The fashion-luxury web aesthetic emerged in the early 2010s when fashion houses began treating their websites as digital storefronts rather than information portals. Hedi Slimane's redesign of the Saint Laurent website in 2012 — stripping it to black backgrounds, white Helvetica, and enormous photography — became a template that the industry followed for a decade.
Phoebe Philo's Celine and Demna Gvasalia's Balenciaga pushed the approach further, reducing their sites to near-empty canvases where a single campaign image or product name occupied the entire viewport. The aesthetic drew from print traditions — Fabien Baron's Harper's Bazaar layouts, the white-space-as-luxury principle of high-end magazine advertising — and translated them for screens.
By the late 2010s, the look had diffused beyond fashion into architecture, hospitality, and any industry where perceived exclusivity mattered more than information density. The irony is that this aesthetic of radical simplicity requires enormous discipline to execute: every margin, every font weight, every shade of gray must be precisely calibrated, because there is nothing else to look at.