How Exclusive Access Became the New Birkin

Once upon a time, if you wanted to flex on Instagram, you might post a limited-edition Supreme piece from the latest drop, maybe a Birkin, or if that was out of your price range, the right niche designer paired with Tabis could also do the trick. Status, essentially, was about what you owned.

That’s beginning to evolve. These days, posting yourself at the invite-only Alo Wellness Club, Selfridges’s newly opened 40 Duke — a space reserved for its top spenders — or even in the right area of a festival can carry more cultural cachet than any specific item.

“The objects we consume — the things we see, own, photograph, or film — simply don’t carry the same cachet they once did, regardless of what the object is,” says educator and brand strategist Eugene Healey, who recently co-founded The New Fundamentals of Brand, a course training marketers how to build brands within fragmented media, tech, and cultural environments. “Even if a product is physically scarce, it’s culturally ubiquitous. Even if almost nobody has seen a Birkin in real life, almost everyone has seen dozens of images of one.”

“It’s less about what you have or what you know, and more about who you know, and if your lifestyle accurately reflects that in a way that requires a much deeper form of entrenchment to even notice, penetrate, or belong to,” says Tariro Makoni, author of consumer publication Trademarked, on the resulting shifting ideals surrounding status.

The idea of turning access in a hierarchy is not new. Finance, travel, and retail have spent years building increasingly elaborate systems around who gets what, from airline status to credit card tiers to loyalty programs that reward customers with progressively valuable benefits. What is changing is the cultural value to those systems: access itself is becoming a status signal. The more you engage, the closer you get to something that fewer people can have, and the higher you climb, the harder it becomes to walk away. The appeal is not just the reward at the end, but the ability to get closer to a brand and to experiences that remain out of reach to everyone else.

That shift is increasingly visible in the proliferation of private members’ clubs, particularly in New York. “We’ve seen that third spaces can be replaced by members’ clubs,” says Ana Andjelic, author of The Business of Aspiration and writer of “The Sociology of Business” newsletter. “When you had a coffee shop that was accessible to everyone, it kind of shifted upstream toward members’ clubs, and that is where the certification becomes both the medium and the message. Because the club you belong to signals something about you, but you have to belong to a members’ club now.”

Outside private membership club, ZZ's Club New York.

For fashion, which has spent decades perfecting the art of making certain products and customers feel exclusive, the opportunity is obvious, but so is the risk. Could the tiered mechanics of beauty retailers and membership clubs turn exclusivity into a more scalable engine for loyalty, or does making access the new status symbol risk alienating everyone who cannot reach the top?

The most effective programs are less about handing out increasingly expensive perks and more about creating moments that feel personally relevant — whether that means securing a coveted product before everyone else, gaining access to an artist, or simply removing a friction point from everyday shopping.

For instance, American Express has built a sophisticated hierarchy of access around its membership model, with experiences ranging from public-facing fan activations to card member lounges and premium hospitality, while Platinum and Centurion customers unlock another level altogether. Delta has similarly turned loyalty into a pursuit, with its status tiers giving frequent flyers an incentive to keep spending, flying and climbing toward the next level of access. Sephora, meanwhile, has turned loyalty into a progression game. Its MySephora program is split into Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers, with customers moving up based on how much they spend over the course of a year. Members earn points through purchases and engagement, which can be exchanged for rewards, while higher tiers unlock more valuable perks, from exclusive offers and early sale access to upgraded birthday gifts and delivery benefits.

“Loyalty today is about far more than rewarding transactions,” says Sarah Boyd, managing director of Sephora UK. “Customers want to feel recognized for their relationship with a brand, not just what they’ve spent. Tiered programs work because they create a sense of progression and belonging, while giving customers something genuinely worth engaging with over time.”

For example, one of Sephora’s buzzy events is its annual advent calendar launch, which gives MySephora members advance waitlist access, which is a reward in itself. “They want to feel closer to the brands they love and part of the cultural moments happening within beauty,” says Boyd. It also means giving members options to use points to donate £5 to their local charity partner, Face Equality International. “That gives customers the opportunity to support a cause that’s closely aligned with our values of belonging, and demonstrates that loyalty can have a positive impact beyond the shopping experience.”

American Express applies the same principle to culture, with their offered experiences spanning music, sport and cultural events, with the level of access varying according to membership. Its partnership with Harry Styles’s Together, Together tour, for example, combines pre-sale ticket access with pop-ups and a sweepstake offering fans the chance to win tickets, flights and even accommodation. “Research shows that 92% of music fans want to feel a deeper connection to their favorite artists, so we create experiences that bring fans closer to the artists they love,” explains Bess Spaeth, EVP of global brand management and experiences.

American Express partnered with Harry Styles’s Together, Together tour. Fans were offered the chance to win tickets, flights and even accommodation.

The strategy reflects a broader shift in what brands are trying to build through loyalty. Rather than treating a program as a mechanism for encouraging another purchase, brands can use it to create positive associations long before a transaction takes place. “The purpose of brand marketing is to construct strong, favorable, mental, and emotional associations. Then, when they enter the market — whether now or in the future — they think of that brand for the right reasons, they desire the product, and eventually they purchase it,” says brand strategist Healey, describing this as what author James Hurman calls building “future demand” — creating desire that can ultimately be converted into sales.

The higher tiers need to feel genuinely exclusive to give customers something to aspire to, but if the most meaningful benefits are reserved for a small group of big spenders, brands risk alienating everyone else. Sephora has sought to make the program valuable from the outset: this summer, new Bronze members began receiving free standard delivery as soon as they joined. “Loyalty should feel inclusive from day one,” says Boyd. “Value means different things to different people.” For one customer, that might mean securing a product before it sells out; for another, it might simply mean free delivery when they need to replenish their favorite serum.

Fashion makes for an interesting case study, because, historically, the status attached to a product has extended beyond the object itself. Brands have imbued clothing with nuance, while exclusivity could come from either owning it or simply knowing about it. Social media has disrupted both forms of scarcity.

“Status requires asymmetry, oftentimes via a knowledge gap (information) or an acquisition gap (price),” agrees Makoni. “When you think about status objects, both pillars are being democratized — social media accounts for accelerated dissemination of knowledge that usually would have been accessible by the few who are ‘meant to know’, and the acquisition gap has been democratized via buy-now, pay-later (BNPL) options, resellers, and I think even more esoterically, the Gen Z and Alpha ‘LARPing’ culture that’s emerging.”

LARPing, borrowed from live-action role-playing, has become an online shorthand for performing an expertise or lifestyle that one does not necessarily possess. In the context of status, this can manifest as individuals buying expensive clothing primarily as a means to flex online, or performing a level of fashion literacy and cultural capital through talking head content, without necessarily having the conventional credentials or purchasing power associated with it.

“Culturally, it feels like we’re skating on very thin ice,” says Healey on the current cultural landscape. “It feels like there simply isn’t enough meaning in the world anymore. Everything feels increasingly absurd. The stock market feels like a fraud. The economy feels like one giant casino. The only way to get ahead is by making an enormous bet on yourself. When so many of our social contracts are fraying, it’s incredibly difficult to construct the larger narratives that make everything else feel meaningful.”

Access, meanwhile, is one form of status that is harder to ‘LARP’. You cannot convincingly pretend to have been in rooms you were never invited into. Unlike a product, which can be purchased, or a particular kind of fashion literacy, which can be prompted from ChatGPT and regurgitated online, access is relational: it is determined by who knows you, who invited you in, and which spaces you are able to move through. In an increasingly transparent status economy, being able to demonstrate genuine access is starting to carry more weight than being able to demonstrate that you can afford the same things.