Luxury fashion’s existential crisis
Pastiche has become fashion’s main mode of creation and the industry — stuck in a rut — has run out of things to copy
I have been an avid fashion fan since 1998, when a fateful visit to Barneys, New York’s famed department store, changed my life. Discovering forward-thinking designers such as Ann Demeulemeester and Raf Simons, Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto was a transcendental experience. Until then, my fashion consumption was textbook Veblenian — like many aspirational consumers, I thought fashion existed solely to signal one’s monetary status. Now I was confronted with and confounded by the notion that it could also be a deeply creative discipline. The rabbit hole was so alluring that I gave up a career on Wall Street and became a fashion writer.
The end of the 20th century was a pivotal time, when the countercultural mood of the 1990s began to capitulate to poptimism — a mentality that championed mass taste while denigrating the avant-garde. This included fashion. Watching trailblazing, independent designers like Helmut Lang, Jil Sander and Martin Margiela sell their brands in the hope of competing with rising conglomerates such as LVMH and Kering, while promising talents like Veronique Branquinho and AF Vandevorst gradually diminished and eventually closed shop, was dispiriting. The 2010 suicide of Alexander McQueen provided an awful coda to that period. Since then, the aesthetic innovation that characterised fashion has gradually given way to the carefully managed regurgitation of stale ideas. The spirit of auteurship feels overshadowed by the power of the corporate brand.
I have spent a lot of time thinking about why fashion today feels more important than ever, yet creatively enervated. My mind keeps returning to postmodernism and its key characteristics: erasure of the high-low cultural divide, enthusiastic embrace of pop, insistence on pure subjectivity of taste, devaluation of originality, diminishing of critical authority and championing of commerce.
A year after McQueen took his own life, a new creator was setting the tone in fashion: Virgil Abloh. A Chicago native and creative director for the rapper Kanye West, Abloh found early success with a graphic hoodie that featured a reproduction of Caravaggio’s painting The Entombment of Christ on the front, and “PYREX23” — an amalgamation of the name of cookware favoured by illicit drug producers and Michael Jordan’s jersey number — on the back. It was pure pastiche, and Abloh was an emblematic product of postmodernism.
The output of his popular label Off-White, launched in 2013 with the backing of savvy Italian businessmen, mostly consisted of banal spins on existing clothing archetypes, such as putting words in quotes on garments, like “little black dress” on a little black dress, or “sculpture” on a handbag. Abloh made no secret of his intentions; in a guest lecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, he said he was only interested in changing an already existing design by 3 per cent as part of his creative process.
The rise of Abloh and designers like him was inevitable; by the 2010s the cultural and commercial forces of postmodernism that brought him to the top had become dogma. Poptimism, pastiche, the dismantling of the cultural hierarchy in the name of “democratisation” and the diminishing of the critical apparatus that counterbalanced marketing-driven narratives provided ample soil for mediocrity. And fashion, by this time thoroughly dominated by the LVMH/Kering duopoly, was there, ready to please its new mass audience. In 2018, Abloh was appointed the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear. He died of cancer in 2021.
In the past 15 years, innovation in fashion has all but died, replaced by a continuous recombination of past styles — copies of copies of copies. For a time, this worked well for big brands, which catered to a new type of mass luxury consumer. This global cohort of the newly minted rich and the attendant aspirational class desired to project an image of material success and upward mobility. It wanted to be seen as stylish but was terrified of standing out. The luxury fashion industry responded by pumping out T-shirts, hoodies and sneakers whose only differentiator was the logo, which doubled as the official stamp of fashionability. Conformity was back with a vengeance with a postmodernist alibi: what’s popular is good, high culture is undemocratic, critics are snobs.
Now, the luxury fashion industry looks creatively listless and rudderless, latching on to other cultural disciplines to superimpose meaning on to clothes that in themselves have none. The lack of direction is compounded by the fact that postmodern culture has no sense of historicity: a feeling of continuity with the past that can either set a forward course or provide ground for subversion. Following Picasso, McQueen said that you need to know the rules to break them. In a culture where there are no rules, there is nothing to break. Increasingly, it feels as if there is nothing to create either.
Postmodernity is characterised by fragmentation of knowledge, which is evident in the piecemeal way information is consumed today through TikTok videos, making it nearly impossible to reconstruct a sense of historical continuity. What’s more, this lack of historicity is attended by a despairing view of the future, and so our culture, including fashion, inevitably returns to the past. Unable to connect with it on any meaningful level, it only mines it as retro, as a series of aesthetic cues without substance to be remixed at will. At a recent panel where I was judging the work of young designers, a brand whose clothes looked like a random blend of rebellion signifiers presented itself as “subcultural”. When I asked the two young designers what subculture meant to them, they had no answer.
The philosopher Fredric Jameson, who examined the pernicious effect of postmodernism in his 1991 book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, wrote, “From the postmodern side of the divide . . . the ‘end of history’ here simply means that anything goes.” To translate this into fashion business terms, “anything goes” means anything sells. Indeed, this is what it feels like when $1,150 cotton T-shirts and $750 flip-flops pass for high-end fashion. If we are at the end of fashion history, it is truly a dispiriting one.
Is there a way out of this malaise? It seems the current luxury fashion downturn is sending a strong signal that the industry has alienated a lot of people. You can see this in the virtual demise of Off-White, whose assets were unloaded by LVMH in 2024, and in the lukewarm reception of Demna’s Gucci, whose postmodern irony worked at Balenciaga just five years ago.
The young in particular — having realised that they missed out on the golden age of creativity — often prefer to buy second-hand. But shopping is not enough. If we want to improve fashion, we must create a new ecosystem, one that returns to the idea that pushing aesthetic boundaries is the only way forward. It will be hard, but postmodernism has made us forget something else: creativity is not supposed to be easy.