8 Media Predictions for a Changing Fashion Industry
This business used to be as predictable as Anna Wintour's hair. Now, that's hardly the case.
The fashion industry has entered the Upside Down. It’s not just the collapse of online luxury fashion retail. Or Alessandro Michele releasing a surprise Valentino collection on Monday, 11 weeks into his creative directorship, that was 171 looks and nearly 200 slides long in Vogue Runway. Or Virginie Viard leaving Chanel after the internet seemingly chased her out of the place, leaving this storied and important house (not just a brand, a house!) without a lead designer. And it’s not just the hype for Sunday’s Vogue World event existing nowhere but the Vogue website. It used to be that when Anna Wintour said, “Jump for Vogue!” everyone asked, “How high?” But that no longer feels like the case. All of it has created unsettling conditions in an industry that has, for so very long, been as predictable as Anna’s hair.
A lot of what’s changing in the industry has to do with how it engages with press, which may be why the media in particular (raises hand) is in a tizzy. Over at Business of Fashion, Editor-in-Chief Imran Amed asks if the fashion system is on the verge of “collapse.” It’s a question that’s at least as old as the pandemic. In 2020, during the height of COVID-19 and business closures, the New York Times Magazine declared that the system had already collapsed and made the case that colorful sweatpants were the future of fashion. Regarding prospects for fashion week, which was disrupted during the pandemic, Anna Wintour told Irina Aleksander, “There will definitely be something, but nothing resembling fashion week as we knew it.”
She wasn’t entirely wrong. New York Fashion Week did come back but as a lesser version of its former self. Meanwhile, designers like Michele, who decided to do away with seasons when he was at Gucci, can just show whenever and however they feel like it, whether editors are in the room or not.
A decade ago, just about every top- and mid-tier fashion brand showed during one fashion week or other, but now we may be on the frontier of a crazy, calendar-less era. Oscar de la Renta didn’t show for years, but recently held a runway show at the New York Botanical Garden without inviting any press or influencers that weren’t brand friends. “I don’t much see the point of engaging with the fashion press when they require a different show than what we require to bring to our customers,” CEO Alex Bolen told New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman, who, like me, was surprised to see the show on social media without having heard anything previously about it (“…did I get banned and not realize it?” she wondered). And then Valentino randomly released 171 resort looks on Monday without warning, like Beyoncé dropping an album.
I normally do predictions at the beginning of each year. However, as we live through the Upside Down, halfway through the year felt like a good time for a new, media-focused round. Ahead, eight predictions for an industry that hasn’t been this unsettled in decades.
1 - Brands will make like Oscar de la Renta and opt out of working with the traditional press. Cultural criticism in general is under threat, as Friedman noted in her NYT story. She cites, as an example, Ben Platt choosing not to invite critics to his recent concert series at New York’s Palace Theater. Fashion criticism seems particularly endangered. Whereas the public often makes decisions about what books and movies to spend time with based on reviews, the same is not true of fashion. Customers don’t read fashion reviews to decide what to buy. The audience for traditional fashion reviews is also very small. Many would argue it’s limited to those in the industry itself.
I would imagine, in a world where a cottage industry exists to track “impressions” of various media opportunities, that the reach of traditional reviews would be minuscule compared to social media or celebrity exposure. Also, brands risk negative publicity if a critic doesn’t like their show. Even if poor reviews have no impact on sales, if you were a brand who didn’t have to allow for them, why would you?
2 - Brands will move away from courting social media influencers. I enjoy following many fashion influencers. Many are entertaining and informed and help me keep up with what’s going on. Influencers are still powerful, and unlikely to be going away any time soon — but I suspect, as brands become more client-facing, they will feel less pressure to invest in influencer marketing.
Brands don’t even have to invite influencers to shows for coverage. Plenty of content creators will clip runway footage from YouTube or save images from Vogue Runway and make videos about collections whether or not they were there — and this content may even perform better than runway footage from guests who did attend in person. I have also heard that brands are turning to shopping newsletter writers for product plugs, given the coming affiliate apocalypse in traditional media (more on that below). This may be a more effective way to sell product than, say, dressing influencers for events.
3 - Influencing will become a worse job.
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