From Archive to Algorithm: Heritage Communication by Luxury Brands on Instagram

Sammanfattning

Traditionally, luxury brands have communicated the feeling of heritage through physical anchors, such as the atmosphere of entering a luxury store, or through the smell of leather. However, the rise of Instagram has created a structural tension. Heritage depends on slowness, continuity and historical depth, while Instagram is a fast-paced environment built for speed where these physical anchors are absent. This raises the central research question of the study ‘How do luxury brands reconstruct the feeling of heritage on Instagram through digital communication?’ To answer this, a multimodal analysis was conducted of 24 Instagram posts across Hèrmes, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton, with the focus on iconic luxury handbags as heritage markers. The analysis used the Brand Heritage Quotient (Urde et al., 2007) as a coding framework Peirce’s (1991) semiotics model to investigate how heritage signs generate meaning. These findings show that heritage on Instagram operates as a symbolic shorthand, the meaning of heritage is expressed not through historical narration but compressed through symbolic cues, such as a brand colour, monogram, a founding year, or product name. Four platform native mechanisms actively reshapes how heritage produces meaning, through visual compression, captions as parallel narratives, hashtags as archival index and celebrity-as-heritage-bridge. This last mechanism, in which contemporary celebrities are paired with heritage objects, emerges as a whole new pattern that has not been captured by existing heritage frameworks. These findings indicate that heritage on Instagram is not maintained but actively reformed through platform-native strategies, contributing to the literature on digital heritage and luxury brand communication.