In 1935, German philosopher Walter Benjamin warned that mechanical reproduction would erode the “aura” of art. By allowing paintings and photographs to be copied endlessly, he argued, technology detached cultural objects from the unique contexts (time and place) that gave them meaning. Half a century later, Andy Warhol’s factory flipped this theory on its head. By reproducing Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe portraits at industrial scale, Warhol collapsed the distinction between commerce and culture, suggesting that mass production and repetition could become a form of value in itself.
Today, generative AI has taken both ideas to their logical conclusion. Image production has become limitless, allowing anyone to create a brand logo, campaign visuals, product photography, or editorial-style imagery in seconds. But if photography challenged the aura of the artwork, AI seems to challenge the aura of the image itself. Where Warhol imagined the factory of images, AI has turned artificial manufacture into the default which has created a crisis of memorability and meaning for brands.
“The bar for what counts as memorable has gone up, not down,” says Radek Wójcik, executive creative director at creative agency Made Thought. “Anyone can create beautiful things now, so beauty on its own stops being a differentiator.”
Codifying brand values through distinctive logos, monograms, wordmarks, and campaigns is still crucial — even though AI has dramatically lowered the cost of producing those assets, and most creative teams are using the tech for storyboarding and campaign mock-ups, if not for the images themselves. But what remains difficult to build is everything that happens after that image is created: recognition, trust, memory, and emotional resonance. In this sense, AI has changed the economics of branding: execution has become abundant, but meaning has become scarce.
The consequences are especially visible across the luxury sector. In the last 12 months, brands from Loewe to Tiffany have been investing heavily in showcasing their archives, doubling down on long-term storytelling and platforming craftsmanship — not because they’ve run out of ideas, but because these are the last brand assets AI can’t accelerate. “The past is the last moat,” says Sean Monahan, co-founder of branding agency 8Ball. “Everything else is subject to imitation.”
Just as AI promises unlimited novelty, it’s why heritage brands appear to be looking backwards. Louis Vuitton’s trademark victory against Chinese tea chain Molly Tea for imitating its four-petal flower motif in early July underscored why this meaning runs far deeper than a logo.
“Of course that Louis Vuitton graphic code is beautiful, but it’s meaningless without the weight of a hundred-odd years of the brand,” says Andy Harvey, founder and executive creative director of creative agency Communion Studio. “That’s the bit that you can’t copy in my opinion.”
It’s a distinction that gets to the heart of luxury’s AI dilemma: images can now be generated instantly, but meaning still has to be accumulated.
Define your reason for being
Although heritage brands can compete on history, emerging brands can still build meaning from scratch. Experts say the most memorable brands begin by asking what they want people to feel, rather than what they should look like.
“Everything has to begin with consumer desire,” says Monahan. “Too many brands rely on associative imagery, riffing off of the well-established brand codes of others, rather than building a unique code from the ground up.”
Several experts cite niche running brands like Satisfy and District Vision as examples of newer, memorable brands that have managed to challenge incumbents like Nike and Adidas by defining their unique reasons for being from day one. Where District Vision’s founders have carved out a “slow luxury” cult status via focusing on mindfulness and highly technical Japanese engineering, Satisfy Running has built a brand world around rebellion and a “punk” ethos for runners.
“Satisfy has built an amazing brand and original proposition, because the founder, Brice Partouche, had a whole philosophy around how he wanted to run, but didn’t want to dress like an athlete. He didn’t want to leave his culture at the door,” says Chris Green, creative director at graphic design agency Commission Studio.
The resulting products — performance fabrics inspired by vintage band T-shirts and laser-cut ventilation resembling naturally worn cotton with moth holes — feel distinctive because they solve a cultural problem rather than chasing an aesthetic trend. “There was a reason for it being,” Green says. “You can tell it comes from somebody who wasn’t looking at the rest of the market, he was thinking: this is what I want to exist that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
This ability to identify a consumer desire may prove one of AI’s greatest limitations. While generative models excel at recognizing patterns across existing imagery, they are far less capable of identifying unmet cultural desires that haven’t yet acquired a visual language.
Think like a “memory engineer”
Once a brand has identified a need and carved out a distinctive identity, the challenge is to sustain that desire by etching itself in consumer memory. Behavioral scientists have long argued that in marketing, familiarity shapes preference. Experts say brands must ask what looks distinctive, but also what people will remember.
“Think less like a designer, and more like a memory engineer,” says Dan Bennett, senior partner and behavioral science lead at Ogilvy Consulting. “Brands exist as memory structures in people’s minds. Every interaction either strengthens or weakens those structures, so consistently and meaningfully showing up in their lives as a luxury brand is crucial. Codes like logos then aid with this memory retrieval because they reduce the cognitive effort to allow instant recognition.”
Bennett argues that logos become memorable when they are seen thousands of times in consistent contexts — contexts that are relevant to the reason for being that the brand identified in the first place. “Today, meaning and longevity come from repeated experiences and making sure your brand shows up in front of the right audiences, at the right time,” he adds.
In a digital world that commoditizes novelty, experts say luxury’s most successful brands are embracing visual restraint, ensuring each campaign deepens rather than disrupts consumers’ existing brand memories.
“If you intentionally keep returning to the same thoughts and brand world all the time with no deviation, that’s interesting and compelling in this oversaturated world, because it shows an authenticity that cannot be faked,” says Harvey.
Don’t be a “museum to the past”
At the same time, the difference between memorability and tired nostalgia hangs in the balance between repetition and relevance. Experts warn that heritage brands’ abilities to draw from their archives must still feel like a new chapter, through continuous reinterpretation.
Every expert Vogue Business spoke to cited Hermès as a blueprint for what this looks like in practice. Rather than treating heritage as a static archive, the house continually reinterprets the same brand codes — craftsmanship, equestrianism, visual restraint, and exceptional materials — through new products and stories. “A brand should never be a museum to the past,” says Harvey. “They’re constantly repeating themselves, but they’re never saying exactly the same thing.” He also cites Louis Vuitton’s consistent messaging around travel as a form of discovery as a strategy that both reminds consumers of its core product — luggage — and allows it to continually inject fresh meaning into the brand.
Seen this way, luxury heritage is less about age than accumulation. While generative AI models can easily reproduce the Hermès aesthetic, they can neither recreate the decades of brand behavior that’s made those symbols meaningful, nor predict what the brand will do next with its collections and campaigns.
Trends are the enemy
Where short-term virality on social platforms is no longer as valuable and consumers are increasingly seeking offline brand experiences and the ability to “disconnect”, several experts say that one of the most powerful things a brand can do to counteract AI automation is to reject the relentless cycle of content production altogether.
“Everything just needs to slow down,” says Commission Studio’s Green. “Brands could just post half as much stuff and none of us would miss them one bit — I understand that brands need to feel always present, but constant production ironically lacks a sense of permanence.”
He points to the “private dimension” manifesto that Phoebe Philo wrote ahead of her first collection at Celine in 2009 as an example of how restraint became part of the brand’s cultural value and meaning. Philo positioned luxury as something experienced rather than performed, reflected in the brand’s sparse advertising, infrequent press interviews, and her own reluctance to step into the spotlight.
“Philo knew that private dimension was Celine’s strength, because it was what generated hype between the shows — we were all left wondering what the brand was up to,” Green adds. The silence became part of the brand code, reinforcing the idea that true desirability didn’t need constant visibility or explanation. While just as much effort is poured into frequent social media campaigns, they often disappear within hours, thanks to platform algorithms that reward endless publishing, rather than lasting impact.
“The brand must be bigger than Instagram,” 8Ball’s Monahan says, adding that jumping on social trends is just as damaging to brand memorability as jumping on aesthetic trends in products. “Nothing has been more disastrous for brands than competing toe-to-toe with memetic content in the fast-paced ecosystem of social media. Imagery needs more than an eighth of a second to impact an audience.”
It’s why the strongest luxury brands increasingly derive value from experiences that can’t be consumed in a scroll: exceptional retail environments and memorable pop-ups, craftsmanship, service, communities, and rituals. Monahan cites Erewhon as a rare example of a modern brand that’s built cultural meaning and scarcity via the physical world, rather than digital visibility.
“Erewhon is probably the most successful new luxury brand of the last five years, achieving cult status despite its extremely limited footprint,” he says. “Unlike most luxury brands, which yes tend to be fashion brands rather than grocery stores, Erewhon hasn’t pursued a ‘growth at all costs’ strategy. They understand that the most important element of a brand is its lived experience in the real world — in their case, the store — and rather than chasing trends, have stayed true to their values. They aren’t producing pop-ups in every major global city; they’ve remained rarefied.”
While AI hasn’t made visual branding obsolete, it’s sharpened consumers’ ability to spot where branding is merely aesthetic, rather than earned. Where it can help compress the distance between imagination and execution for new ideas, it can’t accelerate the lived experience, cultural time, and memory-building that underpins a brand that stays etched in people’s minds. “There’s no AI button for meaning,” says Mad Thought’s Wójcik. “What can’t be generated is history, meaning, symbolism: the consistency and coherence of a visual language that people decipher and feel over time. It’s the part AI cannot shortcut, because it’s not a production problem, it’s a time problem.”