It’s difficult to overstate how much modern life is engineered for visibility. Social media has turned identity into performance, and smartphones have made documentation a reflex. From dinner to downtime, everything is captured. Presence is often just prelude to a post.

Where there is abundance, value often fades. When everyone can share everything, all the time, the mystique that once surrounded access, intimacy, and the rare is diluted.

In this context, the appeal of being unreachable starts to make sense. Disconnection becomes a form of control. It implies a kind of life that’s not governed by platform logics or performance metrics. One that doesn’t need to prove anything.

Private members clubs like Maison Estelle and Soho House are responding to this mood with camera stickers at the door and unsearchable spaces behind velvet guest lists. At London’s Maison Estelle, the black dot over your iPhone camera isn’t just policy—it’s symbolism. In a culture obsessed with documentation, the absence of an image becomes the memory.

Similarly, nightclubs such as Berghain in Berlin, FOLD, Fabric, and Phonox in London enforce strict no-phone rules, not as an affectation but to protect the purity of the experience. The dance floor becomes sacred again—intense, collective, undocumented.

Thanks to widespread burnout, the ‘live in the moment’ rhetoric is spreading beyond dinners and disco. The Netherlands have been taking it seriously—initiatives like The Offline Club host regular digital detox events across the country that encourage both social connection and self-directed time to read, write or simply sit and just be. Deviceless, of course.

Product-based businesses aren’t immune to the shift either. At the end of last year, British wellbeing brand Vyrao looked to combat digital overwhelm with a fragrance designed to help people feel more grounded and offer respite from endless screen time.

According to the 2025 Hilton Trends Report, which surveyed 13,000 adults around the world who plan to travel in the next year, a quarter of respondents say they turn off social media during vacation more than they used to, and a quarter are working harder to avoid responding to calls, texts or emails while travelling. As ever, White Lotus was spot on.

The main drivers here are wellness-focused; a simple want to take back our time, to dedicate attention to what matters. But when this is a challenge, the ability to do so becomes valuable—it’s status through absence. Subtle yet implicit.

Privacy as a Privilege

We once took privacy for granted. Then the Orwellian future arrived, not with sirens, but with seamless UX and it insidiously became a premium service. And increasingly, a signal of affluence.

In a world where almost every interaction is monitored, tracked, or stored, opting out has become its own form of luxury. As Pew Research notes, people are increasingly willing to pay for privacy—a direct response to the erosion of it by smart homes, algorithmic ads, and location-tracking apps.

It’s a behavioural change that aligns with the trends people are buying into today; anti-ostentation attitudes, ‘stealth wealth’, quiet luxury are said to be more philosophical than aesthetic. While we have separate thoughts on the latter, there’s something to be noted in this covert concept, particularly in the context of travel.

Black Tomato’s Get Lost programme, for instance, offers tailored adventures where the client has no idea where they’re going. Phones are left behind. Coordinates are revealed on a need-to-know basis. It’s luxury by disorientation—and the appeal lies precisely in being unreachable.

When speaking to Sarah Doyle, Vice President & Global Brand Leader of Design Hotels, for our JOURNEYS whitepaper, she told us of a property in Umbria, Italy that offers ‘contemporary hermitage’. Blending monastic simplicity with modern design, Eremito has no Wi-Fi, no TV, and meals are eaten in silence. It appeals to high-functioning individuals who just want to not function for a while—a detox for the mind dressed in linen sheets and candlelight.

Remote cabins are also enjoying their moment; brands like Unplugged, Unyoked, CABN, Nokken, The Dreaming (singer Charlotte Church’s wellness retreat) are the anti-thesis of hyper-connectivity. Kip Hideaways’ accommodations in the UK can’t even be found by postcode, guests have to use What3Words to find these remote havens.

While silent retreats and digital detoxes aren’t novel concepts, their relevance is intensifying—driven by mounting geopolitical tension, environmental unease, and an overstimulated relationship with technology. All of these experiences—which have been rapidly growing in popularity for a few years now—are built around one central promise: to not be found. That promise holds weight because, for most people, it’s not an option. It’s a luxury.

New Markers

The shift offline is not a rejection of technology, but of overexposure. It reflects a growing preference for experiences that are meaningful rather than marketable. In previous eras, wealth might have been signaled by a car, a watch, a dress. Today, it might be a three-day hike without reception. Or a stay at a no-wifi alpine refuge with nothing but sheep, pine, and silence.

Affluent consumers tend to be time-poor, making it a valuable asset and status signal. Where scarcity used to be about the product, it’s now about the person.

Brands have taken note. The DeBruce in New York’s Catskill Park offers culinary experiences that unfold as narratives across an entire stay. No phones, no rush, no sharing. Just a slow immersion into place and pace. At Further Future, a festival spun off from the minds behind Burning Man, programming includes meditative design, philosophical talks, and tech-free communes. It’s not escapism. It’s positioning.

This is also part of a broader trend: the elevation of analogue pleasure. High-end wellness retreats are turning down screens and turning up sensory depth. Handwritten menus, warm lighting, and scent-driven design are part of a new visual language of luxury, one that resists the gloss of the digital. What matters is what can’t be screenshot.

This pivot toward privacy has material implications for the luxury sector. It marks a turning point in how value is created and communicated. The idea of showing off is giving way to the allure of being in the know, of belonging to spaces not found on Google Maps, or staying in hotels that don’t advertise.

It also reshapes how luxury brands operate. Less emphasis on social proof; more on whispered reputation. Less about mass visibility; more about cultivated community. The model is moving from broadcast to invitation.

For the consumer, being under the radar isn’t just a retreat—it’s a way to edit the noise, to choose a more considered life. And that, increasingly, is the aspiration.

In a time where everything is always on, disconnection has become one of the rarest luxuries. Silence, mystery, and privacy are being revalued—not as nostalgic ideals, but as contemporary aspirations. The brands that understand this shift aren’t selling visibility. They’re offering something much harder to come by: the right to disappear. And the romance of it all.

 

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Matter Of Form is a design consultancy specialising in brand strategy, CX and digital innovation for timeless brands. To learn more, get in touch with one of our consultants via [email protected].