50 Shades of beige...
The Fashion Industry is Burnt Out
Maybe it's that I’m writing this on the heels of fashion week, but the words “burn out” and “pressure” keep circulating in the thousands of conversations I’ve had this month.
I have a great deal of admiration for the people that work in this industry, day in and day out. Being a freelancer has always allowed me to be in it, but also have some distance from it, which is precisely what gives me the time and perspective to make reflections like these.
Although luxury fashion is comparatively slow, the industry it self has a reputation for moving quickly, but it's picking up speed at a rate which is becoming almost impossible to keep up with.
This is true for almost every industry, and widely every aspect of our lives. Living through the age of social media means the minute a post goes live, it's automatically immediately old. Images like the ones you see in magazines take months of planning, budgeting, co-ordinating, only to expire the minute they hit our feeds. I remember several of the Vogue editorials that came out when I was younger. It's not that they were necessarily better (to be discussed), but my, as well as our collective attention span was longer.
If you consume any fashion news at all, you will have noticed weekly articles on the turn around of Creative Directors throughout luxury brands. It's very simple: sink or swim. The pressure is immense, and it is immediate. Brands hardly have the luxury of having a bad season, a creative directors debut collection needs to be, amongst many things, immediately profitable. There is no time for a creative to find their feet, their translation of a House’s name needs to be immediately understandable. The pressure is even higher for smaller brands, who don't have the financial backing of larger conglomerates to float them through hard times.
If you’ve been in any of the comment sections on social media accounts dedicated to fashion, you will have seen the onslaught of negativity directed to the Dior collections that have come out recently (and Chanel, yawn). I concur that nobody can stomach one more outfit /idea repeat in a collection of 73 looks, in addition to the fact that half of these were replicas of a so-called Couture collection of 60 looks. Whilst I’m not in disagreement with this criticism, there is something to be said for the fact that Maria Grazia Chiuri churned out 8 shows in a year, with 4 of these being abroad:
AW23 February 2023
Pre Fall (India) March 2023
Resort (Mexico) May 2023
AW 23 Couture June 2023
Reprise (China) July 2023
SS24 September 2023
SS24 Couture January 2024
AW24 February 2024
Burnout is an understatement. I can't imagine, even with the power and financial backing of a house such as Dior, how one can require their creativity to work at this level. It is completely unsustainable, and the criticism, although not unfounded, does not necessarily take into consideration the level at which this team is expected to perform. No amount of adaptogens could prevent the kink in the hose from eventually bursting.
Do you remember when things were a little bit shit, and that was ok? Celebrities turning up to the Oscars in jeans and a shirt, a mini skirt and a cute top. A few weeks ago Zendaya wore a vintage Mugler robot suit to the Dune: Part Two premier, and I don't really know where we go from here. The ins and outs of this “costume” choice are discussed more in this Vogue article.
I think about this quote all the time:
How often everything feels like a performance, for the sake of showing the world something. Not just in the world of fashion, but obviously through the influencer culture of social media too. Even the most genuine of accounts only portray one aspect which they're trying to push, obviously because this is how the algorithm rewards you anyways, by being consistent in publishing one type of content, and if you mixed it up, you will end up paying for it in the form of a declining engagement.
The real loss though is nuance. The ability to do multiple things, exist in multiple ways and different spaces, without this being a hindrance.
From where I'm sitting, the conversations around pressure are mostly in relation to the models.
It wasn't so long ago when a new face’s models.com profile would have an odd array of clients, but none of it was taken too seriously, as after all, this was a new model. As a newcomer to any job or industry you would need some time to cut your teeth, learn the nuances of how to handle situations, the subtleties of the industry, especially when the job requires you to be dressed by others, walk in front of hundreds of people, have your makeup put on an off multiple times a day all without letting your skin suffer in any ways, quickly learn to navigate the subway in a foreign city, and the list of weird job skills required to be a model goes on…
These days, this doesn't happen, the slow growth required for longevity is out the door, and if you’re new your profile should list only top luxury brands or you’re often overlooked. The amount of girls that do a Gucci or Prada exclusive one season, only to join the abyss of models that nobody cared about the next season, is ever growing. This increases the amount of pressure on agents, to hold back on girls, to turn down many projects, in order to curate, with surgical precision, a portfolio that ensures a girl is always in demand. So when this turns into modus operandi, you can imagine how hard it is to put a show together when everyone holds back. The terms under which models, even new faces, will work grows more and more ridiculous by the day. And yet I understand it, nobody wants to enter a career only to have it last one season, or a few years. Everyone wants longevity especially in a world where the shelf life of anything is getting shorter and shorter.
To me the solution is simple: close your laptop, take a break, go for a drive to the woods, disappear and never come back. LOL. In all honesty I don't know how the playbook ends, it's certainly an interesting time to be alive, and I am interested to see how we will evolve and what this means for creativity and our society as a whole. In the meantime you know precisely where I’ll be: the forest floor.
❤️