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The Next Luxury Status Symbol Is Having Friends
- Ricky Guillart
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Three years ago, if you had told someone that one of the most desirable luxury products of the next decade would be a community, they probably would have laughed at you. Communities were supposed to happen naturally. You inherited them through neighbourhoods, schools, workplaces, religion, university campuses and long-standing friendships. Nobody needed an application form to make friends. Nobody paid a membership fee to feel understood. Belonging wasn't something you purchased because belonging was simply something that happened to you.
Today, the most sought-after products in the world increasingly look less like products at all. They look like memberships.
Applications.
Waiting lists.
Founder circles.
Private dining clubs.
Creative communities.
Running clubs with capped numbers.
Group chats that require introductions.
And increasingly, they look like sports communities.
Somewhere in the last decade, we quietly stopped paying for products and started paying for proximity instead. The handbag was never really the point. Neither was the restaurant reservation, the members' club card or the invitation-only dinner. The object simply acted as a passport into a room, and eventually the room itself stopped being the most valuable thing inside the experience. The people standing in it became the real product.
That shift explains far more about contemporary culture than we probably realise.
It explains the rise of private wellness clubs and members-only workspaces. It explains why people wait months for access to communities that, on paper, appear to offer little more than conversations with strangers who happen to share the same interests. It explains why entire industries built around networking and "curated experiences" continue to grow despite existing in a world where every person on earth is theoretically one direct message away.
The internet solved access. It never solved belonging.
Perhaps that is why communities increasingly feel luxurious.
Luxury has always depended on scarcity. A handbag becomes desirable because not everyone can own it. A reservation becomes valuable because not everyone can get one. The formula is simple, and it has worked for centuries. What changed is the thing being made scarce. Increasingly, the scarce object is not a product but a feeling: recognition, familiarity and the quiet comfort of entering a room where nobody requires an explanation of who you are or why you care about the things you care about.
The 400 Club understood this before much of the sports industry did.
On paper, it is a community founded by Morgan Riddle and Cherry Beagles, built around Formula One, tennis and contemporary sports culture. Describing it that way, however, misses almost everything interesting about it. Formula One is not difficult to find. Tennis is not difficult to find. Sports content exists in almost infinite supply. If access to races and athletes were the only thing people wanted, the internet solved that problem years ago.
What The 400 Club recognised was something much larger and considerably more valuable: women were never asking to be invited into sports culture. They were already there. They watched the races, followed the rivalries, understood the narratives and cared about the outcomes. The problem was not participation. The problem was recognition. Sports culture spent decades speaking almost exclusively to the people it already knew how to speak to, and in doing so, it overlooked entire audiences that had been standing in the room the whole time.
The result is a community that behaves much less like a sports club and much more like a members' club disguised as fandom.
The races matter, certainly. So do the tournaments, the athletes and the storylines. But none of them feel like the central product once you spend enough time looking at the structure underneath it. A Formula One watch party quickly becomes a social gathering. A race weekend becomes an excuse for travel, conversation and friendship. Fashion enters the room. Lifestyle enters the room. Identity enters the room. The sport remains the common language, but it stops being the only language being spoken.
People arrive because of Formula One.
They stay because of each other. The same thing happened to fashion years ago.
Fashion has never really sold clothing. Nobody buys a watch because they need to know the time. Nobody buys a coat because winter arrived unexpectedly. The object exists as a vehicle for identity, a way of communicating something about ourselves to the people around us. Communities work according to exactly the same principle, except the transaction looks different. The handbag communicates who you are to strangers. The community introduces you to people who already understand.
That is a much more powerful proposition.
The luxury handbag can be copied.
The invitation cannot.
Products possess one enormous advantage over communities: they scale infinitely. A brand can manufacture ten thousand bags instead of one thousand and still survive. A fragrance can be reformulated and relaunched every season. Communities operate according to the opposite logic. Their value comes from intimacy, familiarity and recognition, all of which become harder to maintain as they grow. The larger the room becomes, the less exclusive it feels. Belonging obeys the economic rules of scarcity in a way products no longer do.
Products scale.
Belonging doesn't.
Perhaps that is why younger generations appear increasingly willing to pay for something previous generations expected to receive naturally.
Neighbourhoods provided community.
Universities provided community.
Religious institutions provided community.
Workplaces provided community.
Many of those structures weakened at exactly the same time social media convinced us that visibility and connection were interchangeable concepts. They are not. Being seen by thousands of people and being known by ten people are completely different experiences, and modern culture has become remarkably good at confusing one for the other.
The market noticed the gap almost immediately.
Nature hates a vacuum.
Businesses hate one even more.
The result is an economy increasingly organised around belonging. Some of it looks like coworking memberships. Some of it looks like wellness clubs. Some of it looks like private dining experiences and founder networks. Some of it looks like Formula One communities built by women who understood that the future of sports culture might look very different from its past.
That is what makes The 400 Club feel less like a trend and more like a forecast.
The uncomfortable question is whether communities become more valuable or simply more scarce once they become products. Luxury has always relied on exclusion. Communities traditionally did not. One asks who gets inside the room. The other asks who built the room in the first place. Those are not the same question, and modern culture increasingly seems interested in treating them as though they are.
Maybe the real story of The 400 Club is not that it created a community around sports. Maybe it is that it recognised community itself had become one of the world's most desirable luxury goods. Because perhaps the defining luxury of the next decade will not be ownership.
Perhaps it will not be access. Perhaps it will not even be exclusivity. Perhaps it will simply be finding a room full of people who speak your language before you have to explain it. And perhaps the reason that feels luxurious at all is because it has quietly become so difficult to find.
References
• Author conversations and firsthand observations related to The 400 Club and its development.
• Vogue Business, BoF, The New York Times
Author Bio
Ricky Guillart is an editorial contributor covering fashion, luxury, culture, travel, and contemporary lifestyle. His work explores the intersection of global trends, creative industries, and modern influence.
Photo © Hailey Bieber via Instagram (@haileybieber)
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