I’ve always been passionate towards fashion. It amuses me to see all the different shapes, textures and colors designers can create with basically any kind of material. Fashion wakes my imagination and from just observing the movement of a fabric suddenly a whole new world comes with these sentiments, all these ideas arise, it’s a true magical overwhelming feeling.
However lately, I don’t get that feeling anymore. Fashion no longer has that touch, I can’t really tell which brand is which because it all looks fairly the same.
I think fashion is suffering a depression, where designers aren’t as vivid as they use to be, it’s coming to a break, where for a while we will not see anything outstanding.
I feel that a huge problem is customers, us as a society, have stopped investing in the true meaning of fashion, we have started buying what retail average stores sell, and designers have responded to this by creating the same kind of style. Why? Well, because at the end of the day everyone is looking for a way to survive, and if this makes a designer take a step back and turn off their ideas and focus on trends, that’s what they’ll do.
I’ve been noticing how fashion houses are giving up on design and just looking to advertise the brand. Which means to me their suffering of low clientele. “As unique as it is, in some ways, fashion month is just like any other month: ruled by the Kardashian/Jenner clan.”[1]
“The advent of Instagram, Twitter and the ever-growing portfolio of social media platforms is changing the way fashion shows, and even fashion itself, are made. But now, a look at data provided by Instagram and by Twitter can give an indication how much.”[2]
The new generations are basing their fashion on celebrities, when it used to be personal style, now days you can see basically everyone dressed the same, it’s quite strange, everything looks monotone and robotic.
“Vogue no longer moves the needle, nor is it part of the conversation. Textually and visually, it’s been a drag for decades. The last Wintour cover to make a splash was Kim and Kanye in April 2014 — only because the off-brand Kim Kardashian seemed a desperate attempt at relevancy.”[3]
But what is fashion? Who defines it? It funny sometimes to talk to my parents and see them get all excited because the garments that were “trendy” when they were my age, are back in style now. “Crucially, fashion hasn’t produced a must-have shift in dressing since the skinny jean in 2005. There is nothing we, as consumers, feel compelled to buy — not out of need but sheer desire. No longer do we believe in the illusory life a single garment or handbag seems to offer.”[4]
I used to think of fashion as personal style with an influence of trends, but now days fashion is purely trends, where people don’t dress for fit, instead they dress to look exactly the same as celebrities, models, and other influential social media people.
How can we change this dynamic? It’s interesting to observe it from a distance, now days, fashion houses are looking for influential people to “design” for them, when truly there are only giving a face to the products and behind these products are true designers giving away they creativity and name.
This opens a discussion to is fashion ethical? Is fashion truly pursuing design? Or is it only about the surface, the image, the fame? Which in my personal opinion is yes, fashion is pursuing the surface, avoiding all the other elements of the industry which truly matter. “When we talk about ethical fashion we are taking into consideration fashion which is socially and environmentally conscious. Social issues may include topics of gender, transparency, fair pay, trade unions and good governance. Environmental issues may include carbon miles, pesticides used in farming, natural and synthetic dying methods, how we dispose of clothing and its effect on the environment, water usage during production and post production of a garment. (Elizabeth Laskar, co-founder and director of the Ethical Fashion Forum)”[5]
This is why I say yes, because fashion industry is overseeing all of these “small” details, which in the end gather up and create a huge problem, that makes the system corrupt and unfair, affecting not only people but also our environment, but who are the causers
to this big problem, not only the fashion industry, us too! We prefer to not get involved in what’s the story behind the products we purchase.
Another factor to this crumbling system is online shopping, consumers no longer take the time to go out and search for a piece, instead they turn on their screen and scroll through the browser quickly and see watch catches their eye.
“On average, consumers in Southeast Asia spend about eight hours a day online; from social media to video streaming and shopping amongst other things. The modern shopper’s comfort with digital channels and content has changed the consumer purchase journey from a traditional linear model, to a complex journey across online and offline touchpoints. But regardless of touchpoint, consumers expect a consistent brand experience at all times.
Digital-first e-commerce companies from Amazon to Zappos, and Alibaba to Net-a-Porter are continuing to raise the bar – not least for fashion companies aspiring to provide an even-more-premium experience. Many consumers today expect perfect functionality and immediate support at all times. They are becoming habituated to rapid delivery times as players are constantly competing to expedite products more quickly, as we have seen through the partnership between Farfetch and Gucci, which offers delivery in selected cities from the store to a customer’s home in 90 minutes or less.”[6]
Causing retail stores to shut down, leaving customer service behind. Losing the experience of fit, texture and all these small details that make the costumer engage and fall in love with a garment.
This is also a clear reason of why people dispose so easily of their clothes, because they no longer have an emotional attraction towards it, they just buy, wear and discard.
“The fast pace of the industry is shaking up the fashion system. Sales of the traditional fast fashion-sector have grown rapidly, by more than 20 percent over the last three years, and new online fast fashion players are gaining ground. To keep up, leading fashion players are accelerating the time from design to shelf, including the recent announcement from Gucci that it will focus on supply chain optimization and responsiveness. This “need for speed” is driven partly by social media bringing fashion trends to more consumers at a faster pace than in the past. Industry leaders are also pushing up standards as analytics and customer insights enable them to meet customer needs better and improve responsiveness. But speed and flexibility bring new challenges.”[7] This fast pace causes designers to not allow their creativity flow, pressuring them to deliver goods, that in the end are no good whatsoever, bringing already seen designs, or even worse jumping off designs and just missing all the point of why that design was the design in its times, making everything lose its uniqueness.
Another factor of this fast pace production make fashion a big pollutant to our environment. “Fashion ranking among the highest polluting industries on a global scale.”[8]
“Fashion is one of the world’s largest economic and cultural sectors. It has complex geographies, making it a difficult system to study. The clothing industry has begun to respond to environmental crises, although the ideas emanating from business often offer flawed and partial solutions.”[9]
Although there is initiative to make a change in the fashion industry, there hasn’t been a full response from the public, it’s an on & off struggle to achieve awareness among our society, and maybe there is that sense of knowledge but we still choose to look away.
A clear example was Hermes recycled tote bag project: Hermes intended to reuse material and create new goods out of it, although it was a great approach to making fashion more sustainable, it didn’t have good feedback at all. The reason to the negative
response was how a luxury item was going to be made out of repurposed fabric. The issue of all of this is the mindset.
It’s a whole system, where we can’t blame just one group of people, it’s a whole and every sector of people have a big impact on this system.
Due to all of these factors is why I believe fashion is coming to a long vacation, or an empty faze (if it hasn’t already started), there’s no more muse and excitement, everything is way to reachable and easy to obtain, which eliminates the journey, the stories we used to have for each piece of clothing we owned. “Indeed, the fashion world has never seemed more ridiculous, more out of touch, more irrelevant. If Hollywood is mired in a post-Weinstein existential crisis, the fashion industry is in a death rattle, owing as much to cultural concerns as commercial ones.”[10]
Now what?
Yes, fashion is misguided, but will it always stay the same? Is there some kind of solution? Us, as young designers, will we be able to change this system, or will we just keep on contributing to it?…
Bibliographical note:
- Matthew Schneier “How Kanye West Dominated Fashion Month (No Surprise, It Involved Social Media)” New York Times, 2015.
- Maureen Callahan “Fashion is dead and there’s no coming back” New York Post,
- Imran Amed and Achim Berg “The State of Fashion 2018” Business of Fashion, McKinsey&Company,
- Lindsey Solomon “Solutions For A New Fashion System Presented In NY: The fashion system as we know it is breaking down.” PR Newswire,
- Andrew Brooks, Kate Fletcher, Robert A. Francis, Emma Dulcie Rigby and Thomas Roberts
- “Fashion, Sustainability, and the Anthropocene” Penn State University Press,
- Schiller-Merkens, Simone. “Will Green Remain the New Black? Dynamics in the Self-Categorization of Ethical Fashion Designers.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, 2017.
[1] Matthew Schneier “How Kanye West Dominated Fashion Month (No Surprise, It Involved Social Media)” New York Times, March 25, 2015, accessed April 11, 2018. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1712312546/82AE6270D0BD44D2PQ/5?accountid=12261
[2] Schneier “How Kanye West”.
[3] Maureen Callahan “Fashion is dead and there’s no coming back” New York Post, January 20, 2018, accessed April 11, 2018. https://nypost.com/2018/01/20/fashion-is-dead-and-theres-no-coming-back/
[4] Callahan “Fashion is dead”.
[5] Simone Schiller-Merkens “Will Green Remain the New Black? Dynamics in the Self-Categorization of Ethical Fashion Designers.” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 42, no. 1 (159) (2017): 211-37. http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/stable/44176030
[6] Imran Amed and Achim Berg “The State of Fashion 2018” Business of Fashion, McKinsey&Company, 16. https://cdn.businessoffashion.com/reports/The_State_of_Fashion_2018_v2.pdf
[7] Imran Amed and Achim Berg “The State of Fashion 2018”, 19.
[8] Lindsey Solomon “Solutions For A New Fashion System Presented In NY: The fashion system as we know it is breaking down.” PR Newswire, December 4, 2017, accessed April 11, 2018. https://search.proquest.com/docview/1971775684/CF412D6E4E7F4A21PQ/24?accountid=12261
[9] Andrew Brooks, Kate Fletcher, Robert A. Francis, Emma Dulcie Rigby and Thomas Roberts
“Fashion, Sustainability, and the Anthropocene” Penn State University Press, 2017. http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.newschool.edu/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.28.3.0482?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=fashion&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicResults%3FQuery%3Dfashion%26amp%3Bsi%3D1%26amp%3Bso%3Dnew%26amp%3Brefreqid%3Dsearch%253Afa9d5c7d837bd27c64359e444ed251bd&refreqid=search%3A0f7aaa34053ae79454f89a589972b9b3
[10] Callahan “Fashion is dead”.
