When Fashion No Longer Sells Clothes

Fashion has never been more relevant in mainstream popular culture than now. From viral red-carpet fashion moments during the Challengers press tour to Super Bowl athletes striding into Allegiant Stadium decked out in runway outfits, fashion has become a key component of the public’s fascination in our biggest cultural moments across all spheres. At a time when culture sells clothes more effectively than fashion can, every luxury house now wants to position itself as a cultural brand.

Fashion houses have always courted culture at large, but there has historically been a layer of separation between them. They would tap creative talents from other cultural spheres for campaigns and collaborations or they would be patrons of culture through partnerships and foundations. Perhaps one of the best working versions of this legacy cultural model is Prada. The brand not only has its Fondazione in Milan, which allows it to be a patron for contemporary artists such as Tom Sachs, Anish Kapoor, and Elmgreen & Dragset, but also fosters long-standing relationships with specific cultural figures, such as architect Rem Koolhaas and musician Plastikman, for ongoing collaborations. Despite these close interactions with figures in different cultural spheres, Prada never assumed the role of cultural producer beyond the realms of fashion in this legacy model.

“Now, brands don’t want to just tap into culture anymore, they want to become the culture.”

But now, brands don’t want to just tap into culture anymore, they want to become the culture. It’s not just about collaborations, like the Moncler Genius program, but rather about vertically integrating cultural production into the entire operational chain of luxury fashion. Pharrell’s appointment as creative director at Louis Vuitton is the most transparent move underscoring fashion’s prioritization of cultural relevance as a top strategic priority. But brands that have appointed industry insiders as creative directors are equally focused on ramping up their cultural programming to unprecedented levels. In 2023, Saint Laurent launched an entertainment arm, first producing Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life before producing three more films for the 2024 season of the Cannes Film Festival: Emilia Perez and Parthenope by Paolo Sorrentino, plus The Shrouds by David Cronenberg. The brand also opened a bookstore called Babylone “dedicated to art, music, and culture,” following in the footsteps of Marc Jacobs, who opened Bookmarc in 2012. Under Alessandro Michele, Gucci took over the Piazza della Signoria in Florence for Gucci Garden, a cultural complex consisting of an osteria with a menu crafted by award-winning chef Massimo Bottura, as well as a boutique, a bookstore, and an exhibition space.

Cultural marketing is at an all time high, with luxury groups being especially overt about choreographing their intentions. Earlier this year, LVMH launched an entertainment arm, 22 Montaigne, off the heels of Kering’s owner Francois Pinault acquiring a majority stake in Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the world’s largest talent agencies representing actors, directors, musicians, and athletes. And while luxury fashion has been the most successful at building inroads into other cultural verticals, we’re seeing the reverse happen too. Ferrari has operated a fashion label since 2021, and just this year the Brooklyn Nets launched a private label fashion brand called bǝrō.

“The more a brand can abstract its actual product into an idea, the easier it becomes to sell.”

This begs the question of why there is increasingly no distinction between these cultural categories? Collapsing the boundaries between different cultural categories gives luxury conglomerates opportunities for new revenue streams to directly monetize their brands’ intellectual property (at higher margins), while also reinforcing the enterprise value of their brands’ cultural equity across everything they do. This is both a lucrative business move and a predictable outcome under the paradigm of hyper-optimization, where the idea of fashion becomes more important than the actual substance of fashion. Put another way: for luxury brands, fashion is ideally consumed when it lacks any kind of substance or criticality, packaged as a processed good primarily for aesthetics. The more a brand can abstract its actual product into an idea, the easier it becomes to sell.

But when fashion houses vie to become cultural protagonists at this scale, it signals a complete inversion of what luxury represents. Today, the output of luxury fashion houses is closer to a mass consumer good than it is to a true luxury good, as luxury brands constantly churn out new products, collaborations, content, and activations to become as relevant to as wide a demographic range as possible. It’s not just affluent consumers who are buying luxury goods. In America, 27 percent of luxury consumers have an income of less than 50,000 dollars which is just as sizable as the percent of luxury consumers that have an income greater than 150,000 dollars. Gen Z luxury consumers are starting to buy luxury goods at 15 years old, upwards of five years earlier than the average age of a Millenials’ first luxury purchase (who in turn started buying luxury goods earlier than their parents did as well). This is in part because luxury fashion is now seen more as a cultural product than a pure luxury good. It is more accessible and universal as a signifier for identity than ever before, versus a symbol only to convey class and style. Historically, the penetration rate of luxury skewed towards older consumers as they had the disposable income to afford such goods. Today, the consumption of luxury fashion has inverted along demographic lines.

“The luxury fashion industry has become characterized by a sense of aimlessness in its quest for cultural relevance.”

The dilutive force of hyper-optimization on fashion brands is not an instant process. It happens over a period of time as houses overextend themselves through so many different cultural collaborations and activations that its brand world loses gravitational pull. The luxury fashion industry has become characterized by a sense of aimlessness in its quest for cultural relevance. This is the inevitable result of hyper-optimization, and we see this trajectory repeated across other cultural sectors in the form of creative blanding.

Prada chairman Patrizio Bertelli told the Financial Times in a recent interview that he wants to bring in more facets of culture together for the brand, from fashion to art to food, in order to create an “identity that transcends what we sell. We want it to be a mindset, an experience centered around the Prada brand.”

Kering-owner Francois Pinault proclaimed in a 2018 interview to the Business of Fashion that heritage was holding brands back from growing: “The formula that is overrated is the ‘DNA’ of the brand. Through that term, people imprison themselves. ‘This is the DNA of the brand, we need to respect the DNA.’  What is the DNA of the brand? The brand is symbols, icons — it’s never a style. The style is the interpretation of something, and if you think that the style of the brand has to be respected, you never move forward.” Pinault was right that brands are symbols over styles but chasing after newness without protecting the integrity of the brand world is the literal killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. When a symbol can no longer signify distinct cultural values, it eventually loses its sellability as a cultural product. This is the paradox of hyper-optimization that so many luxury brands face: turning luxury fashion houses into cultural brands results in the gradual dilution of its creative point of view.

Brands cannot just become cultural players by expanding itself towards culture reactively, as a viable cultural strategy requires a brand to first build a clear, self-contained brand world with inviolable and well-defined values and codes through its clothes. We see this in Maison Margiela’s distinct, deconstructivist approach to fashion design, primarily focused on building its own brand universe without relying on external cultural shorthand or cosign, which is explored consistently in every collection both in haute couture and ready-to-wear — jackets are turned inside out to reveal the inner stitching, hems are intentionally left unfinished, contrasting fabrics are juxtaposed on different panels of the same coat. This is further distilled into the use of subtle but visible white stitching to affix the label onto the garments, a nod to the deconstructivist philosophy of the house but also a further abstraction of the logo as a brand signifier. Architecturally, the brand’s haute couture atelier is literally housed at the center of its headquarters, as creative director John Galliano firmly believes that everything that the brand does must be centered around the work from the Artisanal collection. The brand also has the more abstract philosophical aim of being “a symbol of unity and purity,” an idea that is threaded through the brand’s set and store designs, and the notorious white lab coat uniform worn by every member of the team. Once this self-contained world is established, the house meets culture not by trying to bring the brand to the world of culture, but by bringing culture to the world of the brand. It’s the difference of brands approaching their brand building from an etic versus emic approach.

The dichotomy of eticness versus emicness is a classic anthropology framework. An etic approach to anthropology refers to the study of a society from an outsider perspective. It’s about understanding a community not on its own unique cultural terms, but in the terms of the dominant culture at large. An emic approach instead refers to the study of a society by trying to become an insider. It’s about understanding a community on its own unique cultural terms, not applying other cultural frameworks to understand or explain the unique rituals, symbols, and behaviors of that community. This is an approach that requires the anthropologist to shed away their preconceived notions in order to try to understand the world through the lens of the society they are studying.

An etic approach to brand building flattens the richness of communities and identities, resulting in monoculture because it emphasizes cultural similarities by tapping mainstream cultural properties and franchises (e.g., Balenciaga, Moncler and Jordan’s collaborations with Fortnite to create in-game cosmetics featuring key products from their collections). This approach is seemingly more lucrative from a business perspective because it is anchored around a dominant mainstream culture that is presumed to appeal to the widest demographic possible. However, the cost of brand debt it can accrue is expensive when it dilutes brand equity.

Burberry’s current stagnation is a cautionary tale on what happens when you overexpose a brand to culture without having a clear brand nucleus. After the departure of Christopher Bailey in 2017, it counted on Riccardo Tisci’s expertise in blurring the lines between streetwear with luxury fashion to modernize the brand. It also aggressively pursued cultural collaborations, from a capsule collection with Gosha Rubchinskiy in 2018 to a Minecraft activation called “Burberry: Freedom to Go Beyond” in 2022. The “Everything Everywhere All At Once”-ification effect of Burberry, interjecting itself into every cultural canvas it could imagine and trying to speak to as wide an audience as possible may have created short-term excitement. But without anchoring itself around a clear brand nucleus, the brand lost sight of its core values and customer base. In his review of the Spring/Summer 2021 collection for the brand, Tim Blanks wrote: “It’s not as easy to shrug off the incongruity between Burberry’s heritage and Tisci’s vision for its future.” Daniel Lee, while leaning more heavily into a reinterpreted set of consistent brand codes, still faces the same issue in trying to establish a coherent vision for the brand.

An emic approach to brand building emphasizes difference and uniqueness, it is about doubling down on the specificity of a brand’s identity in order to be more distinct. As a counterforce to hyper-optimization in general, emicness is a meaningful concept for cultural producers to embrace as they operate within ever blurring lines within cultural production and across categories. Put simply, if hyper-optimization seeks to emphasize similarity to fuel consumption across as wide a group as possible, emicness as a framework emphasizes difference and distinction within cultural production.

“Brands need to spend more energy defining and building their own brand world than ever, rather than chasing after culture at large to borrow cultural relevance.”

By being more specific on how culture is brought into their brand world, and strictly within the terms of their brand world, some luxury fashion brands have crafted more compelling cultural strategies via an emic approach that will be more viable as a long-term brand strategy. Two examples of brands that employ a much more specific mode of engagement with culture are Rick Owens, with his focus on a poetic, dark, and dystopian design language, and Loewe, with creative director Jonathan Anderson’s keen focus on craft, despite his fluid visual aesthetic. Every product that Rick Owens produces or cosigns (such as his Birkenstock or Dr. Martens collaborations) is always unquestionably “Rick” with a perverse desirability. At Loewe, as a heritage leather-goods manufacturer, every collaboration and cultural output calls attention to its focus on craft. The most notable example is perhaps the annual Loewe Craft Prize, which spotlights many different types of artisans practicing across the globe. These types of cultural activations, while more specific and limited in their potential reach as compared to a major blockbuster moment, help create the cult status that brands need to be able to scale while maintaining a clear vision and identity. Both brands have managed to use these forms of activations to engage customers while establishing a clear brand language that positions them in culture with clarity and gravity.

Brands need to spend more energy defining and building their own brand world than ever, rather than chasing after culture at large to borrow cultural relevance. This shift starts with refocusing fashion brands around the product itself: conveying an actual, substantive creative point of view. When the clothing encodes the values of the house, then it actually serves to inform the basis of the brand world as a concrete idea and not just the idea of an idea. Clothing can be a passport to a brand’s larger cultural world, but fashion needs to return to fashion making in order to re-anchor their cultural strategies in something real, tangible and differentiated.