If you spend as much time on social media as I do, you’ll have come across the designer reseller label Love Luxury.
In recent months, the brand has become infamous – not for its high-end wares, but for its unusual social media output.
The format for Love Luxury’s polished TikTok and Instagram videos is familiar: a well-dressed ‘customer’ enters one of the brand’s boutiques (they have one in Knightsbridge, central London, and one in Dubai) and announces an intent to buy. A sales associate then produces a parade of eye-wateringly expensive pre-loved handbags.
In one video, viewed more than seven million times on TikTok, one female customer has an exchange with the sales assistant and her husband then declares they are buying fives Hermes handbags – at a total cost of £130,000.
In another, one handsome male customer drops £22,000 on a highly coveted Hermes Birkin bag for his girlfriend.
Both clips, as with all of Love Luxury’s videos, play perfectly for a social media audience – brief and choppy with all the hallmarks of a rehearsed script rather than an organic exchange.
And now, a new job advert posted by the brand on LinkedIn suggests these carefully curated videos are indeed set up.
For Love Luxury is advertising not for a sales assistant or luxury authenticator, but for a ‘Reality TV Scriptwriter / Story Producer.’
Emily Abraham, one half of Love Luxury, a high fashion reseller with stores in London and Dubai and a massive social media following
The brief is revealing. Applicants must have experience working on ‘glossy, drama-driven programmes such as The Kardashians, The Osbournes, The Real Housewives and Selling Sunset’ – franchises built on heightened reality and manufactured moments.
The job advert reads: ’This role requires an individual who can take real life and shape it into structured, compelling story arcs while maintaining authenticity and pace’.
This might well suggest to the brand’s followers that what they are seeing on social media are not genuine interactions in which casual shoppers drop six-figure sums without hesitation, but a calculated advertising technique.
It’s certainly worked.
Founders Adam and Emily Abraham – a glossy Instagram couple – launched their first boutique in Knightsbridge in 2021, followed by a second in Dubai last year – and have expanded the brand rapidly, positioning themselves as key players in the ultra-competitive world of high-end resale.
The business trades on exclusivity, expertise and, crucially, trust. The brand maintains that it is among a select group of specialists in Hermes resale, with each item undergoing rigorous authentication against the label’s exacting standards.
Publicly, Adam and Emily present a united front at the centre of the brand. Privately, however, sources suggest a more fragmented reality, with Adam spending significant time in Dubai while the London operation runs parallel. Meanwhile, the couple’s 13-year-old daughter, Maali, known online as Moo, has already been positioned as a next-generation face of the brand. With a substantial TikTok following of 160,000 of her own, she appears regularly in content ranging from Dubai Fashion Week appearances to in-store authentication clips.
In one video, she is shopping with a £20,000 Birkin on her arm. In another, her outfit is casually described as totalling £200,000. She wears a £50,000 Audemars Piguet watch, bought for her by her father.
Again, this is all part of the same constructed narrative, presented as both aspirational and attainable, presented on Love Luxury’s social media pages.
Maali, known online as Moo, next to her mother Emily, has already been positioned as a next-generation face of the brand
When I approached the Abrahams yesterday, they told me the new job advert was merely in response to external interest in the brand, rather than its social retail content. Adam claimed the scriptwriter role was related to a potential Netflix project, not to script their social media content.
But sources tell me many of the brand’s viral videos are not quite as candid as Adam and Emily are insisting they are.
What audiences have been led to believe are spontaneous, high-stakes luxury transactions are far from spontaneous, according to insiders familiar with the operation, who say much of the content is scripted.
‘Their content is a Hermes soap opera,’ the source said. ‘Even when it’s a real customer, the purchase often happens beforehand. Then they’ll ask them to recreate it for filming. And in many cases, the “clients” are employees or people they know.’
What appears to be fly-on-the-wall access to extraordinary wealth begins to look more like a stylised production. And one that borrows heavily from the language of reality television.
None of this, of course, is to suggest that the business itself is illegitimate.
But the world built around transactions, the clients, the conversations, the supposed spontaneity, is beginning to look less documentary and more performance.
Because in the luxury market, perception is everything. And once the perception of authenticity begins to unravel, it is far harder to restore than any designer handbag could ever be.
Career step ball change for Karen
Professional dancer Karen Hauer, 44, is stepping into a new spotlight, swapping the ballroom for the vlog camera just weeks after her abrupt exit from Strictly Come Dancing.
A month after leaving the BBC primetime show following a 13-year run, the longest-serving female professional on the show is re-inventing herself online.
Professional dancer Karen Hauer, formerly the longest running female professional on Strictly Come Dancing, is stepping into a new spotlight
With a new YouTube channel which has clocked up 7,600 subscribers, Hauer is embracing a more personal, unfiltered style in her vlog content
With a new YouTube channel which has clocked up 7,600 subscribers, Hauer is embracing a more personal, unfiltered style, moving away from the workout videos she previously shared.
‘It’s my first vlog… it’s a good day for change,’ she told viewers in a candid clip filmed at home while capturing the emotional aftermath of her departure. Admitting she felt ‘grateful and nervous’, she revealed she avoided checking her phone after announcing the news.
Her weekly uploads now chart everyday life, from yoga sessions to quieter moments with her boyfriend, former rugby player Simon Davidson.
And, alongside her digital pivot, she’s returning to the stage in comedy stage show Stepping Out – a fresh chapter both on and off screen.
Emma has Met expectations
From filming chaotic ‘mukbang’ food videos with James Charles to fronting fashion’s most exclusive red carpets, I think Emma Chamberlain, 24, has pulled off one of the most striking rebrands of the digital age.
Once the poster girl for Gen Z relatability, she is now a fixture at the Met Gala, where she’s gone from internet curiosity to one of the best-dressed names on the carpet.
Emma Chamberlain, at the Met on Monday, May 4, has had a meteoric rise to elite fame from her original YouTube influencer roots
Chamberlain’s rise began in 2017, when, disillusioned with high school, she launched a YouTube channel vlogging her daily life in search of something more meaningful. What followed was meteoric, with 12million subscribers drawn to her real and honest content which felt authentic in a world of glossy high-production videos.
Now interviewing celebrities for Vogue, launching her own coffee brand, and landing covers such as for Vogue Portugal, she has bridged the once-awkward gap between influencer and industry insider.
Add in her close friendships with Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber, and the shift feels complete. Not so much a re-invention, but more of an upgrade, I think.
A snapshot of the influencers rising or slipping this week, based on follower shifts, engagement spikes or newly announced brand deals.
UP
Olivia Neill has just landed herself her first ‘proper’ office job!
The influencer has been named ASOS’s very first Out of Office Director. The online retailer cleared their Instagram for the announcement on Tuesday to kickstart their summer campaign.
Olivia runs in all the ‘cool girl’ circles – so it’s a brilliant marketing trick from ASOS.
Olivia Neill as ASOS’s new ‘Out of Office Director’ in a promotional campaign to launch the online retailer’s summer stock
DOWN
New York-based influencer Audrey Peters has been sharing her daily routine, which sees her ordering her every meal from food delivery service DoorDash.
Some might see it as aspirational, but much of the internet, including myself, isn’t convinced. What’s being framed as effortless city living is, to many, reading as performative and very wasteful.
Yes, New York life is busy and kitchens are small. But turning constant take-out into a status symbol? That for me is where the backlash begins.
Curious scenes at the Top Influencer Awards, held for the third year running in Newcastle. Katie Price and Peter Andre’s brood were centre stage: Junior took on hosting duties alongside girlfriend Jasmine Orr, while Princess walked away a winner on the night. Some couldn’t help but wonder whether it might all conveniently feed into her upcoming TV series. And despite the ambitious title, there was one glaring absence: very few, if any, of the industry’s actual ‘top’ influencers were in attendance.
The brand Skinny Tan used to be my go-to back in my fake-tan days. But, for obvious reasons, the brand name was perhaps slightly problematic. They have had a big rebrand, now named Skin & Tan, and hosted a big influencer dinner at one of London’s hottest restaurants right now, the Brooklands by Claude Bosi at The Peninsula hotel. Endorsed by celebrity names such as Helen Flanagan and Christine McGuinness, it appears the rebrand is working.
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