There’s never been more chatter online about the ever-revolving doors of creative directors in luxury brands than right now. Demna here, Demna there, where Hedi is going next, who’s looking after Burberry (or is it actually fine?).
The subject has been dissected, analysed, memed about (guilty) to the point, simply through force of repetition, where the underlying rumours powering these changes feel like they hold true: luxury fashion is reaching a dead end of innovation and ideas. Legacy brands are swapping out names in the hope of squeezing out a little bit more creativity to generate buzz, stimulate growth and keep shareholders happy.
This chatter is happening against a backdrop of a luxury market slowdown, where customer growth has plateaued, and markets are turning inwards. On LinkedIn, sofa CMOs believe the solution is to set the brand strategy before hiring the creative director. But the risky business of placing a brand in the hands of boardroom suits is also laughed about: shooting commercial-looking products against a budget-friendly background, with a boring logo slapped on top (to soothe the demands of the algorithm) delivers eye-rolls, not desire.
These solutions are symptomatic of overlarge, disconnected brands, who use their media spend as megaphones to shout loudly about product newness without stopping to question their “why?”. We’re left with an unfortunate sea of sameness, where labels feel interchangeable, propped up by celebrities.
And, of course, there’s another reason why the fashion industry is breaking, which the crisis meetings rarely touch on: fuelled by ever-changing trends and the lure of the new, the overconsumption of garments in the Global North is wreaking havoc on economic and environmental systems in the Global South, where the raw materials that make the garments are extracted, and our no-longer-fashionable clothes are discarded.
Ghana is the world’s largest importer of used clothing. In Kantamanto, Accra’s clothing market, traders purchase bales of secondhand clothing from countries like the UK and the US. Around 40% of the contents of those bales are unsellable, classed as textile waste, and only a small proportion of that is recycled: the rest ends up in dumps, in rivers and the sea. At the same time, heritage textile practices like indigo dying are fading away.
And, however fun it is to gossip over the fate of creative directors or dissect seasonal campaigns, these increasingly frantic efforts to reboot legacy brands are contributing to the issue of “too much stuff”. There can only be one solution: to slow down. There simply cannot be more – more hires, more drops, more limited editions – because of the increasing impact this has on the rest of the world and its decreasing impact on customers.
The solution lies in thinking differently about brands. The role of a fashion brand should not be limited to a logo and a label on a product with a high price tag. Social cachet should not come from price alone.
Instead, we can think of a brand as a network: a collective made up of all the people, places and things that it touches, from the creation of the garment to its communication to a community of fans, followers and wearers. This includes the ecologies in the fields where the cotton is sourced from, the owner of the workshop where the pattern cutters work and who the designer pays rent to, the fans in the comments on TikTok and the wholesale partners who agree to stock the garments.
The language of business refers to these individuals as stakeholders, but however they’re called, they form a web of influence that fashion designers find themselves at the heart of. As they build their brands, designers have the opportunity to build a structure of mutual support that threads its way through our global society and holds us together in a relationship. A financial bond, but also a creative one, and an emotional one (for what is a business, if not a partnership?), and one which has the potential for positive social and environmental impact, from garment creation right until end of life.
