Ferrari's Luce is not a car launch. It is a declaration about what the brand intends to be when its core identity, internal combustion, is removed. Commissioning Jony Ive and Marc Newson's LoveFrom to design it is the tell: Ferrari is not competing with Porsche or Lucid on EV specs, it is competing with Hermès and Apple on object desire. The five-seat configuration breaks every Ferrari convention deliberately, signalling that the brand is expanding its customer definition while the petrolhead core is still paying attention. Any brand that still thinks EV is a category story rather than a brand identity story is a full cycle behind.
Three stories today converge on the same structural shift: Ferrari commissioning LoveFrom to design an electric five-seater, Hermès putting a surrealist artist in its windows, and Italian startups rebuilding Made in Italy as a craft-tech methodology. Each is a legacy brand or institution using aesthetic authority to make category conventions irrelevant.
Ferrari's EV is not a car decision, it is a desire decision. Hermès' windows are not a retail decision, they are a commissioning decision. When the leading brands in any sector start operating on object desire logic rather than product category logic, the brands still competing on specs and features are structurally exposed.
For people who’d rather be early and wrong than late and safe.