Is it just me, or does it seem like nobody is really in the mood?
The state of the world aside, even fashion’s fantasy seems to have lost some of its spell. This is telling, given that fashion often shines brightest in moments of social difficulty. Historically, it has been at its strongest when society desperately needed something to pin its hopes to. Only a year ago, I wrote about the downturn in luxury fashion’s indomitable post-pandemic recovery, long overdue given the rising cost of living, and it seems this economic reality is catching up with Fashion (with a capital, industrial F). In its place, there are many cultural analyses to be made about how we’ve become untethered from our collective penchant for fantasy and as Brigitte Arndt declared in her recent Substack piece, “fashion is dead.”
Borrowing Nietzsche’s infamous adage, she argues: “If we dare to borrow his framing, fashion – as a meaning system – is dead. Not clothes. Not making. Not the joy of getting dressed. What’s dead is the tacit agreement about what fashion means and how it should behave in culture and commerce. The late-industrial ritual – trend calendars, logo pageantry, sanctioned scarcity, disposable novelty – no longer persuades. We went on buying after the old gods of fashion stopped making sense, much the way Nietzsche warned: the edifice keeps operating for a while even after its foundations are gone. But the cracks are visible everywhere.” It’s a searingly brilliant use of Nietzsche as a diagnostic tool. Fashion, Brigitte suggests, has entered its “God is dead” moment and I couldn’t agree more and as Nietzsche reminds us, nihilism is never the end goal – but before we use it to propel ourselves forward to new systems value, we must acknowledge that seeming meaningless has us in its grip.
As 1 Granary, the Central Saint Martins student magazine, satirised in their “Which creative director appointment are you according to your zodiac?” post, the absurdity of the churn is both boring and silly, at this point. Fashion as an institution has exhausted its own symbolic capital and the big houses seem hell-bent on regurgitating a carousel of creative directors in the hope of conjuring that elusive unicorn of commercial viability and growth, all under immensely hostile conditions. From relentless production calendars, to unrealistic expectations of instant cultural impact, and the pressure to generate content ecosystems.
The result is a kind of industrial cannibalism, in which designers are chewed up and spat out before they can leave a trace, and the houses themselves trade long-term creative vision for short-term market spectacle. The major difference is, we are now a digitally-fluent and astute audience and our fatigue can be measured by data – we are owed better insights, better stories and it is our direct attention which keeps the dominating forces in fashion as the cultural overlords.
In the South African context, much of this is already inaccessible to us; so the content fodder designed to keep a global audience interested is making less and less sense. We are bombarded with narratives and aesthetics that have little relevance to our local realities, yet still dictate the terms of taste, and as we build our own cultural and aesthetic narratives for the future; so too will this structurally inept industry continue to fail in its delivery.
Here, one of my favourite minds and fashion theorists Rian Phin, has crucial thoughts to help us make sense of this all – especially since independent fashion is fighting its own battles in the wake of the SSENSE debacle (Rian is something of an oracle on avant-garden and indie fashion). Across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack, Rian has become what I would consider one of the leading critics of fashion at a time when critique has been all but buried by paid partnerships. An incredible autodidact, her work has argued that the contemporary industry is sustained less by genuine cultural appetite than by financial engineering, and that the issues in fashion are structural and unavoidable. We have to remember this, each time that we get swept up by the promises of commercial fashion.
Fashion, Rian suggests, has become an ‘asset class’ rather than a cultural force, its health measured in quarterly earnings rather than any kind of aesthetic or symbolic vitality. While I hate to employ nostalgia (for a time I was barely alive), the rise and fall of creative directors at major houses illustrates this truth. It just didn’t seem like this was happening in the 1990s, when Yohji Yamamoto could steadily cultivate his poetic, anti-fashion vision, or when Miuccia Prada was allowed the time to build an intellectual, ironic, deeply personal language that still defines her brand today. Back then, creative authorship was tethered to long arcs built on patience and respect for the creative process; today, it is collapsed into a handful of seasons before the next appointment is announced.
Now, in the wake of a hostile shareholder takeover and allegations that it has failed to pay its vendors – those same independent designers who relied on SSENSE to make ends meet – the platform has thrown the entire retail–e-commerce model into question. For many small brands, the promise of wholesale visibility has soured, and direct-to-consumer strategies are increasingly seen as the only sustainable way forward. That is a story for another day, though.
What matters here is that SSENSE’s collapse reveals how precarious those values, of authenticity and non-conformity, always were in a fashion economy that rewards scale above all else. If even SSENSE – the platform that has set so much aesthetic and cultural weight for fashion in the digital era – cannot survive, what chance do the smaller spaces have?
Meanwhile, the cultural surface has become cluttered with the rise and fall of “-cores.” This once-amusing way of naming niche aesthetics — cottagecore, gorpcore, balletcore – has metastasised into a cringe reminder that these “cores” are really surrogates for the death of subculture, flattened and accelerated by the internet. Here again, the churn reveals its own limits. When naming itself becomes a form of consumption, a label applied by corporations and brands to sell identity-led trends back to us, the whole system appears as a mirage.
So what does this mean for us, the audience? Well, it means that our power is both diffusive and decisive. Our collective relationship to fashion is changing and this shift could be the very thing that saves it. While I may be taking the temperature as an overview; there is always creativity and art being made, and cultural interventions that forgo being captured digitally but that are so wildly significant.
Studios brim with ideas all the time, and there are always new ideas to be pulled down from the collective ether. We are, of course, material girls in a material world. Fashion is happening in real life because we engage with it in our own personal spheres – and what remains is our attuned capacity to demand something more akin to our own expression of it.
Personally, this is my own intellectual and physical curation of fashion whether locally, or through thrifting and collecting; and caring for what I already own. Creating projects, obsessing over moodboards, learning to engage with archives, making personal notes for my own nourishment and reading magazines, or accumulating references that stretch far beyond ‘fashion’ with a capital F (this is crucial). These kinds of practices can de-commercialise our experience of fashion as some abstract, large entity looming over us.
Instead we the people demand slower cycles, deeper storytelling, and clothes that carry meaning for us personally, and culture more broadly. At least, this is what is worth striving, creating and hoping for. Let’s see.
Written by Holly Beaton
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