Selling the vibe: Why fashion brands need more than just product

In the last decade, the currency of fashion has moved decisively beyond fabric and form. Value now resides in broader social, cultural and environmental significance. A pair of jeans is never just a denim garment; it stands as an emblem of creativity, community and lifestyle values. Every garment is a transaction of meaning: the buyer aligns with its narrative, the brand broadcasts a point of view.

To be considered in a discerning customer’s purchasing intention, a fashion house must achieve awareness and convey what it stands for: its purpose, promise and values. Two textbook examples illustrate this vividly. Nike welds innovation with community to create aspiration; LVMH’s flagship, Louis Vuitton, pairs luxury with contemporary culture by aligning itself with global sports platforms from Formula 1 to the Paris Olympics. In doing so, it signals a marriage between heritage luxury and cultural immediacy. As Ana Andjelic, founder of The Sociology of Business, puts it: “A brand increases the product value by adding the emotional resonance and the symbolic dimension to it. Consumers are not buying products, they are buying stories.”

Those stories must now resonate as vibes. According to Vibe Marketing 2025 Statistics, searches for the term have surged 686 per cent over the past year, and nearly half of Fortune 500 companies are now experimenting with vibe-led strategies, enabling up to 80 per cent cuts in production costs while deepening consumer engagement. Echoing this shift, TrendHunter observes that brands are replacing demographic targeting with emotion-led strategies that emphasise mood and cultural resonance. Increasingly, AI is the mechanism making this possible.

Stories must now resonate as vibes

Marketers are using AI tools not only to generate content but to test and refine it against specific emotional tones and cultural signals. Industry data shows that 50 per cent of marketers already rely on AI to create first drafts, while 43 per cent use it specifically for social media content. Campaigns created in this way are often produced 40 per cent faster and at 32 per cent lower cost than traditional methods (Amra and Elma). More importantly, AI content calibrated for sentiment achieves 2.3 times higher engagement compared to campaigns that overlook emotional tone.

"Consumers are not buying products, they are buying stories." - Ana Andjelic

This move beyond mere storytelling can be seen as a form of perception engineering, where the brand’s vibe becomes the primary message. By deploying AI platforms capable of sentiment analysis, such as Affectiva’s Emotion AI, which interprets facial expressions and vocal tones across millions of data points, brands can predict emotional resonance with unprecedented accuracy. On TikTok, more than half of marketers are already experimenting with AI-generated avatars, and Symphony AI tools have been shown to increase purchase intent by 37 per cent and brand favourability by 38 per cent (Influencer Marketing Hub).

The strategic advantage is agility. By rapidly creating and deploying content formats, from Instagram visuals to TikTok videos, brands can respond in real time to cultural signals and shifts in audience sentiment without diluting their core identity. AI-powered perception engineering thus enables a more scalable approach to brand building, where emotion and cultural relevance are not afterthoughts but the essence of the product being sold.

The payoff is tangible. Deloitte’s 2023 Global Marketing Trends report found that 57 per cent of consumers exhibit greater loyalty toward brands aligned with their values, and McKinsey data indicates that vibe-led campaigns achieve up to three times the social engagement of traditional efforts.

Several fashion houses have demonstrated how this works in practice.

• Jacquemus has mastered the art of Instagrammable marketing. From staging a runway through a lavender field in Provence to parading oversized handbags on delivery trucks through Paris, the brand understands that spectacle fuels community engagement as much as product design. The garments themselves become entry points into a lifestyle defined by playfulness and modern romance.

• Bottega Veneta took a more radical route by erasing itself from social media entirely in 2021. Rather than fading from view, the brand stimulated cultural discourse around exclusivity and discretion, principles now central to its silent luxury positioning.

• Telfar demonstrates how vibe marketing can work from the bottom up. The label’s Bag Security Program, where customers pre-order their sought-after shopping bags, reframes scarcity from exclusion to inclusion. Its slogan, “Not for you—for everyone,” fosters a sense of communal ownership, cementing emotional as much as material loyalty.

Vibe marketing succeeds by capturing the zeitgeist while it forms. It thrives on cultural contradictions, inversions and unexpected connections, says Andjelic, elements traditional trend-spotting often overlooks. Vogue Business recently noted the decline of micro-trends in favour of immersive vibes, a turn toward authenticity, subtlety and emotional longevity over quick perishable fads. The Guardian has gone further, remarking that the rise of vibes signals a cultural shift: emotion now rules where facts used to dominate, and fashion “turns a vibe into something concrete.”

For fashion marketers today, this means embracing vibe as method, not just aesthetic. Mood, meaning and emotional resonance must be curated as carefully as hems and seams. Those who master it are not merely selling garments. They are offering identity, belonging and cultural relevance