Why This Brand Whisperer Thinks Luxury Needs a New Kind of Magazine
PARIS — Dom Leguay is used to telling stories.
A longtime creative consultant for luxury brands, she specializes in helping them to articulate their identity, develop products and branch out into new segments. But as the sector suffers its deepest slump in 15 years, luxury needs to reinvent itself by broadening its reach to new subcultures, she told WWD in an interview.
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That’s why Leguay, founder and creative director of Alchimie Paris, and Bernard Nazaire, associate director of the agency, are launching their own magazine with a party on Tuesday during Paris Men’s Fashion Week.
They hope the annual publication, named Resonant, will “set ideas in motion and open a dialogue with the players of the future,” they said in a statement. A freeform showcase for activists, artists, writers, scientists and experts, the first issue explores the theme of night as a space of exploration and dissent.
“It’s a magazine of divergence and free spirits designed to help people form their own opinions and convictions,” explained Leguay, adding that the magazine is a springboard for a cycle of conferences she hopes to bring to Italy, and potentially further afield.
Tuesday’s event will feature a talk hosted by Leguay and Alina Gurdiel, the editor of Ma Nuit au Musée, a collection of books published by Stock written by authors who spend a night alone in a museum. “Young people are thirsty for culture and reading,” she noted.
The 144-page magazine, which is printed on FSC mix paper, retails for 40 euros and is available at bookstores including OFR, Les Cahiers de Colette and L’Ecume des Pages in Paris. The first issue has just three advertisers, none of whom had previously advertised in print: Patou, Diptyque and Frédéric Malle.
Leguay thinks luxury brands must pivot from their elevation strategy and pay closer attention to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. “We keep reading stereotypes about these cohorts. That’s not very interesting. What’s interesting is being able to detect the lines of emerging youth cultures,” she said.
Those youths are abandoning luxury in droves, recent statistics show.
The market for personal luxury goods fell 2 percent at current exchange rates in 2024, its first slowdown in 15 years excluding the coronavirus pandemic period, according to the latest Bain-Altagamma Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study, which expects the segment to grow between 0 percent and 4 percent this year.
For the first time in the 23-year history of the report, the customer base contracted. The luxury market lost around 50 million customers between 2022 and 2024, shrinking to an estimated 350 million at the end of last year, it said.
Even as brands have made inroads into areas including sports and entertainment, they’ve lost touch with the micro-cultures that inform younger consumers, who aspire to buy meaningful products that reflect their ever-evolving selves, Leguay argued.
“It’s important to speak to very young generations who will be the luxury consumers of tomorrow and to listen to them, to hear them and not leave them out,” she said. “The key question is: what is precious to a young person?”
Rather than relying on data, the key is to explore emotional connections, she said, citing the example of Chinese niche fragrance brand Documents, which opened a bookstore featuring 200 tomes curated around the topic of trees, or Chanel’s Comètes Collective of three makeup artists with highly diverse backgrounds.
As cultural leaders, she believes brands have a duty to better understand and represent the symbols and aesthetics of other parts of the world. “That is also the role of luxury: to work on myths, totems and other powerful elements — and not just stick a dragon on the back of a T-shirt,” she said.
Focusing mainly on beauty, jewelry, and wines and spirits, Alchimie specializes in challenging data thanks to its team of creative “profilers” as far afield as Colombia and China, and a global network of 300 consultants ranging from neuroscientists and videogame experts, to textile experts and ethnologists.
“Given that we work on projects sometimes four or five years upstream, we’re bound by strict confidentiality rules, and even when we develop a brand from A to Z for a large group, which we’ve done several times, we’re not even allowed to say on social media that we invented the name and the strategy,” Leguay said.
“When you help someone give birth, it’s not the midwife that matters, it’s the person having the baby,” she reasoned.
Traditionally reliant on word-of-mouth, the agency is stepping out of its comfort zone with the magazine project, which will shine a light on its methods and thinking.
“At one point, we had a tool that analyzed brand territories through the filter of religion. It was immediately pilfered. Then, we developed a tool that analyzed them according to archetypes. That was immediately pilfered too. So now we no longer use archetypes, but a mix of figures and anthropology,” she said.
Amid unprecedented creative upheaval at European fashion houses, the consultant would appear to have her work cut out for her. “I love working on brands that have lost their way,” she said, describing the process of forensically teasing out a brand’s identity.
“You need to define your own vocabulary and renew it,” she continued. “Luxury must start afresh, or it will become an endangered species. It’s a species worth protecting, but I think that you can no longer approach it through a very commercial, data-driven lens.”
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