Luxury Retail at a Crossroads: Heritage, Innovation and the Race to 2030

The global luxury industry lost roughly 140 billion euros in market capitalisation across a four-month stretch earlier this year, according to figures cited at the panel. Bain and Altagamma, the industry's most-watched data partnership, estimate that the personal luxury goods category has shed close to 50 million customers since 2022, after retail prices climbed by about half over five years. And yet, on the outskirts of Riyadh, a 14-square-kilometre district is rising from the desert with 40 metres of infrastructure buried beneath it, betting 62.2 billion dollars that luxury's next chapter will be written in a place most luxury executives have never visited.

These were the stakes laid out at a recent industry session convened by Servane Mondes Dumesnil, who leads the International Association of Department Stores (IADS), the global think tank dedicated to a retail format that does substantial business with luxury and watches the category closely. The panel brought together three perspectives that rarely share a stage: Andrew Keith, who led Selfridges Group until stepping down in autumn 2024; Nermeen Nosseir, Chief of Retail Leasing at Diriyah Company; and Alexis Mourot, group chief executive of Christian Louboutin. Together they sketched the contours of a category in flux, and the non-negotiable principles each business refuses to compromise.

A market priced out of itself

The numbers are stark. Luxury's customer base has contracted by tens of millions, with the Chinese consumer, long the engine of growth, pulling back sharply. The reasons are layered: a property crisis that has eroded household wealth, a generational shift in values, and a creeping suspicion that the category has confused price increases with brand building. As Mondes Dumesnil put it, customers have not stopped buying. They have stopped buying things that no longer feel worth it.

Against that backdrop, the panel converged on a simple diagnosis. Luxury cannot raise its way out of this. It has to earn its way back in.

Selfridges: from department store to retail media company

Andrew Keith joined Selfridges as managing director in late 2020 and took the chief executive role the following year, steering the group through the Central Group acquisition and a difficult stretch for British luxury before stepping down in autumn 2024. The thesis he articulated in his final years still defines how the business is being run: the future of the group, which also owns Brown Thomas and Arnotts as separate banners with their own heritage and customer base, is not as a department store at all. It is as what Keith called a retail media company.

The distinction matters. A department store sells products. A retail media company sells attention, context, and belonging, with product as the medium. That reframing is reshaping how Selfridges thinks about everything from buying to building. The Oxford Street flagship is being reimagined around a 2,500-square-metre members' club where loyalty is earned through time spent and money spent rather than points accumulated. The buying philosophy has tightened: where the food hall once stocked seventy varieties of pepper mill, it now carries ten, each chosen with conviction. The principle is curation as confidence.

Keith was direct about the non-negotiables. Selfridges will not chase volume at the expense of point of view. It will not let the building become a backdrop for brands to do their own thing. And it will not treat sustainability as a marketing layer. The group has committed to halving its environmental impact by 2030, a target that constrains buying decisions in ways that show up on the shop floor.

Diriyah: building a city to host a category

Nosseir's brief is unusual. Diriyah Company is developing a 14-square-kilometre district on the outskirts of Riyadh, on the site where the first Saudi state was founded three centuries ago. The 62.2 billion dollar project includes residential neighbourhoods, cultural institutions, hotels, and two retail precincts: a heritage-led quarter rooted in the historic Al-Turaif district, and a contemporary high street called Grand Avenue. All of it sits above 40 metres of buried infrastructure, so that the surface experience is uninterrupted by service vehicles or visible utilities.

Her pitch to luxury houses is not the obvious one. Diriyah is not selling traffic. It is selling permanence. The argument is that a brand opening in Diriyah is not opening a store, it is taking a position in a place that will still matter in fifty years. That framing has resonated. Several luxury maisons have signed leases for spaces that will not open until 2027 or later.

Nosseir's non-negotiable is authenticity to place. Diriyah will not become a generic luxury mall transplanted to the desert. The architecture, the materials, the rhythm of the streets all draw on the local Najdi vernacular. Brands that want in have to engage with that context, not paper over it.

Christian Louboutin: the discipline of saying no

Alexis Mourot has spent his career in luxury, and he speaks about the category with the patience of someone who has watched several cycles play out. Christian Louboutin is a brand built on a single visual signature, the red sole, born in the early 1990s when the founder reached for a bottle of nail lacquer to colour a prototype that felt too quiet. That gesture has become one of the most recognised marks in fashion.

Mourot's job is to protect it. Under his leadership, the brand has redesigned its signature stiletto, the Missy, lowering the heel from 16 centimetres to 10 to meet how women actually want to wear heels today. The men's category, under creative designer Jaden Smith, has expanded the brand's vocabulary without diluting it. New categories, from beauty to leather goods, are evaluated against five pillars Mourot returns to constantly: joy, audacity, a Parisian point of view, authenticity, and craftsmanship.

The pillars function as a filter. A product idea that does not deliver on at least four of them does not move forward. That discipline, Mourot argued, is what separates a brand with a long future from one busy chasing the present.

What the panel agreed on

For all their differences, the three executives converged on a few points. Luxury is not in trouble because customers have run out of money. It is in trouble because too many houses have run out of conviction. The recovery, if it comes, will be led by businesses that know what they are for and are willing to say no to almost everything else.

Asked to describe the luxury of tomorrow in a single word each, the answers were telling. Mourot offered craftsmanship. Nosseir chose authentic, the sense of a place and a product that feels earned rather than manufactured. Keith offered two: welcome and wonder. The sense that everyone belongs, and that the unexpected awaits around every corner.

Together, these answers map something important about the direction luxury retail is travelling. Not toward the cold, the exclusive, or the distant, but toward something more human, more layered, and more memorable than a transaction could ever be.