The Dive // Why emotional wellbeing has become the ultimate marker of desirability.
Here we are, the last lap of the year. Only two months left of 2025. We need to run it hard.
Today, the streets of New York City pulsed with endurance as thousands crossed the marathon finish line. Over 50,000 runners from more than 140 countries filled the city with a collective rhythm of breath, persistence, and purpose. In an age where health has become both a personal pursuit and a cultural aspiration, completing a marathon now carries a meaning beyond sport — it signals discipline, emotional resilience, and privilege. The ability to care for one’s body, to dedicate time to training, recovery, and balance, has become one of the new forms of status.
Recently, a close friend — a marathoner who also works in the luxury industry — was advising a top Maison on expanding a key vertical within the business. After months immersed in that universe, she shared that her most meaningful purchase during the experience, despite having access to the employee sales, was not a bag, shoes, or a watch. It was an Ōura Ring.
That reflection brought me back to the article we wrote some months ago, Tariffs, Shifting Values, and the Rise of Experience, and how luxury continues to evolve from possession to perception, from display to depth. Just as a retreat can carry the emotional weight of a Birkin, this moment revealed that the most meaningful expressions of luxury today are not necessarily about what we acquire, but about what helps us reconnect with our inner selves and needs.
A ring that may not carry the price of a handbag can still offer something far greater — a quiet awareness of your body, wellbeing, and health.
Let’s dive into what this shift means for the future of luxury — and for you.
The ability to afford a product does not necessarily mean that this product delivers what is now understood as the experience of luxury. A recent Bain & Company study found that 74% of luxury consumers associate value with emotional wellbeing rather than product ownership.
Value itself is shifting from the tangible to the intangible, from price to meaning. What people seek today is not simply to own, but to experience themselves more fully through what they choose. Nearly 80% of high-net-worth consumers now prioritize experiences, including travel, art, gastronomy, and wellbeing, over material possessions.
Luxury has evolved from a symbol of display and possession into a practice of regulation. In a time when exhaustion has become a collective condition, peace of mind and body has emerged as the ultimate privilege.
After decades of expansion and accumulation, the industry has reached a point of saturation. Growth is no longer measured by scale but by significance. In a market overflowing with offers, rarity is no longer about availability, but about coherence, clarity, and depth. The next chapter of luxury will belong to those who grow through meaning rather than multiplication, and who cultivate value as something cultural, symbolic, and emotional.
The world we inhabit runs faster than our capacity to process it. Information, expectations, and connection are constant. Data has become the ultimate source of truth, and the way we use this data defines how we live. Studies show that one third of all global data is related to health. As we often write in our columns, the most sought-after experiences today are designed to slow us down, from wellness retreats and longevity programs to sleep optimization tools and biofeedback rings. They remind us that in a culture shaped by acceleration, equilibrium has become the rarest form of power.
The visual language of luxury has also reached its point of standardization. For a generation that values individuality over perfection, desire now stems from sincerity, not symmetry. The future of luxury will not be built through uniformity but through creative courage, through brands that dare to feel, to take risks, and to reveal personality over polish.
Over the past decade, luxury entered what could be called the age of experience. From immersive boutiques and phygital activations to the continuous flow of content created for sharing, the industry mastered the art of visibility. Luxury became an aesthetic language of presence, carefully curated, published, and performed. Yet this constant state of presence has generated its own kind of fatigue. According to McKinsey’s State of Fashion 2025, consumers are spending over 60% more time engaging with luxury content than they did five years ago, while their emotional satisfaction has dropped by nearly half. The more we consume luxury, the less we seem to feel it.
Today’s most recognized leaders are reinterpreting what value means. If luxury once represented control, power, and performance, it now represents something closer to integration. Leaders who understand this change are no longer defined by their output but by their ability to remain grounded within uncertainty. The capacity to create psychological safety, manage attention, and sustain energy has become an advantage.
A Deloitte study from 2024 found that 68% of senior leaders now monitor at least one biometric indicator daily, treating wellbeing as a form of responsibility. The focus has shifted from performance management toward energy management, from the optimization of output toward the cultivation of coherence.
For leadership and for the luxury industry as a whole, this transformation invites humility. To guide others in a culture of fatigue, we must learn how to protect our own balance. The future of influence will be led by those who embody steadiness rather than exhaustion.
As the year draws to a close, these questions take on a sharper relevance. What does balance look like when the world itself moves without pause? What movements should we be paying attention to? In this week’s The Dive, we remind you of three topics shaping this new landscape of luxury, where recovery becomes refinement, where attention builds ecosystems, and where wellbeing defines the architecture of lifestyle.
#1 – When Recovery Becomes Refinement
The wellness market has entered a phase of sophistication that aligns it more closely than ever with the codes of luxury. What once appeared as an alternative lifestyle has become an infrastructure of care, precision, and emotional calibration. Devices such as Ōura, Eight Sleep, and Apollo Neuro are redefining the relationship between health and aspiration. The Finnish company Ōura, now valued at 11 billion dollars, has built an ecosystem that combines minimalist design with biometric intelligence, allowing users to interpret sleep, temperature, heart rate, and recovery as part of a larger narrative of self-regulation. Its newest generation integrates an AI advisor that interprets health data conversationally, creating a bridge between technology and empathy.
Alongside it, Eight Sleep is transforming rest into a measurable and adaptive experience. With over one billion hours of sleep data analyzed and a recent funding round of one hundred million dollars, the company is positioning rest as the next frontier of performance and longevity. Its AI models each user’s physiology to predict and adjust recovery in real time, turning comfort into science and transforming the bed into an intelligent system of equilibrium. Executives are turning to the same tools once reserved for athletes. Ōura, Eight Sleep, Garmin, and Apollo Neuro have entered corporate wellness programs at companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Deloitte, illustrating how the pursuit of vitality and mental balance has become integral to professional life.
The appeal of these instruments lies in their discretion. They are not designed to project success but to sustain it quietly. In a world where visibility has reached saturation, they represent a subtler form of distinction: invisible, precise, and profoundly personal. The ability to understand and regulate one’s internal state has become a contemporary expression of refinement, a measure of self-mastery that values restoration as a form of strength. This convergence between wellness and luxury marks a cultural realignment, where the preservation of coherence begins to replace the performance of excess.
#2 – Worlds That Luxury Now Inhabits
The rising visibility of tennis and endurance sports reflects how attention has become one of the defining currencies of our time. The 2025 US Open averaged 1.1 million viewers across ESPN networks, a 39% increase from the previous year, while the men’s final reached three million viewers, an 82% rise, according to Sports Media Watch. These numbers suggest that people are seeking more than entertainment; they are drawn to places where precision and presence can coexist. On the court, every gesture carries intention. Brands understand this resonance. Rolex continues to shape its narrative around the discipline and time of the game, while Nike and On Running mirror the spirit of energy and renewal. Even the players themselves embody the same dialogue between emotion and refinement. Aryna Sabalenka, now collaborating with IM8, a platform dedicated to optimizing performance and recovery through science and technology, embodies this new alignment between wellbeing and excellence. Her custom jewelry, designed around the number eight to mark her eighth appearance at the tournament, extends that symbolism of balance and continuity, a ritual of focus that connects body, emotion, and design.
