Photo found at Trendhunter.com, believed to be from a Michael Kors campaign

For several months I’ve been collecting articles about the luxury industry’s contraction and resulting mandate for a new strategy if they’re to survive. Sameer Reddy writes for Newsweek, Luxury’s Image Problem: Having Lots of Fancy Toys is Suddenly Not So Chic:

Until now, the luxury world has represented an ideal lifestyle that the masses aspired to achieve. The models in advertising campaigns for companies like Michael Kors and Jimmy Choo are perpetually stepping off private jets or lounging poolside in five-inch stilettos.

The luxury industry will still represent an ideal lifestyle that the masses will aspire to achieve, it will just have to adjust to the new ideal.

But the economic meltdown has left luxury with an image problem. Signifiers of social status are suddenly out of fashion…

The old signifiers are out of fashion. What will be the new ones?

…and those who previously flaunted their toys without hesitation are thinking twice before taking their Bentleys out for a spin, lest they end up with egg all over the windshield, or worse. Banking scandals and Bernie Madoff’s massive fraud has made the luxury machine look guilty by association, and, somehow, luxury needs to regain its luster.

Here we are back to ‘let them eat cake.’

Unfortunately, consumers are showing little response to the tired, old marketing strategies on which the industry has relied for the past decades, and elite brands are in danger of coming across to consumers as alienatingly out of touch.

Another recurring theme - all the ads and imagery that are suddenly ’so 2007.’

The solution, then, is to look toward luxury’s next evolutionary stage: value-driven, sustainable, conscious—the antithesis of its traditional glorification of conspicuous consumption.

Consciousness and ethics become cool. Enter stealth wealth - those new under-the-radar coded symbols that whisper, not shout, one’s cognizance of the post meltdown reality.

Claire Hamilton, an editor at WGSN, a leading trade publication focused on industry trends, confirms this shift, observing that “the brand logo has come to signify a cheap substitution for workmanship, and a meaningless markup. People want to believe that they’re smarter than that.“

Paying big bucks for bling now only signifies that you’re a sucker.

For labels struggling to come up with an alternative solution, she advocates “producing fewer items of greater value and durability…

Less disposable volume, more longevity.

…better suited to the more eco-conscious direction in which consumers are moving. Companies that produce finely made, long-lasting products will win admiration from aspiring customers, who in this era of connectivity are reading more about the brands they buy, and sharing more opinions. It’s time to show off the real mechanics behind the brand, and not just the celebrities wearing it.”

Aspiration alive and well, but pointed in the direction of declaring one’s awareness, education, consciousness.

So what’s the prescription for success?

By investing in an image that encompasses more than blatant self-interest, luxury brands can build a postcrisis business foundation that rehabilitates the industry’s reputation and offers a compelling rationale for consumers to start spending once more.

Beyond blatant self-interest? This is a paradigm shift that cannot be understated.