In an era defined by planned obsolescence and algorithmic trends, a quiet reversal is taking place in luxury markets. The most coveted objects are no longer the ones fresh from the box. They’re the ones that have aged alongside their owners. Ones that are scarred, patinated, and irreplaceable.
Walk through any design-forward hotel lobby or creative studio and you’ll see the evidence: the leather jacket that’s molded to its owner’s shoulders, the raw denim faded unevenly where light hit it differently over years, the vintage Hermès dress with seams that tell you it was sewn by hand, the Rolex Submariner with a bezel worn soft at the edges. These aren’t objects in decline. They’re objects at their peak. Intimate, biographical, and impossible to replicate.
The shift represents something deeper than aesthetic preference. It signals a fundamental change in how consumers, particularly younger ones, are defining value itself. Longevity has become the new status signal. Wear has become proof of life lived, not product neglected. And the brands positioned to capitalize on this moment are the ones designing not for the unboxing, but for year seven.
Advika Aggarwal has been tracking this evolution from the inside. As Senior Director of Marketing at ROAM Luggage and previously the strategist behind Paravel’s transformation into a category leader, she has spent her career at the intersection of craft, culture, and commerce, building brands for consumers who increasingly ask what their purchases say about who they are and what they value.
“We’re seeing a complete inversion of the traditional luxury playbook,” says Aggarwal. “The products people keep for ten to fifteen years are now more valuable than anything fresh from the box. Newness used to be the signal. Now it’s proof you just got here.”
The Psychology of Travel Objects
Of all the categories experiencing this shift, travel goods may be the most revealing. Unlike a worn leather jacket that looks better with age or denim that fades to perfection, luggage at year seven doesn’t get more beautiful. It looks used. Gate-checked, scuffed, dented, weathered. And yet people keep it, often decades past when it looks good, sometimes decades past when it functions perfectly.
That’s what makes the attachment so revealing.
Research on object attachment shows that people form deeper emotional bonds with items that accompany them through transitional experiences and few objects witness more private, transformative moments than luggage. Hotel rooms at dawn. Delays that turned into adventures. The weight of a bag as you board a plane toward something unknown.
This intimacy explains why consumers keep luggage longer than nearly any other object they own, often decades past functional obsolescence. Every scratch becomes a story. Every dent encodes a memory. The suitcase becomes a biographical record, an artifact that holds not just belongings but identity itself. The relationship transcends aesthetics entirely.
Aggarwal saw this firsthand at Paravel, where she led brand and marketing strategy as the company redefined what luggage could mean in modern culture. “In an industry where luggage had always been purely functional, we were building for people who understood that the objects you travel with say something about how you move through the world,” she explains. “The goal wasn’t to make luggage aspirational through marketing. It was to make products people would want to keep.” Under her leadership, Paravel’s revenue more than doubled and international markets posted triple-digit growth. The brand earned recognition as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies and became a category leader in modern luxury travel. The Aviator100 Collection, the first 100% recycled polycarbonate suitcase in the luxury segment proved that conviction could drive cultural relevance even in utilitarian categories.
But the more significant shift was in how consumers responded. Paravel customers weren’t cycling through products seasonally. They were forming attachments, repairing rather than replacing, and treating their luggage as extensions of personal identity. The brand had tapped into something the industry had missed: people wanted objects designed to age with them, not despite them.
Longevity as the New Status Signal
This appetite for endurance reflects broader cultural exhaustion with disposability. Resale platforms now show premiums on worn Rolex pieces over unworn models. Heritage brands like Hermès and Gucci report waitlists for restoration services. In menswear, “my grandfather’s Filson bag” has become a personality trait. Quiet luxury, the rejection of logos in favor of craft and longevity, has moved from insider signaling to mainstream aspiration.
The shift is generational but not demographic. It’s philosophical. Younger consumers, in particular, are asking what their choices signal about their values. They want products that improve over time rather than degrade, that develop character rather than require replacement, that can be worn proudly because the wear itself tells a story.
“Keeping something for ten or fifteen years is the real flex now,” Aggarwal says. “It’s proof of discernment, not just purchasing power. It means you chose well the first time and you’ve lived enough life with it to make it yours.”
At ROAM, where each suitcase is hand-assembled in Vidalia, Georgia, and customized to the individual, this philosophy shapes every design decision. Materials are chosen not for pristine presentation but for how they patina – leather that darkens with handling, hardware that develops character, shells engineered to absorb the evidence of miles traveled.
“We’re designing for performance over time, not performance at purchase,” Aggarwal explains. “That’s the luxury metric that actually matters. Not how it looks in the store, but how it holds up in year seven when it’s crossed thirty countries and carries memories you can’t even fully articulate.”
Building Systems, Not Campaigns
This approach of designing for the decade rather than the debut reflects how Aggarwal thinks about brands entirely. She describes herself not as a marketer but as a brand architect, a distinction that shapes everything. Architects don’t just design what people see from the street. They design foundations, structural systems, and how people actually move through and inhabit a space. That’s exactly how she approaches brands: as three-dimensional worlds where identity, operations, and experience must reinforce each other.
At Coach, she helped launch pet accessories—not as a merchandising play, but by recognizing that people eventually stop buying more bags. “The extras—the things people don’t need—are often where they express who they’re becoming,” she notes. “A dog collar isn’t functional merchandise. It’s identity work.”
Her training at Parsons School of Design formalized this systems approach, pairing design students with MBA candidates to solve problems for major luxury brands. The mandate: diagnose the actual problem, not the stated one. Often it was positioning, not promotion. Structure, not storytelling.
What This Means for Luxury’s Next Chapter
If longevity is the new status signal, the implications reach beyond product design into how brands position themselves, communicate value, and measure success. It requires designing for the long relationship rather than the quick transaction. Investing in materials that cost more upfront but perform better over years. To resist the pressure of constant newness in favor of depth.
It also requires honesty about what sustainability actually means. For Aggarwal, the term has been diluted by brands treating it as marketing differentiation rather than embedded infrastructure. True sustainability, she argues, isn’t about messaging. It’s about building objects people want to keep.
“The most sustainable product is the one someone doesn’t throw away,” she says. “That’s not a function of material alone. It’s emotional, cultural, and operational. It’s designing something that improves with wear, that absorbs memory, that becomes irreplaceable.”
Aggarwal also challenges the conventional “customer-first” mantra. Brands need conviction as much as they need feedback, she argues. “If you lose clarity about what you stand for, you’ll chase every request and dilute your identity. Great brands listen, then interpret. They solve the problem underneath the request, not the request itself.”
For an industry navigating the tension between growth and identity, the brands most likely to endure won’t be the ones that expand fastest. They’ll be the ones built with the structural discipline of systems designers and the cultural fluency of storytellers who understand what people are reaching for when they choose to keep something for a decade.
In a market defined by churn, that kind of staying power, both in products and in the brands behind them may be the ultimate luxury.