How are luxury and streetwear brands perceived today?

Over the last few months, in nss articles, we've often asked ourselves what is luxury and how this category is evolving, once rigid and easily identifiable by the price, while today that scenario has been completely disrupted by the streetwear revolution. The Cartesio project - presented by nss and Lyst, the leading search engine in the fashion industry - was created with the intention of defining more clearly how the perception of brands has changed starting from the users' opinion. Through an interactive game map, each user had the opportunity to rank the 40 brands examined on the basis of four key criteria: streetwear, luxury, hype and heritage. Now the data has been collected and analyzed in the first industry paper signed by nss based on more than 1200 maps selected according to statistical criteria: the result is extremely interesting because it reveals to what extent to this day the perception of a brand is often far from the actual production of the same.

The map above shows the average of users: it's interesting how the perception is shifted upwards hype rather than downwards, and that today the number of brands perceived as luxury or streetwear are almost equivalent. Among the most interesting data are those extracted from the individual categories: Hermès, Dior and Valentino are the brands most associated with luxury, while Stüssy, Palace and Nike those perceived as more streetwear.
Surprisingly, none of these three brands has been associated with the hype category where the first three positions are occupied by Off-White, Supreme and Palm Angels.
When it comes to single brands, Nike is certainly the brand that has divided users the most in terms of placement, together with Supreme and Off-White, among the brands that more than any other have managed to stand on the edge of luxury and streetwear.

The top brands for each category

The Cartesio paper - available online for free - analyzes in the introduction the stages that marked the clash-meeting between high fashion and streetwear and then analyzes the results created by users on the interactive map. In the final part of the paper, the opinions of industry insiders and leader were collected, such as Luca Benini - the founder of Slam Jam, Olivia Spinelli - coordinator and creative director of IED Moda Milano, Derek Morrison - Senior Director Europe of StockX, on the brand perception and what will be the topics that will dominate the industry over the next five years.