10 Fashion Predictions for 2025

The Met Gala, sweatpants jeans, and more!

Well, here we are: 2025. It promises to be an exciting one for fashion, even if our friends at Pantone have sentenced us to year of brown. We have designer debuts to look forward to at EIGHT major brands, including Givenchy (Sarah Burton), Chanel (Matthieu Blazy), and Tom Ford (Haider Ackermann). Also, the industry has to try to dig itself out of its flop era of lowered profits, which means: those quarterly earnings reports ought to be met with the unbridled enthusiasm of a shirt twirled excitedly above the head! (Earnings reports!!!)

As is annual tradition here in Back Row, I’m offering ten fashion-related predictions for 2025, covering everything from consumer spending to luxury brand gimmicks to the future of fashion here on Substack.

But first, let’s take a look at how I did with my list for 2024.

I predicted brands would move away from making statements on social and political causes, which became a fad in 2020. (“Make a change. Freedom from racism towards peace together. #BlackLivesMatter,” offered Louis Vuitton.) I figured the inertia corporations felt around whether or not to make a statement on October 7 would free them from feeling like they had to weigh in on anything political moving forward. From a business perspective, it’s hard to argue with a policy of not getting into these issues. LVMH and Kering and even fashion’s most left-leaning entities like Condé Nast are for-profit businesses, not activist organizations. Not only is it risky for them to make statements that alienate customers, but I also suspect a lot of shoppers don’t want to hear about social justice from their favorite purse brands. The phase of brands posing as activists is so over that the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show even staged a comeback last year.

I was also right about publishers losing search traffic thanks to Google being driven by AI, which has drastically lowered revenues from affiliate shopping kickbacks (it’s hard to imagine that Hearst’s layoffs of 200 employees had nothing to do with this). And I accurately predicted that Skims would face scrutiny for sustainability; its supply chain is so opaque that it received a score of zero in Remake’s Fashion Accountability Report over the summer, tying with Fashion Nova, Temu, and Missguided.

I also predicted that Shein’s CEO Sky Xu (also known as Chris Xu), would be forced into the spotlight as the company pursues an IPO in London. I was sort of right about this. While news outlets like the South China Morning Post have tried to dig up information on him, he’s made a point of staying out of the media, and has continued to be so successful at this in 2024 that his employees don’t even recognize him. “He basically sees no point in exposing himself to possible questioning,” one source told SCMP. The Shein IPO could go through this year, and I’m sure more reporters will keep digging for info on Xu. But he remains a largely unknowable figure.

My biggest miss — and biggest swing — was predicting that CEO Roger Lynch would depart Condé Nast. His tenure remains surprisingly long for that job post-Great Recession. But I also realized that it’s very Condé Nast that he’s still there. Of course the company would hang onto their most expensive executives like him and Anna Wintour while unceremoniously cutting lesser employees right after Thanksgiving. There was no reason for the year of Trump’s reelection to make the company less of a “let them eat cake” sort of place.

With that, here are my predictions for 2025.