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It struck me when I made a quick image search recently. If you typed luxury or luxury trends in a search engine, you would much certainly end up with fashion-related results some years ago. When you use the same keywords today, the search results bring up decoration, travel, and interior-related results mostly. Yes, this long-due post is about fashion brands venturing into to home business.

Luxury has always been evolving. Some brands initially targeting women started slowly tapping into menswear and vice versa. And luxury brands knew they could not always sell to the masses. They had to devise a plan to reach to the masses with more affordable products. Then came cosmetics and perfumes; the democratisation of luxury. Today, cosmetics make an important part of luxury sales.

Luxury shopping habits have been shifting. Over the last decade, customers, especially those in the western and more saturated markets, switched from product-oriented buying to experience-focused buying in luxury. Fine dining and luxury holidays were replacing buying luxury bags and watches. Companies realising that they cannot sell monogram bags in a variety of shades and shapes started tapping into unchartered territories.

Brands with bigger ambitions and long-term vision realised that they should offer the brand's values and the brand experience as a whole which is a total lifestyle experience. So, luxury houses started offering homeware to complement the brand lifestyle. Interiors is one area that all the luxury and fashion designers are considering and making a switch into slowly. Is it a new thing? Not at all.

Ralph Lauren began to offer iconic furniture and homeware items for some Americanness at home around the ’80s as well as being a preppy American fashion classic. Fendi was one of the oldest luxury brands to offer furniture since the ’80s. Armani and Oscar de la Renta were some famous luxury houses that started offering homeware around the millennium.

This move also made so much sense as homeware was their next best bet that is related to design. Fashion is about design and aesthetics which also overlaps with interiors and homeware.

This enabled luxury brands to tap into a market that has not yet been fully covered. And what better way to offer products as a company that is already well-known. Customers can find the same prints to adorn their homes in their favourite designer’s colours and patterns (I for one would love to get my home decorated with Missoni’s unique and multicoloured patterns).

It was interesting to see how luxury brands were evolving their merchandise towards a more integrated lifestyle proposal offering clothes, accessories, and homeware to offer a total brand experience in different areas of life which can certainly immerse customers deeper into the brand universe.

As the market shares were shrinking and sales became scarce due to changes in customer preferences, luxury houses and fast fashion brands understood that they needed to diversify their portfolio as well.

In recent years, big brands like Gucci, YSL and Dior started their interior lines offering products like decorative objects, pillows and textiles, kitchen utensils, and more.

Some of the fast-fashion retailers like Primark or Zara had already launched their home sections a while back. Zara Home has already become a strong separate brand that is sold in standalone stores. H&M joined the ranks and came up with homeware and even started to offer products in separate shops dedicated to its new line.

Considering this generation’s struggles, while buying a home is a dream for a vast majority and all the increasing cost of living, companies offering affordable decorative items such as cushions, candles, frames, rugs, and alike can attract the struggling generation who is tight on money and live in small spaces.

With the pandemic, working from home is indispensable for some. People need to divide their homes with a corner for work/study and another to relax, another one to eat and one to refresh, etc.

But all of these multiple activities are mostly taking place in the same place. People started to look for creative and pleasant ways to redecorate whether to separate their living rooms from their children’s nurseries or to avoid being distracted by the comfort of the living room. Our living space has its own rituals dedicated to each different activity to make us feel like we are in the gym or going out or lunch or we are working in the office in the quiet, etc. Several fast fashion and luxury brands are foraying into homeware to reap the benefit of this relatively untapped market.

Especially nowadays, with a little push of the pandemic, as people began to spend more and more time indoors at home, everyone is looking for ways to personalise the space they live in. As people turn their attention to their nests, more retailers now have a corner dedicated to homeware and we will definitely see this big trend continue in the following years.