Dear BoF Community,
September’s start gun has gone off.
After a warmup on the red carpet in Venice, the fashion world is hurtling into a historic, high-stakes season of runway shows, even as a sharp downturn in consumer demand continues to deepen with many groups posting steep sales declines last quarter.
In recent years, lacklustre designs and soaring price points have contributed to the growing feeling that luxury fashion isn’t worth it anymore — and the industry is betting big on creative revamps to re-energise shoppers.
An unprecedented number of storied fashion houses — Chanel, Gucci, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Loewe, Versace, Jil Sander, Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier — will unveil debut collections by new creative directors in the next month, following refreshes at Dior, Givenchy, Celine, Tom Ford, Margiela and Dries Van Noten earlier this year.
But fashion’s malaise is multi-faceted and fresh runway propositions alone won’t solve this.
That’s why we’re kicking off our fashion month coverage with “The Great Fashion Reset,” a special package of stories, which, over the coming days, will examine the key challenges facing the fashion industry and the “reset” it needs, on and off the runway, to get back on track.
Robert Williams is up first, opening the package with a deep dive on the question of the hour: can designer revamps save fashion? Yes and no. As Robert writes, a refreshed creative vision can spark interest in a brand, “but translating novelty into marketing narratives, products, store concepts and more is a lengthy process with no guaranteed outcome” and “a saturated, ultra-fast-paced media climate is making it harder for novel propositions to cut through the noise and stick.”
In today’s post-internet “attention economy,” fashion has turned to “always on” marketing, but endless collaborations and celebrity tie-ups have come at a cost, making brands feel more ubiquitous and interchangeable. Does the industry need to recalibrate its marketing machine? It’s part of the analysis in Diana Pearl and Haley Crawford’s contribution to the bundle.
“Made in Italy” sweatshop scandals have also put pressure on fashion’s value proposition — not because consumers care particularly about the welfare of workers, but because the revelations have dented the industry’s image, lifted the lid on its high profit margins and mingled on social media with reports of diminished quality, leaving some clients wondering what they’re paying for — and whether they can trust luxury brands anymore.
Sarah Kent’s piece for the package, “How to Fix Luxury’s Trust Issues,” digs deep into fashion’s thorny Italian sweatshops problem, why it persists and what can be done to solve it. As Sarah writes, brands must tackle “the structural issues that have destabilised the very foundations of luxury’s promise of quality, craft and value.”
If much of fashion’s malaise is self-inflicted, tough economic trends haven’t helped. Marc Bain’s contribution to the series takes a look at the big picture. His top-level findings? Neither China nor the US, luxury’s primary growth engines for more than a decade, are likely to power a rebound next year.
But as Marc reports, “there are green shoots to find if brands know where to look,” particularly in the wealthy Gulf states, where luxury sales are projected to grow by 6 percent through 2027, far outpacing momentum in other markets.
Elsewhere in the bundle, Cathaleen Chen and Malique Morris explore the near collapse of wholesale, what it means for small and medium sized labels, and the future of multi-brand retail, while Joan Kennedy examines the challenges facing emerging designers, the implications for fashion’s talent pipeline and what the industry can do about it.
Don’t start your fashion month without reading “The Great Fashion Reset” in its entirety. And as the season gets going, stay tuned for in-depth designer interviews and must-read runway coverage from the industry’s most authoritative critics, including Tim Blanks and Angelo Flaccavento, as well as key business insights gleaned amid the action in New York, London, Milan and Paris.
Vikram Alexei Kansara, Editorial Director