The difference between an “OMG, I’m hooked” rupture and a hot take (and why one creates luxury positioning while the other stops sales in their tracks)

In 1926, Coco Chanel did the unthinkable.
She dressed women in jersey fabric.

Not silk. Not taffeta. Not the heavily embroidered, corseted cages that marked you as a decorative object instead of a woman going places.

Jersey. The fabric of men’s sportswear and *gasp* underwear! Cheap, soft, stretchy – and utterly unthinkable for haute couture.

Think lululemon with 1920s silhouettes.

Vogue called her little black dress design “Chanel’s Ford”, the Model T of fashion. A uniform. Industrial.

She took it as a compliment.

Because while every other couturier was competing on being fancy – more beading, more boning, more visual proof of a husband’s wealth – Chanel did something luxury brands have been mastering ever since.

Chanel withdrew from playing from the game entirely.

Find your niche? Don’t know her.

Ready for an example of a rupture?

Here’s what traditional, commodity-based marketing will tell you:

• Just find your niche.
• Have an opinion on everything.
• Create consistent content.
• Burnout?

Here’s what they don’t tell you:

That’s market participation, not market gravity.

You’re still playing in someone else’s reality, using someone else’s rules, competing on someone else’s terms. You’re just doing it with a strong opinion and a narrower target audience.

Luxury brands don’t work like that.

Experts don’t win because they specialised harder.

Here’s the lens…

They win because they reframed reality entirely.

Oh, how meta!?

Chanel left clues for your brand

Early 20th-century women’s fashion operated on a single assumption:
A woman’s role was to be looked at, not to move through the world.

Corsets restricted breathing. Skirts made walking impractical. Silhouettes existed to display wealth, not enable movement. Back then, women were dressed to be seen – not to move through the world on their own terms.

Chanel didn’t argue with that system. She simply ignored it.

She designed for a different reality – one where women worked, travelled, and moved independently. Clothes became tools for living, not costumes for display.

The question shifted from How ornamental? to Can you move?
And once that lens installed, everything changed.

Steal Chanel’s secrets for your personal brand

Chanel didn’t create a niche (“I dress independent women”).
She created a rupture.

A rupture is not:

• A hot take
• A controversial opinion
• A “here’s what I think” POV

(These are secondary affects.)

A rupture is a withdrawal of consent from the dominant narrative.

It says: “The question you’re all asking is incomplete, and operating from it keeps you small.”

Chanel didn’t say “Corsets are bad.”

She said: “This entire system has trained you to confuse decoration with value.”

Damn, girl!

Then she proved it by creating clothes women could actually live in, and making them the most covetable pieces in Paris.

That’s luxury psychology.

Quiet. Substantiated. Inevitable.

It starts with a hypothesis – put into the world and tested by what reflects back.

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And here’s the part that creates Brand Gravity

The rupture alone isn’t enough. You’ve crashed the party, now give them a show.
→ You need a lens.

• A lens is how you see before you speak.
• How you organise meaning.
• How you interpret events, behaviour, strategy, success.
• How you see the zeitgeist and build cultural capital.

Chanel’s lens was: Fashion as a tool of autonomy, not ornamentation.

Every design decision flowed from that interpretive frame:

• Shortened hemlines (so you could walk and dance)
• Menswear tailoring adapted for women (competence over decoration)
• The “little black dress” as uniform (repeatability over novelty)

She wasn’t teaching women what to wear. She was teaching them how to see themselves. Not as ornamental objects to be displayed. As agents moving through the world.

She created what women where already wanting but didn’t dare express.

And this is where your traditional marketing “niche + POV” falls apart

Most personal brands are built on:

• Niche: “I help X with Y” Boring!
• POV: “Here’s my opinion on Z” Also boring.

That answers the question: “Is this for me?”

Luxury positioning asks a different question entirely:

“Do I see the world this way?”

Because once someone adopts your lens, they don’t just consume your content.

• They mentally cite you when making decisions.
• They reference your framework when analysing their own situation.
• They see themselves differently because they see through your interpretive lens.

That’s orientation, a movement, a belief system… without a cringy manifesto.

Cult brand… check ✓

What this means for you

If you’re still only thinking in terms of niche + POV,
you’re playing the wrong game.

• You’re competing on relevance (look Mom, I’m an expert) when you should be competing on interpretation (here’s how to see the world differently).
• You’re asking “What do I think about this?” when you should be asking “What lens do I install for my audience?”
• You’re trying to be helpful when you should be reframing reality.

Chanel didn’t help women dress better.

She reoriented their entire relationship to their bodies, their movement, and their place in the world. No big deal…

That’s the difference between a boring expert brand and a cult brand.

One answers questions. The other changes the whole game.