before it's obvious
While retail collapses around it, Saks continues moving product from 380+ brands including LVMH and Kering. This isn't resilience—it's consolidation. The real story: luxury has completely decoupled from traditional retail structures. Bankruptcy is now just noise in the background of a system that's already rewired itself.
Luxury and stratification are moving in opposite directions simultaneously. While mass-market retail implodes, high-end brands are shipping unmolested through the chaos—and simultaneously, luxury is fragmenting vertically (beauty, food, speakers, urns). Meanwhile, tech infrastructure (AI, touchscreens, dynamic interfaces) is accelerating regardless of whether the output is any good. The pattern: winners aren't staying in their lane anymore. They're expanding sideways into categories that used to be separate.
Asics moving Onitsuka Tiger into beauty and food signals a larger shift: legacy fashion houses treating their brand as a platform, not a product line. Expect more high-end designers launching adjacent categories in the next 6 months. This is how you survive when retail channels collapse—you become the entire lifestyle.