This article is part of the Vogue Business Index: H1 2025, an bi-annual objective scorecard of the 60 top luxury fashion brands, based on revenue. Advanced Members can read the full Vogue Business Index here.
2025 is shaping up to be a tumultuous year for the digital landscape, primarily driven by legislative and political changes in the US. TikTok’s ban and subsequent reintroduction on 19 January punctuated the arrival of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Meanwhile, Meta removed fact-checking across Facebook and Instagram on 7 January while altering its ‘Hateful Conduct’ policy and in turn widening the scope for anti-diversity rhetoric — a move that a group of House Democrats described as “currying favour with the Trump administration”.
While many of these changes occurred following our data capture period, which concluded on 31 December 2024, the Vogue Business H1 2025 Index highlights the shifts that took place among the digital space in the build-up.
Digital triumphs
In this chapter, we examine the digital field, reviewing brand performance across Western social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube) and Chinese social media (Weibo, Xiaohongshu and Douyin), as well as page views on Vogue Runway, website traffic from brand sites and Google search volume. Across social platforms, we examine a variety of metrics including followers, shares and views, offering comprehensive coverage of luxury brands operating in the digital space.
Dior takes back the top spot in digital after briefly being surpassed by Louis Vuitton in the H2 2024 edition. Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren entered the top five for the first time, where it replaced Chanel. Dior, Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton all lead on Western social channels, while Giorgio Armani marks itself an unlikely frontrunner on Chinese social media, placing second (32nd in Western channels).
The rise of Ralph Lauren represents the pendulum swing from luxury to premium labels, with 24 per cent of consumers saying they’ll switch to cheaper brands if the prices of goods continue to rise. The luxury slowdown, which first took hold in 2024, has translated to a ‘digital recession’ as platforms begin to deprioritise brand content within their algorithms, favouring low-budget, lo-fi digital content. Across Index brands, interactions have declined 19 per cent on Instagram and 4 per cent on Weibo, while views have dropped 93 per cent on YouTube. Tommy Hilfiger (Instagram and Weibo), Dior (Weibo) and Ferragamo (Youtube) are just three of the brands bucking this digital decline.
Forty per cent of luxury customers surveyed discover brands and products through social media, while a further 40 per cent use the channel to research brands ahead of purchasing. As consumers continue to spend less, engagement with the majority of luxury brands is expected to reduce in tandem. Brands themselves, however, should look to play the long game, engaging consumers with entertaining and culturally relevant content during their spending lull, while instilling values important to customers such as quality (34 per cent), value (15 per cent) and innovative design (11 per cent). This offers brands the ability to remain front of mind as the market makes a gradual recovery.
New brands enter
In this edition of the Vogue Business Index, three brands enter the ranking for the first time: Ami Paris, Jacquemus and Maje. With respective digital rankings of 38, 39 and 60, each brand spotlights a different approach to brand marketing.
Ami Paris, ranking highest out of the three, follows a largely traditional digital strategy. Its celebrity-centred tactics mimic those of top performing brands Dior and Louis Vuitton, with actors such as Whoopi Goldberg and Gavin Casalegno starring in brand campaigns, as well as Canadian singer-songwriter Henry Lau, who’s popular among the K-pop crowd. As with Dior and Louis Vuitton, Ami Paris’s content is polished but maintains a distinct brand feel that leans heavily on its heritage.
Despite France being the birth place of all three brands, the ‘Paris’ in Ami Paris represents the heartbeat of the house. Social campaigns, including Goldberg’s French-speaking pursuit for a croissant, tap into its Parisian roots, while the growing intersection between luxury and TV saw the brand feature in Netflix hit Emily in Paris. Out-of-home activations, such as taking over the rooftop of the city’s iconic Galeries Lafayette, once again strengthened the brand’s Parisian DNA.
Jacquemus’s social accounts are perhaps the most playful among the three entries. While celebrities still play a part — notably French footballer Jules Koundé and model Alex Consani — content features avant-garde campaign imagery, as well as the “making of” these very campaigns. The latter gives consumers a peek behind the curtain, showing the stars being covered in shaving foam or layered with cucumber to get the final shot. Beyond celebrity names, Jacquemus offers a blueprint for the ‘designer-as-influencer’ model, with posts featuring Simon Porte Jacquemus garnering as many as 12.6 million views on TikTok.
Maje, on the other hand, is struggling to gain traction on digital, scoring better in ESG (51 per cent), omnichannel (32 per cent) and innovation (32 per cent). With the second largest follower count of the three brands (8.2 million across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Weibo and Xiaohongshu), and the greatest number of posts (7,309 across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Weibo and Xiaohongshu), the brand scores the lowest of all 60 Index brands when it comes to social channels. With its posts mainly highlighting product, this speaks to the power of culturally relevant, lo-fi content. Considering its out-of-home experiences, such as a Maman Bakery takeover at New York Fashion Week and campaigns with British Brazilian artist Tessa Silva, there is space for the brand to leverage its marketing strategy across socials.
Perhaps the most notable difference is how each brand plays across various platforms. Jacquemus has tailored its content in a way that performs best on Western social media — particularly Instagram (75.8) and TikTok (88) — while only holding presence on one of the three Chinese social media platforms tracked. In comparison, Maje performs stronger on Chinese social media, driven by local celebrities on Douyin and Weibo, as well as campaigns to encourage user-generated content on Xiaohongshu, including a screenshot challenge encouraging users to share their digital styling of the brand’s Autumn/Winter 2024 collection. Despite not being present on Douyin, Ami Paris remains relatively consistent across both Western and Chinese social channels, with its Le Café Ami Beijing opening generating particular attention on Xiaohongshu.
Awareness of the three brands globally — and in China, specifically — highlights the importance of localised marketing. Ami Paris and Maje are respectively known to 40 per cent and 53 per cent of consumers globally, with this rising to 48 per cent and 62 per cent in China. Jacquemus, which has a relatively limited presence on Chinese social media, is the only brand of the three to see reduced awareness in the Chinese market, at 46 per cent (5 per cent less than its global awareness).
Celebrities secure the crown
While just 18 per cent of consumers discover new brands and products through celebrities, these popular figures remain at the centre of the most engaging content for luxury brands. In a review of the top 100 posts from December 2024 across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, two-thirds (66 per cent) of brand posts featured one or more stars. Louis Vuitton dominated the celebrity game with seven Instagram posts starring Australian rapper Felix from K-pop band Stray Kids (6.2 million total engagements), while South Korean actor Kim Soo-hyun emerged as the second most popular figure in an Instagram post for Prada (2.1 million engagements).
While celebrity content is a clear engagement win, brands should be aware that it may not always drive immediate returns. Four of the top 10 engaged with celebrities during December 2024 were from the Korean music scene; nevertheless, the average age of a K-pop fan is 23, per research from the Open Science Framework, so brands should look to layer their celebrity approaches to broaden reach. The fan bases of other high-engagement celebrities such as Zendaya, Consani and Sabrina Carpenter consist of both Gen Zs and millennials. With 59 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds spending less than $3,000 on luxury fashion per year, according to the Vogue Business Index, Gen Z are the lowest spenders of all generations — targeting their predecessors could be key.
Priming the next generation of luxury consumers is often seen as essential in instilling brand awareness and loyalty from a young age, but the investment may not pay dividends in the long run if tactics do not successfully resonate with target cohorts. Cultural tie-ups could help bridge this generational gap. Louis Vuitton’s campaign with Zendaya highlights the brand’s collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, while the ‘Biggie’ sunglasses worn by Carpenter in Versace’s campaign nod to late American rapper Notorious BIG. To appeal to a broad range of consumers, a broad range of talent and reference points are essential.
Case study: Prada Group’s social gains
Prada has long been a digital leader, remaining in the Index top five based on digital performance across the past eight editions. Fondazione Prada — a cultural institution launched in 1993 by Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli — has long served as the backbone of Prada’s cultural pursuits through a series of exhibition spaces and workshops. In this edition of the Vogue Business Index, the maison’s close ties to culture, from art to literature, continue to pay off in the digital sphere. The ‘Sound of Prada’ event, hosted in Seoul last October, contributed heavily to its social performance, cementing its position as the top performing brand on TikTok. The music event, previously held in Paris, London and Cannes, was curated by Grammy award-winner Anderson Paak, proving that in the current luxury landscape, entertainment through culture can serve as a surefire way to engage customers.
Miu Miu is witnessing an upward trajectory rivalling its stablemate across both sales and digital success. Rising five positions in the digital ranking over the past six months, the brand has witnessed strong gains across TikTok, YouTube and Xiaohongshu. On YouTube, its mixed format approach (both long-form and YouTube Shorts), has seen the brand become the fifth most-viewed on the platform, with a total of 31.2 million views across the six-month data capture period. Views were led by its nostalgic ‘Irreverent Wonder’ holiday campaign, as well its live-streamed SS25 runway show.
With ‘Miu Miu muses’ spanning cultural icons from Emma Corrin to Little Simz and Chloë Sevigny, the brand has solidified its position as one for the cool girls. Its success speaks to the curation of ambassadors from a wide spectrum of culture — but all within the zeitgeist — with a pinpoint accuracy of what its target audience desires the most from a brand. Purchase intent has risen 8.8 per cent since the last Vogue Business Index (ahead of Prada, which saw purchase intent decline by 8.9 per cent), with growth not expected to slow anytime soon. Miu Miu’s quirky aesthetic, bold styling and savvy approach to celebrity means it’s likely here to stay.
Key takeaways:
- Maintaining engagement during a digital recession. In a sign of the times, the nature of content users are seeking out on social platforms means maintaining engagement becomes a long game for luxury brands. Values such as quality, value and innovative design remain important for luxury shoppers, and should be the backbone of brand storytelling during this period.
- New Index brands offer varied digital strategies. Latest additions Ami Paris, Jacquemus and Maje join the digital pillar with different strategies and varying levels of success. Ami Paris follows a classic approach leaning on its celebrity ambassadors and heritage, while Jacquemus offers a peek behind the curtain of its experimental campaigns.
- Making the most of celebrity culture. Star power prevails in social engagement, most notably in the K-pop scene where most fans are yet to even reach full spending power. While priming the next generation of luxury shoppers is a tried-and-tested approach, it is not without risk. Coupling celebrity talent with intergenerational appeal through cultural touchpoints could maximise success.
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