Advertising Won’t Buy You Cultural Relevance, Create It Yourself

Symonne Torpy is a concept-led creative whose work spans everything from couture-caliber advertising to TikTok-born storytelling. Known for her razor-sharp voice and cultural fluency, she crafts ideas you’ll want to steal and scripts you’ll want to screenshot. Her work blends brand voice, strategic insight, and emotional precision — with zero tolerance for clichés. She currently calls BETC Etoile Rouge her ad agency home.

If you want cultural relevance in luxe today, you don’t buy an ad slot. You write the script. You direct the movie. You are the plot. Audiences aren’t afraid of bingeing hours of content, but they’re skipping conventional ads within the first two seconds. Not because they don’t have the time. They’re fatigued, suspicious of, and saturated by the global consumption machine.

We want our favourite luxury labels to use their enormous budgets to give something back to culture. Make me feel. Make me laugh. Trigger my tears. Change my mindset. Make zeitgeist happen. I want to live in the mind of a creative director, experiencing everything that might have sailed through their mind while they were dreaming up the best goddamn dress I’ve ever worn.

When luxury brands embrace longer formats rather than bombarding us with micro product blasts, it’s a relief. I’m OK with a 15-second short from my mattress salesman, not from my Maison Margiela.

Audiences can smell “branded content” a mile off. But drop them into a Saint Laurent Western, a Gucci art book, or a Dolce & Gabbana Grand Palais expo, and they’re leaning in.

Take On the Wings of Hermès. A 35-minute surrealist performance starring opera-singing Kelly bags, reimagining the myth of Pegasus through puppetry, dance, and live cinema. It toured the world, not as a conventional campaign, but as art. And we ate it up.

Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales, Saint Laurent Productions, and Loewe’s art-house shorts are actively creating couture cinema: custom stories, cut to brand, but made to live. They allow us to enter aspirational universes that feel deeply desirable, because they’re not yelling “buy me”, but immersing us in something worth wanting.

When a brand gets it right, it doesn’t just show up in culture. It champions it, shapes it, and shares the spotlight.

Saint Laurent has hit the right stride. They didn’t just slap their name on a premiere. They founded their own production company. Creative director Anthony Vaccarello is credited as a producer of Saint Laurent Productions, overseeing creative and costume direction. All wardrobe is designed in-house. It’s fashion, baked into the narrative. Director collabs have so far included David Cronenberg, Paolo Sorrentino and Pedro Almodóvar. The films reflect the brand’s identity — raw, intense, seductive — without ever resorting to advertising logic. Saint Laurent is building a cinematic legacy, and delivering what fashiongasms are made of.

Long-form is one thing — but how do you do brand cinema within the confines of Instagram and TikTok? Alexis Bittar’s Margeaux & Hazel series is the answer. The never-ending story (served up in social-formatted, cliff-hanger-driven bites) is equal parts satire and soap opera. Margeaux’s oversized cuffs scream Upper East Side delusion and grandeur. Hazel’s Lucite hoops channel downtown ambition. And boy, do I want to be both of them! The tone is sharp. The cameos (Cynthia Nixon, Ayumi Perry, Kelly Cutrone) are iconic. It’s a love letter to New York, to fashion, to dysfunction, and of course, to Bittar’s irresistible world.

Even when brands aren’t the original driving force, they can still own a cultural moment. Just look at Barbie. Mattel positioned their CEO as co-producer and turned the film into a marketing masterstroke, activating everything from brand collabs to Barbiecore to a global pink obsession. Once again, Barbie was the maker of her own myth, even if Greta guided the camera.

On the flip side: Duke University’s meltdown over The White Lotus T-shirt cameo was a masterclass in corporate tone-deafness. Their alumni loved it. The world loved it. And Duke came out publicly against it, clutching their pearls about a potentially negative product affiliation. They were invited into the moment, but went Karen on the RSVP.
Another example comes from a brand trying to hijack culture instead of contributing to it. Think Burberry’s Imagined Landscapes on Jeju Island. The mirrored installation tried to merge nature with brand expression but came off as an awkward imposition, criticized for environmental insensitivity and aesthetic intrusion on a UNESCO site. It wasn’t immersive. It was invasive. The problem? Cultural imposition instead of culture-creation. Trend-chasing without meaning. Virality-seeking without depth. The pursuit of clicks without authenticity, love, or generosity.

The golden rule? If you want to create culture, get out of your own way. Don’t be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Be the very best creator — in couture.