By Alex Low
Image: Chinh Le Duc/ Unsplash
Luxury has long defined itself through material expression — objects designed to signal taste, leisure and distance from necessity. For decades, these symbols aligned neatly with where cultural and financial power sat. That alignment is now breaking down.
As a growing segment of Gen Z moves into skilled trades and hands-on careers, luxury’s assumptions about where wealth forms and how it expresses itself are increasingly outdated. The issue isn’t declining interest in quality or craftsmanship. It’s a failure of recognition.
Wealth Beyond the Office
Image: Kemal Kozbaev/Unsplash
Twenty years ago at my school, there was always something being built: a new classroom, a sports facility, a school hall. Despite the scale of these projects, the fundraising targets were always met. What stood out wasn’t just generosity, it was who was giving. Many of the parents underwriting these efforts were electricians, HVAC technicians, construction workers and small business owners.
Long before white-collar prestige began to wobble, these households were already generating real wealth. They accumulated assets, funded infrastructure and achieved financial autonomy quietly, without the cultural validation typically associated with affluence.
That pattern has only intensified. Today a growing share of Gen Z is choosing skilled trades — electricians, plumbers, mechanics, contractors — paths that often deliver earlier income, clearer trajectories and tangible asset ownership. From a business perspective, this cohort represents stable cash flow, repeat purchasing behaviour and a strong preference for durability over display.
Yet luxury continues to measure affluence through office prestige, polished appearances and symbolic consumption. As a result, it systematically overlooks environments where purchasing power is real but not performative: job sites, workshops, garages and small businesses.
Under Pressure
Image: Hans Gaber/ Unsplash
Many of luxury’s most enduring icons emerged not from fashion houses or marketing departments, but from environments where performance was non-negotiable. Field watches and dive watches became aspirational because they worked reliably under stress. Their prestige followed proof, not positioning.
The Omega Speedmaster offers a similar lesson. Its cultural authority was not engineered through branding, but earned through external validation. Chosen by NASA for its ability to withstand extreme conditions, its mythology was forged in an environment where failure had consequences. Where prestige was once conferred through external performance under constraint, it’s now often mediated through visibility, amplified by influencers, aesthetics and algorithmic proximity rather than proof.
Skilled trades today involve physical risk, technical mastery and accountability for outcomes. Mistakes cost time, money and safety. These are precisely the environments that historically generated legitimacy and long-term prestige. Yet modern luxury largely engages with this world only at the level of aesthetics, treating function as reference rather than requirement.
Luxury’s Blind Spot
Photo: Nicolas I./ Unsplash
From a strategic standpoint, luxury isn’t losing relevance; it’s misreading where new forms of affluence are consolidating and how they define value. It has always borrowed authority from environments that couldn’t afford failure. Those environments still exist; they’re simply less visible from the showroom.
The opportunity for luxury is not to imitate the aesthetics of work, but to re-enter environments where performance still confers status. As more wealth consolidates outside traditional prestige pathways, recognition becomes the strategic advantage. The brands that understand where legitimacy is still earned will be better positioned to serve a generation that values proof over presentation.
