Digital Estate Planning in the Luxury World: When Your Password Vault Becomes More Valuable Than Your Jewelry Box

It may come as a surprise, but in 2025, your most valuable legacy may not lie in the vault beneath your Paris apartment, but in the encrypted passwords stored on your phone — especially if you’re part of the luxury or fashion ecosystem. As digital estate planning moves from legal niche to necessity, families are awakening to an uncomfortable truth: our online lives, from password vaults and social media archives to NFT couture and luxury domain names, now demand the same degree of planning once reserved for wills and heirlooms.

And yet, few are prepared. Especially in an industry that trades on exclusivity, status, and storytelling, digital assets are often dismissed as peripheral. But in truth, they are the new pillars of modern inheritance. A Chanel dress may be passed down with reverence, but what of the digital rights to a virtual fashion collection sold on Ethereum? Or a TikTok archive that generates more annual revenue than a family vineyard?

Far too often, luxury families — or fashion entrepreneurs themselves — fail to account for these digital footprints until it’s too late. Domains expire, influencer accounts are locked, and high-value NFT wardrobes become inaccessible due to a lost password stored in someone’s personal note app. Legal recourse? Often murky. Emotional toll? Always heavy.

The legal framework, while evolving, remains uneven. In the United States, online will creation is now legally recognized in many jurisdictions, but not all digital assets are treated equally. Some platforms — Instagram, for instance — allow for legacy contacts or memorialization requests, but these are limited in scope and often require proactive setup. Others, like Google’s Inactive Account Manager, offer timed account handoffs, but again, only if configured in advance. The catch? Most people never do.

This is where the idea of a digital executor becomes critical. Not simply a legal figure, but someone entrusted with intimate knowledge of a person’s digital landscape — from Shopify storefronts and cloud-based design libraries, to subscription-based archives or affiliate dashboards that link to six-figure annual earnings. Without this, families are left not only grieving, but navigating opaque platform policies and potential financial loss.

Take the case of an L.A.-based fashion designer who passed unexpectedly in early 2024. Her estate included an unreleased digital clothing collection minted as NFTs, along with a modest but steady income from affiliate links tied to her style blog. Yet because access credentials were neither shared nor documented, her family lost the entire digital revenue stream — estimated at $250,000 annually. Worse, a few months later, her domain name was scooped up by a reseller and relisted for $9,500.

Contrast that with another example — a Manhattan couple in their early 40s, both legacy clients of a private digital estate consultancy, who had already listed over 150 digital assets in a secure family password vault. This included account access instructions, licensing agreements, social media credentials, and even instructions for their children's digital guardianship settings. When one of them tragically passed in late 2023, their partner was able to retrieve and control every digital account within 48 hours — not just preserving legacy, but preserving continuity.

This is the true value of digital estate planning. It isn’t just about preparing for death — it’s about ensuring your online world doesn’t collapse the moment you step out of it.

For fashion and luxury professionals, this becomes even more nuanced. What happens to a model’s archive once they’re no longer around? Who owns the virtual showroom of a couture house when the founder passes away? And in a world where digital collectibles are auctioned at Sotheby’s alongside real-world art, how do we codify, preserve, and transfer those assets without friction?

The answer, increasingly, lies in proactive systems. Not just legal paperwork, but practical infrastructure: encrypted password vaults shared with family, clear digital inventory templates that include everything from rare design files to metaverse fashion real estate, and thoughtful executor selection. Forward-thinking platforms like Everplans or Trust & Will now allow users to integrate digital assets seamlessly into online will creation, while tools like Dashlane Family Vaults or 1Password Teams offer secure credential storage with inheritance functionality baked in.

But none of this works unless there’s awareness. Digital estate planning must move out of the realm of tech lawyers and into mainstream conversation — especially in spaces where legacy is everything. The fashion world, with its obsession over what is remembered and revered, is perfectly poised to lead that shift.

Because in this age, inheritance isn’t just about who gets the family diamonds. It’s about who can access the Dropbox folder containing the brand’s future runway collection. Who holds the password to the TikTok that speaks to millions. Who knows the unlock code to the Shopify store that’s keeping the atelier alive.

We once thought of digital spaces as ephemeral. But today, they are the most permanent reflections of who we are — and what we’ve built.

It’s time we curated that legacy with as much care as we curate our wardrobes.