietly losing ground to the houses that had made almost none.
The lesson is uncomfortable for anyone who equates activity with progress.
The brands that appeared most cautious were, in fact, building the deepest advantage. The brand that appeared most daring had, in fact, taken on the most fragile position - dependent on a constant supply of new cultural moments to borrow, because it had spent less time building a cultural position of its own.
Consistency looks like inaction until the moment it becomes the only thing standing.
Why the Trend Is Structurally a Trap
There is a deeper reason the trend fails as a strategy, and it has nothing to do with any single brand.
The cultural cycle has accelerated beyond the point where chasing it is possible.
A trend now emerges, peaks and exhausts itself within months. By the time a large organisation has identified one, secured approval, negotiated a partnership and produced a campaign, the cultural energy that made the trend valuable has already moved elsewhere.
The brand arrives precisely as the moment ends.
This means the trend-led brand is condemned to a permanent state of lateness. It is always reacting, always slightly behind, always spending to catch a wave that has already broken. Each campaign must be larger than the last simply to produce the same effect, because borrowed relevance depreciates the instant the borrowing stops.
A point of view does not depreciate in this way.
It compounds.
Every consistent decision a brand makes adds to a reserve of meaning that competitors cannot access by spending more. This is the difference between a marketing budget and a cultural position. One buys visibility for a quarter. The other builds authority over a decade.
What Building Culture Actually Requires
Refusing the trend is not the same as refusing to change.
The strongest houses evolve constantly. But they evolve from a fixed centre - a clear sense of what they are, what they value and what they will not do. Change, for them, is an expression of identity rather than an escape from it.
This is the discipline the trend removes.
Chasing culture means allowing the outside world to set your agenda. Building culture means having an agenda strong enough that the outside world begins to organise itself around you. The first makes a brand a follower with a large budget. The second makes it a reference.
It requires the willingness to disappoint the demand for constant novelty. To let a season pass without a headline. To invest in relationships, commissions, craft and continuity that will not produce a viral moment but will, over years, produce something no campaign can buy: the sense that the brand means something specific, and has meant it for a long time.
That is not a slower version of the trend.
It is the opposite of the trend.
The Choice Every Serious Brand Now Faces
The temptation to chase culture will only intensify. The tools to measure attention are more sophisticated than ever, and attention is easy to mistake for value because it is so easy to see.
But the brands that will hold their position over the next decade are unlikely to be the ones that generated the most conversation. They will be the ones that built something worth having a conversation about - patiently, consistently, and without asking the culture for permission to be relevant.
A trend tells you where culture has already been.
A point of view tells the world where you intend to stand.
One is rented. The other is owned.
And when the moment passes - as every moment does - only one of them is still there.