This has put the fashion industry in a rather peculiar state, indeed. Like, legitimately weird. Do you recall when everybody believed that there would be a couple of months of these hygienic practices before life goes back to normal shopping? Well, three years later and the industry is still teetering as I do when leaving fashion week afterparty with three glasses of wine inside of me.
Fashion designers were once protected royalty who drew fantasies that were often conjured into $4,000 jackets, garments most people don’t require. But now? Those towers are beginning to look more unstable as ever.
The Great Designer Exodus
Now let’s discuss an organizational dilemma that is as fast-paced as shoppers during a discount sample sale. The past few years alone are obsessed by the number of high profile designers who have exited than the number of celebrities that can grace a failing restaurant’s launch.
Alessandro Michele has departed from Gucci after seven years of steering the brand from formal and restrained to eccentrically opulent. Raf Simons ceased the production at his own label after 27 years, albeit he continues his work in Prada now. The fatal loss of Virgin Abloh was actually deeply felt at Louis Vuitton to this date. After making Bottega Veneta fashionable once more, Daniel Lee discontinued his work with the firm in a rather strange manner. And let’s not to mention Christopher Bailey’s departure from Burberry, Clare Waight Keller leaving Givenchy, and Alber Elbaz’s unanticipated resignation from Lanvin several years ago (Till he died during pandemic period).
Not even Phoebe Philo, themistress who made all of us quickly forget about our skinny jeans and embrace wide-legged option instead, can manage to make it when she tried starting her own brand in the previous year. It is just as harsh as the climate.
Fashion Graveyards Are Getting Crowded
The list of brands that either shut down naked or declared bankruptcy status is increasing as fast as my cart when I’m unusually emotional, specifically, sad.
Barneys New York? Gone. Opening Ceremony? Closed. Need Supply and Totokaelo? Vanished. Topshop? Collapsed. Forever 21? Bankrupt (though still limping along). Brooks Brothers? Chapter 11. J.Crew? Restructured after bankruptcy. Neiman Marcus? Same story. Zac Posen had to close his company, and he was dressing half the stars of the Tinseltown a few years ago.
The pandemic was essentially a fashion holocaust which could be compared only to the one that befell dinosaurs had they been into fashions and wore some fancy type of footwear.
Why Luxury Fashion Is In the ICU
So what the hell happened? Why is luxury fashion struggling more than me trying to fit into my pre-pandemic jeans?
Nobody’s Got Cash for That Cashmere
First of all, one must admit that people have no money, or people are extremely poor, or people are unsound financially, etc. Like, genuinely broke. After surviving a pandemic, inflation, housing problems, and if that’s not enough, foreseeing recession and unemployment, reducing oneself to dropping two months’ rent on a handbag is no longer the definition of ‘self-care’ but need ‘help’.
The high poverty levels when combined with greater thickness of income inequality means that the so called middle income earners who once in a while felt ‘rich’ enough to afford a taste of luxury are at the moment struggling to feed their families with food that seems to be getting more expensive by the year and yet the prices of gold have come down to a bargain. And the truly wealthy? As for the $10,000 coats, they only require a limited number of them.
Fast Fashion Is Eating Everyone’s Lunch
While luxury fashion brands were busy preserving the image of sophistication, other brands such as Shein, H&M in collaboration with sustainability activist, and the Zara outfit were learning the art of knockoffs better than the designers themselves, or better still saying ‘copyright infringement.’
Why spend $3000 on an elegant dress when you can get almost the same dress at $30? Indeed, it is more grotesque than the sushi from gas stations, and its environmental influence is roughly the same as nuking the planet; however, fast fashion has taken over our wallets and hearts because clothes have become essentially indisposable and IG looks cannot be recycled.
Digital Disruption Turned Everything Upside Down
Traditional fashion was based on the heritage of the Matrix – selected brands and designers deciding on the labels and colors that women should wear. Now? It does not matter that Vogue has a more significant following than TikTok teenagers; the latter have significantly more influence over trends regardless of their numbers.
Social media made it much more difficult for luxury brands to maintain monopoly as they used to have. If everyone is aware of everything at the same time, the glamour evaporates quicker than one could disappear into the crowd at an art exhibition.
Are Designers Actually Necessary Anymore?
Here is the question that is far too risky to be posed during fashion week: Are designers actually necessary anymore?
AI can now generate “designs.” Marketers are today taking hold of brands rather than creatives. It is more effective to launch clothing items associated with celebrities than those of a designer. Today big luxuries groups and fashion houses have no visionaries who are interested in creating masterpieces; all what they want is to satisfy their quarterly earnings reports.
This suggests that many of the fashion houses have lost their focus and are more interested in selling fragrances, shades among other things and branded products with the house logo. This is the reason why sometimes the clothes exhibited on the fashion show runways may not necessarily be the company’s most lucrative ones, but instead, simple items that have high profit margins that thrill shareholders.
Glimmers of Hope in a Sequined Apocalypse
Before you throw your fashion degree into the shredder, there are some positive signs that designers still have a future – just maybe not the one they imagined.
Sustainability Could Save Us All
The current fast fashion model has been found to be on the verge of collapsing, due to the environmental disaster. The customers and especially the younger generation are now more concerned with the sustainability of their purchases. This is actually a possibility for designers who embrace values of good craft, quality and fair production.
It has now become possible for brands such as Marine Serre, Bethany Williams, and Collina Strada to be sustainable and creative without dressing people in clothing that seems to have been made from discarded potato sacks if that is not what you want).
The Digital and Physical Worlds Are Colliding
Fashion in the virtual world is new opportunities that designers have in the fields of digital games, virtual platforms, virtual reality, augmented reality. Though, I do not think it as right to spend actual dollar on things that are imaginary or we can’t even touch, though sometimes it is equally hard to justify spending a few bucks on an actual piece of clothing, this realm presents plenty of potential.
Fashion designers to this present have gone ahead and merged technology with fashion and have been able to come up with physically impossible designs that are exquisite.
Community Over Commodity
It thus emerged that the most successful of today’s aesthetically talented designers are not merely marketing apparels; they are nurturing followership. Telfar Clemens didn’t make a viral bag, he produced an anthem of luxury for those of us who were told we were not good enough to be associated with luxury. Brands needed to represent more than just the products they offer: Pangaia is selling sweatshirts, but it is also promising belonging to the right group of people.
The Bottom Line
Stalwart icons of the mythical fashion gurus may no more be the legends but there is still hope in the future for them. It is not going to appear as it was before. The new Fashion world establishes itself on values in which they value originality, connections with others and the notion of change as opposed to legacy.
Those who believe they can get by on the name, a high price for a shirt with a logo on the front will ever learn the hard way. For those that are able to remember that fashion in an ever-evolving process, then they may be ready to navigate this rather turbulent period.
Thus is there a future for protagonists in fashion designing? Yes, however only for those who are willing to work for the future than try to keep pacing on the glories of the past alone. The ivory tower has crumbled and, now is the time to create something out of the debris that does not cost the equivalent of three months’ salary and easy to match with the clothes in our wardrobe.
