Codes of Culture | Issue 94
Sephora enters ChatGPT, Cucinelli masters AI, and Aerie bets on the “real.”
Welcome back to Codes of Culture. I’m Ashumi Sanghvi.
One of my favourite parts of this work is the conversations that happen before the newsletter gets written. This week, I met with a founder building a wearable company with a fine jewellery angle, specifically for women, and something clicked. Women’s health is no longer a niche conversation. It is becoming one of the most serious investment theses in consumer tech, and luxury and fine jewellery are naturally finding their way into it.
The story that confirmed it for me: fine jewellers across the US are now building bespoke diamond-encrusted jackets to dress the Oura Ring, with some pieces reaching $10,000. The women buying them say the same thing: they want to track their health, but they refuse to wear something ugly to do it. That was always true. The industry is finally catching up.
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📖In this issue:
Estée Lauder confirms merger talks with Puig.
Sephora built itself into ChatGPT.
Brunello Cucinelli is showing luxury’s most credible version of AI.
Aerie cast Pamela Anderson against AI-generated bodies.
HSBC put buy ratings on seven luxury stocks.
1. LUXURY AND BEAUTY M&A
Estée Lauder confirms merger talks with Puig
What’s happening: Estée Lauder has confirmed it is in discussions with Spanish beauty group Puig regarding a potential business merger. No agreement has been reached. If completed, the deal would unite Estée Lauder’s portfolio- Clinique, MAC, Tom Ford Beauty, Jo Malone, La Mer with Puig’s Charlotte Tilbury, Carolina Herrera, Jean Paul Gaultier, Nina Ricci, Rabanne, and Penhaligon’s, creating a combined entity with roughly $20 billion in annual sales. The market read the asymmetry immediately. Puig rose on the news. Estée Lauder fell. That split captures the deal logic clearly: Puig is negotiating from a position of strength, while Estée Lauder is trying to accelerate a turnaround after years of declining sales, restructuring, and a strategic reset under CEO Stéphane de La Faverie.
TLDR:
The strategic logic is fragrance. Estée Lauder has scale in beauty, but Puig is structurally stronger in scent. A combination would materially shift the balance of power in the prestige fragrance market.
Puig is not entering these talks out of weakness. Charlotte Tilbury, Carolina Herrera, and its fragrance portfolio have held up well through the luxury slowdown.
Estée Lauder is making a recovery bet, not an expansionist move from strength. That is why investors are treating execution risk seriously.
The market reaction was telling: Puig up, Estée Lauder down. Strategic logic is clear; confidence in integration is not.
This would be the most consequential beauty-industry consolidation move in years, narrowing the field of serious global acquirers.
Why it matters: Fragrance is the one beauty category that held its cultural and commercial power through the luxury contraction, and the major groups are now moving accordingly. Control of prestige scent is becoming a strategic question rather than a category decision. For founders, operators, and investors across the Future+ network, the more important implication is what this does to the exit map. Fewer scaled buyers, more pressure on cultural distinction, and greater value placed on brands that arrive with identity intact. The appetite is still there. The bar is simply getting higher.
2. BEAUTY AND AI COMMERCE
Sephora built itself into ChatGPT
What’s happening: Sephora has launched its app inside ChatGPT, piloting in the United States. Users can prompt beauty queries directly in chat, receive personalised product recommendations, and access Beauty Insider rewards and member benefits. In-app checkout is still to come, but the architecture is already clear: beauty discovery is moving into the AI layer. This is not a chatbot activation. It is a retail infrastructure play built on loyalty data, purchase history, and consumer preference. Sephora is not simply showing up inside a new interface. It is attempting to bring its relationship graph with it.
TLDR:
Beauty discovery is now happening inside ChatGPT, personalised through Sephora’s loyalty ecosystem rather than generic search logic.
Beauty Insider is the real asset. Tens of millions of profiles, preferences, and behaviours give Sephora an advantage few retailers can replicate.
Checkout comes later. Discovery comes first. That sequencing matters because it shows where the real control point is shifting.
Other retailers are building similar integrations, but beauty has moved earliest and with the clearest use case.
The front door of retail is beginning to migrate from owned environments to AI interfaces.
Why it matters: This is one of the cleanest signals yet that the interface layer is becoming commercially strategic. For luxury, beauty, and retail operators, the question is no longer whether AI will shape consumer discovery. It already is. The question is whose data, content, and product architecture are structured well enough to win inside it. Brands that invested early in direct consumer relationships and first-party data will have an advantage. Brands that still treat those systems as back-end functions will find them harder to discover in the environments that increasingly shape demand.
3. LUXURY AND TECHNOLOGY
Brunello Cucinelli is showing luxury’s most credible version of AI.
What’s happening: Brunello Cucinelli launched Callimacus, a new e-commerce platform developed by Solomei AI, the brand’s in-house research centre. The system replaces conventional site logic with a multi-agent structure that composes interface and content in real time around visitor intent. The agents are named after classical figures, including Socrates and Demosthenes. That could sound ornamental elsewhere. Here, it does not. What makes the move distinctive is not novelty but coherence. Brunello Cucinelli has spent years building a language around “humanistic technology,” and it now has an operating model to match. In a luxury sector flooded with AI pilots, this is one of the few examples where the philosophy appears inseparable from the product.
TLDR:
Callimacus abandons conventional e-commerce structure. The interface is composed dynamically around visitor intent rather than built from fixed pages and menus.
Solomei AI is an internal research centre, not an outsourced experiment. That gives the project more cultural depth and strategic control.
The classical naming system is not decorative. It reflects a longer institutional position on humanistic technology and the role of intelligence inside luxury.
Brunello Cucinelli is one of the few brands attempting to define what AI should mean in a luxury context, rather than simply applying tools to existing systems.
In a market where many AI initiatives feel opportunistic, coherence has become a competitive advantage in its own right.
Why it matters: Luxury is beginning to divide into two camps: brands using AI as an efficiency layer, and brands using it to clarify their philosophy of service, judgment, and human value. Brunello Cucinelli is the most persuasive example so far of the second. For the founders and brand leaders Future+ advises, that distinction matters. The technology position is becoming inseparable from the brand position. The relevant question is not whether to use AI, but what kind of intelligence your brand is prepared to stand behind publicly and operationally.
4. FASHION, CULTURE, AND AI
Aerie cast Pamela Anderson against AI-generated bodies.
What’s happening: Aerie has announced it will not use generative AI to create images of people or bodies in its advertising, extending the brand’s long-standing anti-retouching stance into the synthetic-image era. Pamela Anderson fronts the campaign, which Vogue covered this week. The pledge will also apply to partners and creators. The choice of Anderson is especially sharp. Her recent cultural reappraisal has been built on rejecting the image machinery that once defined her. That makes her more than a celebrity face. She is the message.
TLDR:
Aerie is not simply avoiding AI imagery. It is making a visible, public brand claim against it.
The commitment extends to partners and creators, which gives the position operational weight rather than leaving it as campaign language.
Pamela Anderson gives the story cultural precision. Her presence turns a brand stance into a broader argument about image, agency, and credibility.
Consumer appetite for visibly human aesthetics is becoming measurable rather than theoretical.
A new split is emerging: brands embracing synthetic image production, and brands using refusal as a trust signal.
Why it matters: Authenticity has moved from vague values language into a real positioning category. For fashion and luxury brands, the question is no longer whether synthetic imagery will become controversial. It already has. The question is whether your stance is legible before you are forced to explain it. The brands arriving at this now still have room to define their own codes. The brands that wait will be responding to someone else’s framing. In visual culture, believability is starting to behave like a premium asset again.
5. CAPITAL AND LUXURY
HSBC put buy ratings on seven luxury stocks.
What’s happening: HSBC issued a sector report forecasting mid-single-digit organic growth for luxury in 2026, assigning buy ratings to seven of the eight stocks it covers: LVMH, Richemont, Burberry, Prada, Moncler, Hermès, and Kering. The optimism is notable not because it predicts recovery, but because of the diagnosis attached to it. HSBC’s view, as reported by WWD, is that much of luxury’s recent contraction was self-inflicted. Brands raised prices faster than they added value, while creative inconsistency and leadership churn weakened momentum. The implication is clear: recovery is possible, but it will not be delivered by macro conditions alone. It has to be earned.
TLDR:
HSBC is broadly constructive on luxury again. Seven out of eight names covered received buy ratings.
The bank’s diagnosis is unusually blunt: luxury damaged itself through overpricing and creative stagnation, not just external headwinds.
The recovery thesis depends on volume returning, not further price escalation. That is healthier, but also more demanding.
The brands best positioned for recovery are those that directly repaired desirability and value perception.
The rebound story is real only if brands stop behaving as though pricing power alone can substitute for product, creativity, and conviction.
Why it matters: This matters less as a stock call than as a framework. The most useful part of the HSBC thesis is the condition attached to its optimism: recovery will not be evenly distributed, and it will not be inherited automatically. For luxury groups, founders, and capital allocators, the relevant question is simple. Has the brand rebuilt enough cultural and creative authority to deserve renewed demand, or is it still waiting for consumers to tolerate the old model again? Those are not the same thing. This next phase of luxury growth will likely reward the brands that understand the difference.
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