The Hunger Games of Relevance: Contemporary Fashion’s Biggest Problem
Fashion has never been allergic to chaos. It has survived wars, recessions, plagues, and the occasional celebrity collaboration that felt like a cry for help. But the current crisis carries a different flavour. There is a particular scent in the air — some tragic blend of corporate anxiety and nylon — signalling that the industry has reached a point of desperation that no amount of heritage branding can mask.
Heritage houses, once fortified by craftsmanship and cultural literacy, now behave like spooked socialites convinced that the world is ending because their niece on TikTok said their logo feels “a bit 2018.” Suddenly, the cathedral of fashion — centuries of artisanship, symbolism, religious devotion to cut and cloth — is run by executives who believe the highest form of cultural expression is “going viral.” If architecture is frozen music, fashion today is frozen panic: hollow, loud, and oddly defensive.
You can feel the insecurity. These labels crave “youthfulness,” “energy,” “vitality,” yet they approach these concepts with the subtlety of someone pouring a can of Monster into a glass of Château Margaux. There is a kind of spiritual malnutrition haunting these brands, a hunger they cannot quite diagnose, leading them to medicate with influencers who consider fashion a form of light cardio between Pilates and a green juice.
And to be clear, my critique is not aimed at the genuine fashion commentators who study the craft — the Brendahashtags, high-fashion eccentrics, historians, and YouTubers whose closets are half archival, half delightful obsession. Those people actually possess a genuine love for the craft. They understand the language of a silhouette and its socio-political context. They know, instinctively, that a well-cut jacket can function as a geopolitical event.
No, the problem sits squarely with heritage labels inviting influencers whose entire aesthetic expertise extends to owning one pair of trousers, which are, invariably, Alo Yoga leggings. Their audiences do not care about fashion in any meaningful sense anyway; they are present for gym routines, beige home décor, or endless ‘GRWMs’. Yet somehow, these influencers are positioned as the vital lifeline for houses with 150-year histories. It is the equivalent of asking someone who cannot swim to lifeguard the deep end, simply because they own a popular pool float.
Somewhere in a conference room, an executive is whispering, with the solemnity of prayer, that “Gen Z engagement matters.” Meanwhile, the design team is producing collections that look as if an AI gained consciousness and immediately suffered an existential breakdown. Creative vision is replaced with “marketability decks” featuring slides pompously titled What Young People Want, all drafted by someone who has never actually met a young person outside of a focus group.
And this desperate scramble for relevance might be funny in a camp, theatrical way, if it were not dragging the entire creative ecosystem down with it. Fashion once relied on substantive critique, written by people who could identify a cut, trace its lineage, and discuss its political climate without breaking into hives. You needed literacy to write about fashion. You needed to know things.
Teen Vogue understood this at one point. Vogue itself certainly did, back when Anna Wintour reportedly had some applicants sit an exam containing four pages of 178 notable people, places, books, and films (all of which had to be identified on the spot,) just to become an assistant. There was a time when fashion journalism recognised that to properly understand a hemline, you needed some knowledge of global affairs, theology, colonial history, basic anthropology, and a functioning attention span.
Now we inhabit the era of the “content creator who reports news” breathlessly announcing that Dior did something “crazy” like use traditional tailoring. I am utterly convinced we are merely two months away from someone describing a lapel as a “whole vibe.”
The industry is collapsing under the weight of its own cultural literacy. Ignorance itself is fine; ignorance is a human condition. But we have now begun treating ignorance as a curated lifestyle, which is particularly unfortunate because fashion genuinely and desperately needs polyglots of culture — people who comprehend the intricate relationships between history and instinct, religion and textiles, economics and silhouette. When informed critique dies, imagination swiftly follows. And right now, imagination is on life support, sustained only by the faint memory of what once was.
What we are witnessing is a world where superficial commentary has replaced deep study, where discourse is generated faster than seams can be stitched. The clothes themselves barely have time to exist before they are buried under an avalanche of hot takes, interpretations, reactions to those interpretations, and meta-commentary to those reactions. It is commentary consuming its own tail, an ouroboros of mediocrity.
Meanwhile, brands rely on and cling to clout like it is a dialysis machine. If you are deemed cool, you are cool. No proof is required, no depth is necessary. Coolness has become an unregulated currency, traded by people who do not understand the origin of their own taste. The entire industry feels like a disastrous group project where everyone wants credit, but no one has bothered to read the brief.
And because no one wishes to offend crucial advertisers or risk losing their coveted seat at the next show, the reviews sound like carefully negotiated hostage letters. Everything is “beautiful,” “bold,” “important,” and “groundbreaking,”even when it looks suspiciously like the designer lost a fight with a roll of upholstery fabric.
Sarcasm aside, something precious is quietly slipping away. Fashion deserves genuine curiosity. It deserves passionate frustration. It deserves arguments carried out in full paragraphs rather than comments hastily typed with acrylic nails. And above all, it deserves true thinkers — people who can look at a single garment and understand that it is simultaneously an aesthetic object and a cultural document.
The Heritage Panic
Heritage houses used to possess something resembling a spine. Identity was not a marketing slogan, and “brand DNA” was not some mystical phrase whispered by executives who could not identify a French seam if it mugged them in a dark alley. Now, however, many of these institutions behave like ageing actors in deep denial about the passage of time, clinging white-knuckled to their legacy while secretly begging to be told they are still young, still fresh, still capable of pulling off that silhouette they should have retired in 1999.
The panic is palpable. A kind of collective existential dread radiates through the industry, the way you might sense a faint tremor before a grand old building collapses. They speak about “relevance” with a level of urgency normally reserved for organ transplants. There are entire, lavishly catered private meetings dedicated to predicting which keywords will “trend,” as if creativity were little more than SEO dressed in silk.
What was once an ecosystem powered by artistic conviction is now a boardroom imagining vitality as something quantifiable — something that can be juiced into a data set and handed to a designer like a prescription. “Gen Z wants authenticity,” they murmur into their oat milk lattes, as if authenticity were a marketing campaign one could simply launch. “Gen Z loves comfort,” they say, a statement which apparently justifies turning the intricate craft of haute couture into a fleece-lined fever dream.
There is an almost theatrical absurdity in watching a house with a century of masterful artisanship behind it attempt to produce garments whose primary purpose is to look good in a looping fifteen-second video filmed on a cracked iPhone screen. A dress that took three hundred meticulous hours to embroider is shown for exactly half a second, wedged between someone’s smoothie recipe and their boyfriend reveal. That is the cultural level fashion is pandering to: audiences who cannot tell the difference between silk faille and polyester chiffon, and who harbour no particular desire to learn.
And so the panic grows. You can feel it in the collections that strain to appear “cool,” in the way every brand now fights to attach itself to youth culture without any understanding of what youth culture even is. They want vitality the way a dehydrated plant wants water: indiscriminately, desperately, and without any discernible judgement.
This is not about gatekeeping; nor is it mere nostalgia painting the past as more intellectual than it was. It is the simple, observable fact that so many of these houses once stood for something tangible. Craftsmanship. Symbolism. A coherent vision. An aesthetic philosophy. A point of view that was not designed by a committee of anxious marketers. All of this now risks being traded for the fleeting buzz of an influencer’s unboxing video, and the most tragic part is that the industry has the audacity to call this “innovation.”
The true danger is not change itself. Fashion, at its best, thrives on transformation. The real threat is fear, fear disguised as evolution, fear performing as modernity, fear dressed in conceptual slogans. A house can change direction with intelligence, intention, and historical awareness, moving with the same sensitive precision a conservator uses to restore an old master painting. Alternatively, it can simply panic and fling rhinestones at everything in sight.
Currently, the latter is winning.
It would be quite funny if it were not so depressingly widespread. Designers of immense talent are forced to dilute themselves so the brand can chase a demographic that is not even genuinely interested. A heritage house with archives so rich they could single-handedly furnish the V&A will ignore everything that made them iconic because a social media analyst in a glass-walled office said something about “engagement dips” on a Tuesday afternoon.
Vitality becomes something external — something you must hire, buy, or bolt onto your brand as if it were a decorative accessory. This obsession with imported energy is precisely where the influencer panic sinks its teeth in deepest. Consider the jarring spectacle of a heritage leather goods brand, whose identity is built on timeless, silent luxury, partnering with a TikTok creator famous for frantic, hyperactive dancing. The cognitive dissonance is staggering. It is a desperate, almost tragic attempt to siphon a perceived “coolness” that the brand itself can no longer generate organically.
The financial logic driving this is as short-sighted as it is transparent. Luxury brands have certainly redirected more of their marketing budgets toward digital channels; according to an analysis by Amra & Elma, around one-third of total luxury advertising spend now goes to digital marketing. At the same time, a report has found 73% of luxury brands use influencer marketing as part of their strategy, with 65% deeming it effective. Yet the return on this investment remains increasingly nebulous. These campaigns produce bursts of online chatter and short-term visibility that read well in quarterly updates, but they do little to rebuild the deep brand equity that once took years to cultivate. They are buying exposure, not legacy, renting attention rather than earning loyalty.
The great irony is that in this frantic scramble for a future they cannot comprehend, these houses are abandoning the very thing that made them desirable in the first place: a steadfast, almost arrogant, commitment to their own unique world. They are sacrificing their distinctive character on the altar of algorithmic approval, becoming bland, interchangeable, and utterly forgettable. In their desperate attempt to be everything to everyone, they are in grave danger of becoming nothing to anyone.
The Influencer as a Misguided Defibrillator
Influencers are not the inherent problem. Let’s start there. A specific, valuable cohort exists who are genuinely insightful, culturally literate, and historically attuned. Some possess archival knowledge that would shame a museum curator, and others treat fashion with the obsessive, analytical seriousness of a psychoanalyst decoding a dream. Their contribution to the cultural conversation is valuable and essential.
However, those are categorically not the influencers being hired for these grand rescue missions.
Instead, the industry finds itself courting a very different archetype. These are individuals whose entire brand identity is meticulously constructed around beige athleisure and emotional breakdowns filmed in tasteful, high-definition. Their audiences, vast and engaged, care infinitely more about the contents of a skincare fridge than the construction of a garment. They do not crave fashion in any meaningful sense; they crave a specific, algorithm-friendly form of relatability. Clean-girl minimalism. Endless hauls punctuated by discount codes. Videos titled “5 Ways to Look Expensive” that inevitably conclude with the revolutionary advice to wear neutrals and pearl earrings. It is a landscape where someone can achieve monumental fame for correctly identifying Hailey Bieber as the originator of the “clean-girl-toasted-teddy-strawberry-skin-erewhon-smoothie-glazed-donut" aesthetic. A monumental achievement, truly.
And yet, in boardrooms from Milan to Paris, heritage houses cling to the genuine belief that these specific influencers will “introduce fashion to a younger demographic.” Introduce them to what, exactly? A world they are not curious about? To a craft that requires literacy, patience, and a sustained cultural interest? A runway show they will never watch beyond a five-second, aggressively clipped snippet on TikTok?
It is like gifting someone who hates reading a signed first edition and expecting them to weep from literary gratitude. It is a fundamental miscalculation of desire.
These collaborations create the surreal spectacle of watching someone with no real passion for fashion pretending to be moved by a brand they did not know existed three weeks ago. They point at garments and say things like, “This is very me,” in a tone suggesting they are discussing salad toppings. Their presence is meant to convey “youth appeal,” but what it really conveys is the industry’s blind, almost religious faith in metrics over actual meaning.
The absurdity reaches a peak when a house founded on precise tailoring and richly layered symbolism throws its weight behind someone whose stylistic instincts begin and end with “match your beige coat to your beige car interior.” They speak about clothes with the same vacant enthusiasm one might use to describe a new scented candle. Everything is reduced to “super cute” or “really wearable,” which in the lexicon of fashion criticism is equivalent to describing a seminal novel as being “made of paper.”
Beneath this surface-level comedy, however, lurks a much deeper and more troubling issue.
Fashion has catastrophically misplaced the true source of its own vitality.
It has come to treat youth as an external resource you can hire, like a consultant, instead of an internal quality you cultivate through bold ideas and genuine creative conviction.
It assumes relevance is an aura someone can transfer via a carousel post.
Vitality, though, has always belonged to ideas, not individuals.
Ideas refresh.
Ideas evolve.
Ideas sustain.
But ideas require a foundation of literacy to be conceived, understood, and appreciated — and literacy is precisely what the industry continues to sideline in its frantic pursuit of relatability metrics.
This influencer-driven strategy is the cultural equivalent of feeding a starving person a single, perfectly ripe blueberry and calling it a nourishing meal. It provides a momentary spike of sugary satisfaction, the illusion of sustenance, which is almost instantly followed by the same hollow, gnawing hunger.
The most tragic element in this whole circus is that the influencers themselves are rarely malicious. They are simply participating in a system that has cast them in the role of human defibrillators: external devices brought in to shock a dying body back into a fleeting, palpitating semblance of life. The critical misdiagnosis, however, is that fashion is not dying from a lack of youth. Fashion is languishing because the industry, at an institutional level, has forgotten how to think, how to curate, how to stand for something beyond sellable blandness.
There exists a clear alternative. If influencers who are genuinely, ferociously passionate about fashion — think of voices like Lyas, HauteLeMode, IDeserveCouture, NewsFash, or BrendaHashtag — were given these substantial platforms, the effect could be transformative. They would contribute context. They would revitalise through education. They would push public literacy and intelligent critique forward. Yet, these specific voices are consistently overlooked in favour of someone with marginally higher engagement on a video titled “Come Shopping With Me (I Hate All My Clothes)” promoting overconsumption.
So, fashion continues its desperate, circular dance. It keeps asking the wrong people to rescue it, and then, with a straight face, it blames the failed rescue attempt when the patient fails to make a full recovery. The problem was never the defibrillator itself, but the fact that they used it on a patient suffering from severe intellectual malnutrition, expecting a jolt of electricity to substitute for a missing soul.
The Industry That Forgot Its Own Alphabet
Contemporary fashion increasingly resembles an ageing aristocrat who has realised, with a sinking heart, that the grandchildren will only visit if the estate has reliable WiFi. In a flustered panic, the poor dear raids the digital corridors of TikTok for a shot of relevance, dragging home whichever influencer happens to have the shiniest algorithm that particular week. One moment, the house is speaking in hushed, reverent tones about atelier craftsmanship and the heritage of the petite main; the very next, it is posting a frantic backstage Reel narrated by someone whose closest brush with construction techniques is the careful unboxing of a PR mailer.
The truly melancholy part of this spectacle is that these heritage brands once possessed a coherent sense of lineage. A Maison had a vocabulary, a visual and philosophical language built over generations. A specific silhouette carried meaning; a particular fabric told a story. There were dialogues unfolding across decades, references folded into newer references, offering the quiet, intellectual pleasure of continuity. Now the industry is gripped by a kind of frantic vitality-hunger that makes even the most venerable houses behave like teenagers desperately begging for a repost. Everything bends towards the ephemeral “moment,” that brittle, fleeting thing that crumbles to dust the second a new audio trend goes viral.
This seismic shift did not occur because fashion suddenly fell out of love with depth or substance. It happened because someone in an air-conditioned boardroom, staring at a spreadsheet, fundamentally confused virality with longevity. Marketability has systematically colonised imagination. What once relied on a singular creative vision now relies entirely on quantified social media reach. And this reach, more often than not, comes wrapped in the polished personas of digital personalities who have never genuinely encountered the subject they are being paid to promote. Their audiences follow them for hair tutorials, fitness challenges, or the delicate art of soft-launching a situationship. Yet these are the individuals flown out first-class, glossed up by a team of professionals, and placed in front rows originally designed for editors and patrons who understood how a single, deliberate button placement could alter the entire geometry and attitude of a jacket.
To be fair, influencer involvement possesses a certain logical purity when the brand in question is small, independent, and simply fighting for its share of oxygen. In that context, visibility functions as a genuine lifeline. That kind of amplification feels earnest, almost symbiotic. What I find deeply troubling is the hollow, performative ritual of century-old heritage houses offering their hard-won cultural weight to people who demonstrate no substantive interest in the craft itself. It creates a strange and dissonant theatre where everyone looks immaculately expensive, yet no one in the picture seems particularly intellectually or emotionally engaged. In this transaction, fashion is reduced to mere decor, a beautiful background for a personality’s personal brand.
There was a time, now feeling increasingly distant, when the industry actively flirted with danger. It housed formidable editors who argued passionately, designers who staged creative revolts, and critics who dared to publicly dislike things. Teen Vogue once ran incisive breakdowns of geopolitics. Vogue itself dedicated pages to discussing war and welfare policy. Now, the industry collectively croons its allegiance to content creators whose entire creative philosophy can be summarised by two questions: “Would this look cute on camera?” and “What does my manager think?”
The supreme irony in all of this is that fashion, more than almost any other creative medium, thrives on the electric collision between intellect and raw instinct. To understand it fully demands a working knowledge of politics, economics, anthropology, religion, and philosophy. Clothes are the material evidence of the stories a society tells itself about power, gender, class, and desire. The central problem is that fashion’s largest and most powerful platforms have simply lost interest in these deeper narratives. They hunger only for numbers, for the seductive illusion of relevance. Anything requiring more than a fifteen-second attention span risks being lazily labelled as boring. Boring. A word now casually weaponised against thoughtful analysis by those who consider reading a two-line Instagram caption a form of rigorous study.
A genuine irritation simmers beneath the surface of this entire dynamic. This is not the kind of irritation that positions itself above others; I have little patience for that particular brand of smugness, which treats fashion literacy as some kind of divine inheritance. Ignorant is not synonymous with stupid. A simple lack of knowledge usually just indicates a lack of exposure. A healthy fashion ecosystem should be expansive and generous enough to embrace the scholar, the teenager passionately stitching upcycled denim in their bedroom, the auntie making magic from Ankara scraps, and the historian meticulously mapping how silhouettes shift across political eras. Intelligent critique only becomes richer and more vital when more voices, informed by vastly different lives and perspectives, are welcomed into the room.
The tragedy, therefore, is not that new voices are speaking. The tragedy is that the industry, in its hunger for their audience, is asking them to speak in a language it has forgotten how to teach, about a history it has stopped bothering to curate. It is an abandonment of pedagogical responsibility in favour of a quick, hollow hit of engagement. We are left with a beautiful, crumbling library where the librarians are busy outside, taking selfies with the signpost instead of guiding anyone inside to read the books.
When Journalism Goes Quiet: The Death of Critique
True fashion criticism has been quietly shuffled into an unmarked grave. The ceremony was brief and sparsely attended. Advertisers sent tasteful floral arrangements. Brand partnerships recited poems they had not written. The assembled reviewers nodded along graciously, already thinking about securing their invitations for next season’s show. The entire profession has grown remarkably, almost professionally, soft. It pads its sentences with qualifiers, trims its critical claws, and behaves like a well-trained poodle awaiting an approving pat from a publicist. Politeness now frequently passes for genuine insight. Where an honest review could once sharpen a designer’s entire collection, the modern critic often behaves more like a career diplomat assigned to a precarious nation, rehearsing compliments with strategic caution.
The rot begins with a pervasive, multi-layered fear. Writers fear alienating brands. Brands fear truly independent journalists. Journalists fear losing their precious access. And presiding over it all, everyone fears upsetting the softly glowing deity known as Ad Revenue. This self-perpetuating cycle produces a kind of niceness so diluted it bleaches the colour from every adjective. Contemporary reviews increasingly read like corporate press releases wearing borrowed intellectual glasses. Outfits are declared “fresh,” “bold,” or “a new direction” while the reader can almost sense the compromise seeping through the digital page. Critical literacy evaporates in this environment. Historical context receives a mere cameo appearance rather than a substantive paragraph. Archival knowledge is downgraded from a foundational requirement to a quirky personal hobby.
It was not always this intellectually anaemic. One need only look at the formidable figures who once dominated the front row, whose presence and pen elevated fashion journalism to the realm of serious cultural discourse. André Leon Talley was more than a critic; he was a colossus of style and history, a towering personality whose understanding of fashion extended far beyond fabric and silhouette. His writing and commentary possessed an almost operatic scale, weaving together references from art, theatre, history, and literature. To read Talley was to be transported into a world where fashion was not merely about commerce or appearance, but a grand, sweeping narrative in which every collection, colour, and cut carried symbolic resonance. His flamboyance — on the runway and in print — was inseparable from his intellectual approach, and he brought a theatrical gravitas that made fashion feel both inevitable and extraordinary.
Suzy Menkes, in contrast, exemplified the critic of the old school. Her famous pouff hairstyle became almost as iconic as her incisive prose, a visual marker of a mind unafraid to speak with precision and authority. Her reviews were meticulously researched and delivered with a scalpel-like precision, fearless in their ability to offend or unsettle designers and readers alike. Menkes approached fashion with an unflinching commitment to clarity and truth, blending an encyclopaedic knowledge of history with a relentless eye for craftsmanship, innovation, and coherence. She treated every runway show as a text to be interrogated, unafraid to call out pretension or celebrate subtle brilliance.
Cathy Horyn, formerly of The New York Times, operated with a surgical precision that left no room for artifice. Her writing was crisp, uncompromising, and unsentimental, often highlighting the contradictions and pretensions of the fashion world with a wit that could be both cutting and illuminating. Where others might default to hyperbole or flattery, Horyn’s critiques were anchored in observation, logic, and cultural awareness. Her intolerance for superficiality distinguished her as a critic whose judgment mattered, shaping both the industry and public perception of what fashion could signify.
Robin Givhan brought yet another dimension to fashion criticism, one that earned her a Pulitzer Prize. Givhan approached clothing as a text through which politics, social norms, and identity could be deciphered. Every choice of garment, every sartorial gesture, became a signifier, a deliberate act with cultural and political ramifications. Her work revealed that fashion was never merely about personal expression or aesthetic pleasure; it was inseparable from the social and political currents of the day. Through her writing, the seemingly superficial world of style became a prism through which society itself could be understood.
These critics were, in truth, cultural analysts whose beat happened to be fashion. They demanded intellectual engagement from both their audience and the designers they scrutinised, demonstrating that clothing and style could — and should — be examined with the same rigour, historical consciousness, and cultural sensitivity as art, literature, or politics. Theirs was an era when fashion journalism did not merely report trends but interrogated them, situating each collection within broader historical, social, and political narratives. The front row was a vantage point from which the world could be observed, analysed, and understood.
The fall of the Teen Vogue that combined high fashion with hard-hitting political journalism still feels like the industry losing its last remaining lighthouse. It dared to treat clothing as both a potent symbol and a complex language, speaking to a generation about everything from presidential elections to climate policy. Its closure, or more accurately its transformation into something far less substantial, left an eerie quiet in its wake. The wider industry simply pretended nothing of consequence had happened, despite the fact its editors had represented what fashion journalism was always meant to do: illuminate the world and its stark contradictions through the powerful mediums of fabric, silhouette, and story.
Into that deafening silence stepped the shapeless, relentless creature known as “content creation.” Cultural literacy has been unceremoniously traded for raw speed. Algorithms generously reward whoever posts first, not whoever thinks most deeply. Designers may reach into their archives with scholarly intention, yet many contemporary commentators treat those references as accidental, aesthetic echoes. Historical lineage becomes a light seasoning sprinkled over the dish, rather than the rich, slow-simmered broth that gives the entire meal its meaning.
Digital media has consequently produced a peculiar new breed of “reporter.” They speak with breathless urgency from the front seat of their cars, analysing the creative direction of Dior or Prada while simultaneously wrestling with a collapsing phone stand and the ghost of unforgiving lighting. Their confidence is, in its own way, charming. Their research, however, often begins and ends with whatever has been mildly viral that particular week. A handful do uncover thoughtful interpretations and genuinely expand the conversation. The overwhelming majority, however, simply magnify reactions, creating endless layers of commentary on commentary until the original garment or collection disappears entirely from view. One can easily imagine, somewhere in a Parisian atelier, a couturier screaming in frustration into a bolt of pristine muslin.
The core tragedy is not the existence of these new voices. A diversity of perspectives is essential. The tragedy is that a desperate industry has crowned them as its primary analysts because it has simply forgotten what rigorous, knowledgeable criticism actually sounds like. Thoughtful critique, of the kind practised by a Vanessa Friedman today, grows from continuity, deep curiosity, and institutional memory. Without it, fashion loses its cultural spine. Designers create in a creative isolation, and audiences absorb trends without understanding the cultural or economic forces that produced them. The entire ecosystem begins to feel weightless, almost entirely rootless.
Fashion once understood its vital place in the wider society. It mirrored revolutions, exposed structures of power, and documented the shifting architecture of personal and collective identity. Journalism gave those complex transformations depth and intellectual ballast. Today, the profession simply whispers, too frightened to provoke the very brands that fund its existence. The silence spreads like a stain. And in that expanding quiet, the car-seat correspondents speak louder than ever before, filling the void with an enthusiasm that earns them immense affection but rarely, if ever, earns any lasting depth.
Critique is not, and has never been, mere hatred. It is a vital conversation grounded in intellect, culture, wit, and a genuine willingness to be wrong. Designers of all calibres deserve that level of serious engagement. Audiences, who are increasingly hungry for meaning, deserve it too. The industry once relied on sharp, intelligent criticism to keep itself honest and creatively sharp. Today, it just smiles politely, desperately trying to ensure it remains on the guest list, even as the table it clamours to join has grown round, fluorescently lit, and slightly, unmistakably, sticky.
The Multiverse of Media Illiteracy
The age of digital noise has created a peculiar fog where ignorance is mistaken for stupidity. Ignorance is a universal, entirely human condition; it is a neutral and perfectly ordinary starting point, a simple lack of information that anyone, with curiosity and access, can move beyond. Stupidity, on the other hand, is an active posture. It is a stubborn refusal to stretch beyond the comfortable confines of one’s own unexamined certainty. The great flattening effect of the internet, unfortunately, has blurred these two distinct states into one convenient, casually tossed insult, deployed the moment someone fails to decode an obscure reference or dares to mispronounce a designer’s name. In this environment, the vocabulary of taste has been weaponised, polished to a sharp gleam by people who loudly claim to despise elitism while simultaneously, and rather desperately, maintaining their own position within its hierarchy.
A particularly biting irony keeps surfacing. Many of those who most ostentatiously flaunt their haute sensibilities are, in fact, entirely dependent on the very masses they so readily mock. Their engagement metrics, their follower counts, their very relevance, are built upon the attention of the audiences they condescend to, yet they behave as if cultural literacy is a gated property with their name elegantly etched on the brass plaque. Fashion becomes a performative arena where a sense of superiority is often projected more loudly than actual knowledge itself. A quiet, persistent insecurity sits beneath all this posturing. The underlying fear is simple: if a complex field can be clearly explained and made accessible to more people, then those who once acted as its gatekeepers lose their cherished illusion of exclusivity. In this light, snobbery frequently reveals itself as the final, flimsy refuge of the intellectually fragile.
Fashion, when taken seriously, is a democratic language. It is a visual, tactile, and social discourse that deserves a form of criticism capable of speaking to both the scholar with a digital library of archived runway footage and the teenage girl experimenting with fabric scissors in her bedroom. Real, valuable criticism is fluent in both of these registers. It possesses the generosity to teach without a hint of a sneer. It actively refuses to punish genuine curiosity. The entire discipline only breathes properly, only remains culturally vital, when its vocabulary is accessible enough for newcomers to enter the conversation without feeling like unwelcome trespassers. A truly good critic possesses the rare skill to translate a reference to Mariano Fortuny’s Delphos gown or Alexander McQueen’s Highland Rape collection in the very same breath that they explain, with tangible clarity, why a particular hemline feels emotionally heavy or a sleeve cut feels liberating. There is immense intellectual dignity in that kind of communicative clarity.
Diverse and varied knowledge is the very substance that keeps the industry alive. The academic historian who can trace the evolution of a silhouette through centuries, the master tailor who sees architectural genius in a single shoulder seam, the grandmother who can detect shoddy construction purely by running the fabric through her experienced fingers — they all carry different, essential fragments of the same core intelligence. Fashion has always, historically, been stitched together by people with wildly different, deeply personal relationships to clothing. This rich diversity of insight is not a threat to intellectualism; it is the fundamental condition that makes intellectualism meaningful and grounded in the first place. A theoretical framework is hollow and ultimately useless if it cannot withstand the practical scrutiny of lived, hands-on experience.
Our contemporary media illiteracy complicates this entire ecosystem. Countless people now swim through a relentless torrent of information without ever being taught to recognise the crucial differences between a structured critique, a personal opinion, a socio-economic analysis, salacious gossip, and a corporate press release. Yet, simply condemning these individuals as “stupid” only creates a punitive hierarchy that ultimately benefits no one and solves nothing. Ignorance can be soothed, and even cured, with better tools, more thoughtful education, and clearer, more engaging writing. Stupidity, by contrast, hardens over time because it is a conscious choice. Our current digital landscape, with its incentive structures, actively encourages snap judgements and harsh dismissals rather than patient explanation, which is a tragic state of affairs for a discipline with a long, storied history of being shaped by both formal scholarship and raw, informal intuition. Fashion survives and evolves precisely because both of these modes of understanding are allowed to speak to one another.
Fashion has no meaningful future if it willingly isolates itself inside a smug, self-congratulatory echo chamber. True criticism only flourishes in the fertile ground where scholars and laypeople can meet as equals, united by shared curiosities about craftsmanship, human expression, and the stories we tell through what we wear. When the wider ecosystem learns to respect every kind of knowledge — the academic, the artisanal, the instinctual, the street-born — it becomes possible to build something far richer and more enduring than the next viral trend or another display of gatekeeping bravado. The vast, wonderful multiverse of fashion only truly works, only reveals its full magic, if everyone is given the tools to read the map.
Commentary on Commentary: The Infinite Regression
There is a specific, slightly dizzying moment that occurs with increasing frequency online — a fleeting pang of digital déjà vu — when the chilling realisation dawns that absolutely no one is talking about the actual clothes anymore. The dress, its cut, its construction, the designer’s original intention: all of it has vanished from the conversation. What remains is a perfect, self-sustaining feedback loop, so intensely self-referential it could easily qualify as a doctoral thesis in postmodern absurdism. The contemporary fashion discourse now resembles a hall of mirrors where every gleaming surface reflects a reaction to someone else’s reflection, until the original garment dissolves into pure abstraction, replaced by endless, concentric circles of commentary on commentary on commentary.
This infinite regression follows a predictable, almost liturgical pattern:
A look materialises on a runway or a red carpet. One person, often with commendable speed, posts a reaction. A second person then responds not to the look itself, but to the specific framing of the first reaction. A third commentator swiftly enters the fray to critique the tone of the second response. Before you can even identify the fabric, entire parallel universes of manufactured outrage, arch irony, and performative expertise have crystallised around a single, solitary hemline. The outfit itself becomes a mere footnote in its own sprawling discourse; it functions first as a catalyst, and is then promptly relegated to an afterthought. Nothing quite assassinates genuine literacy like a culture that begins to interpret the analysis more diligently than it engages with the actual object being analysed.
In this frantic environment, nuance is always the first casualty. No one has the luxury for slow, considered looking when there is a limited-edition digital pile-on to join. Context vanishes shortly after, evaporating in the scorching heat of rapid-fire takes designed for maximum engagement. Even joy — that small, frivolous, and utterly vital component of fashion — is the final, tragic casualty. Simple aesthetic pleasure cannot possibly survive in an atmosphere where every personal opinion must instantly harden into a public position, and every position must then be fortified to withstand scrutiny from a legion of strangers who seem to operate under the conviction that the mere act of caring about clothes constitutes a sweeping moral declaration.
Then we have the peculiarly modern phenomenon of the self-anointed connoisseur. These individuals behave as though they have unearthed forbidden, esoteric knowledge every single time they manage to spot a functional seam. Their breathless delivery is operatic in its scale. They treat the glimpse of basic craftsmanship like Victorian children being exposed to fresh country air for the very first time — delicate, trembling, and perpetually on the verge of a theatrical swoon. A single pick stitch is revealed on a jacket lining; they collapse with a gasp, as though the entire weight of fashion history has descended upon them in a divine vision.
Consequently, the entire ecosystem devolves into a hollow parody of expertise. Critics no longer critique the clothes; they instead critique the critique of others, perpetually scavenging for a fresh meta-angle as if direct, unmediated sincerity were a contagious disease. The most celebrated voices are no longer those with the deepest knowledge, but those who can most cleverly deconstruct the ignorance of their peers. It is a closed system where the air is being breathed, re-breathed, and then breathlessly commented upon.
Meanwhile, the actual garments hang in perfect silence in climate-controlled archives or glide mutely down runways, perfectly capable of speaking volumes for themselves through their cut, their drape, and their material presence. If only anyone in the roaring, self-congratulatory crowd still possessed the quiet patience to listen.
Clout Over Craft: Reputation Economics
Fashion has always functioned as a social sport, a delicate dance of perception and prestige. Yet somewhere between the quiet fall of print media's authority and the aggressive rise of the algorithmic feed, the industry perfected a bizarre new economic model. This system operates on a simple but brutal currency: reputation. Clout has become the ultimate capital, and the collective determination of what is deemed “cool” is decided by a remarkably small, self-appointed committee who behave less like creatives and more like a clandestine cabal safeguarding state secrets. The comforting myth of a pure meritocracy dissolves with startling speed once you have witnessed a room of industry insiders nod in perfect synchronised conviction, as though good taste were not a subjective preference but a divine truth revealed exclusively to the same twelve people, all at once.
Behind the glossy, impeccably curated surface lies a Byzantine ecosystem of strategic alliances, transactional brand friendships, and PR whisper networks that would make the most intricate Renaissance courts appear disorganised and straightforward. Entire careers can pivot on a single, strategically captured photograph of who is standing beside whom, on which exclusive parties one manages to attend, and on which influential names slip, almost accidentally, into a strategically placed press release. Influence here circulates with the same opaque, coded logic as insider trading; it is clandestine, rarely spoken of directly, and almost always lavishly rewarded.
In this carefully managed landscape, raw clout has a remarkable tendency to dress itself in the respectable garments of artistic innovation. A designer posts a cryptic, visually arresting teaser. A celebrity is photographed in an unreleased sample. An influencer with millions of followers mentions, in a carefully offhand manner, that the brand is moving in “a new direction.” Suddenly, and with immense certainty, the work is hailed as visionary long before anyone has had the opportunity to inspect a single seam or question the integrity of the fabric. The sophisticated performance of importance becomes a direct substitute for importance itself. Hype is treated as concrete evidence; spectacle willingly becomes a placeholder for actual substance.
Genuine, uncalculated experimentation, meanwhile, receives only polite, muted applause, and even then only under the strict condition that it aligns seamlessly with what is already trending. The industry’s embrace of “newness” is entirely conditional upon its immediate recognisability. Dare to try something truly unfamiliar, something that does not already have a pre-approved digital footprint, and you will be gently, yet firmly, escorted to the creative margins. You will be told, with a patronising smile, that your boundary-pushing work is “interesting" — that most diplomatic of all words, which in this context translates directly to “commercially useless.” Anything that is not already circulating through the mood boards of creative agencies or the TikTok edits of teenage tastemakers is swiftly dismissed as too risky, too niche, too clever for its own good, or simply too earnest to be taken seriously.
Thus the entire, wearying cycle perpetuates itself. Reputations are fortified solely by other reputations in a closed loop of mutual affirmation. Coolness is agreed upon by a committee with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. In the process, true artistic craft — the mastery of cut, the innovation in textile, the quiet intelligence of a perfect silhouette — is quietly elbowed aside. It is sacrificed in favour of whatever can be most efficiently packaged, most widely reposted, and most rapidly declared iconic, all before anyone has had the chance to pause and ask the one question that truly matters: is any of this actually good?
Towards an Actual Solution: The Return of Thought
After trudging through the endless circus of digital hysteria, the careful choreography of PR diplomacy, and the quasi-religious worship of empty clout, the only truly sensible response is to make a counter-proposal that feels almost radical in its elegant simplicity. We need more thinking. We need a deliberate renaissance of literacy, historical awareness, and genuine, unbridled curiosity. This is the kind of deep engagement that once allowed fashion to sit comfortably at the same table as literature, politics, and philosophy, rather than clinging to the coattails of the entertainment industry like an insecure younger sibling desperate for validation.
Imagine, for a moment, a different landscape. A world where fashion criticism operates with the intellectual promiscuity of a true polymath, borrowing analytical tools shamelessly from every available discipline. It would use economics to trace the intricate power flows behind luxury conglomerates. It would employ philosophy to untangle the complex moral weight of beauty and desire. It would draw on religious studies to decode the industry’s own arcane rituals and rites of passage. Anthropology would provide a lens to read garments as living social archives, while sociology could map the movement of trends as a form of collective behaviour. Even textile science would have its place, allowing us to appreciate the literal alchemy of fibre and form. This would be a proper, rigorous interdisciplinary practice, where clothes are treated neither as trivial decorative objects nor as untouchable sacred relics, but as rich, complex artefacts that have stories to tell, and are finally given the space and vocabulary to speak them fully.
Let us be clear: there is no need for fashion to desperately audition for intellectual legitimacy. It already possesses the requisite complexity in its very DNA. What is missing is the collective courage and willingness to engage with that complexity without flinching, without reducing it to a simple binary of 'like' or 'dislike'. The industry has been starved of commentators who treat fashion as a legitimate public intellectual activity, rather than a frivolous carousel of personalities and products. The audience's hunger for this is palpable. Readers and viewers are actively craving criticism that expands their understanding of the world, instead of shrinking it down to a reductive list of consumerist preferences and “get-ready-with-me” monologues filmed in the transient back seat of an Uber.
Cultivating such a shift requires a new breed of critic, one willing to imperil their precious front-row invitations in the name of intellectual integrity. It demands writers who accept the simple, powerful truth that influence is a flimsy, hollow thing to protect if it means never saying anything of real substance. A critic’s fundamental job was never to flatter a fashion house into sending another embossed invitation; it was to offer the kind of sharp, illuminating clarity that might genuinely unsettle the powerful and enlighten the public. The most exciting, transformative thing fashion journalism could do today is to rediscover that forgotten nerve and start speaking difficult truths again.
This revival of serious thought is not some nostalgic yearning for a mythical, bygone golden age. It is a forward-looking, urgent insistence that fashion as a discipline deserves seriousness precisely because the people who engage with it deserve seriousness. Culture as a whole improves when the people who are tasked with interpreting it refuse to play dumb. An industry that treats intelligence as an optional extra will always inevitably stagnate in a shallow pool of its own recycled ideas. Conversely, an industry that actively welcomes vigorous debate, nuanced analysis, and a wide intellectual range might finally, mercifully, evolve beyond the exhausting, closed-loop feedback of manufactured hype and performative reaction.
If there is a future for fashion worth endorsing, it is one where its greatest luxury is not an exclusionary price tag, but a shared, accessible literacy. It is a world where to write thoughtfully about clothes is to write meaningfully about humanity itself, with all the precision, warmth, and unapologetic intellectual intent that such a vital subject commands.
The Industry Deserves to Be Understood
Fashion is, or at the very least was intended to be, a living, breathing organism. Today, it stumbles forward like a body suffering from a profound and chronic anaemia, looking increasingly feeble and pale. It is fed a relentless diet of sugary influencer energy drinks, while being systematically starved of the real sustenance it craves: history, context, and intellectual rigour. Its arteries are clogged with the dense plaque of metrics and the empty promise of virality, while its essential heartbeat — that vital rhythm of curiosity, sharp criticism, and creative courage — grows fainter with each passing season.
This industry deserves both our passing attention and our active comprehension. To engage with fashion in any meaningful way is to understand the world it so accurately mirrors, the layered histories it silently archives in its seams, and the intricate social rituals it so deftly choreographs. Clothing is never a neutral object; even the quietest, most subtle shift in a cut, a colour, or a fabric carries a distinct political, cultural, and philosophical weight. To wilfully ignore that dense web of meaning is a form of intellectual negligence.
We must remember that true vitality cannot be purchased from a PR agency, accumulated through likes, or algorithmically boosted into existence. It must be cultivated with patience and intention, through the deliberate acts of reading, thinking, debating, and daring to risk a professional misstep in the noble pursuit of an honest truth. Critics, consumers, and creators alike share a collective responsibility to insist, with growing volume and conviction, on substance over hollow spectacle, and on literacy over fleeting clout. The organism can indeed survive this malaise; it can even thrive again. But this recovery depends entirely on us choosing to feed it a richer diet, one composed of knowledge, deep context, and the kind of stubborn, unquenchable curiosity that resists easy monetisation.
Fashion, operating at its absolute best, is neither frivolous nor predictable. It is beautiful, necessary, and occasionally, gloriously ruthless in its reflections. Let us have the courage to approach it as such. Let us commit to engaging with it fully, with all the intellectual and emotional tools at our disposal. Let us work to restore its powerful, essential pulse.
S xoxo
Written in Miami, Florida
7th December 2025 (though, I’ll be honest, this piece took 2 weeks to write lol)