Out of style?
Fashion was broken even before the pandemic. A reboot could be just what it needs
It has been a lie. Fashion — as a business — has been a beautiful, intoxicating, unsustainable lie. Not all of it, but much of it. It didn’t start that way, but that’s what it ultimately became.
The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has made this truth plain.
“They always say this is an industry of smoke and mirrors,” says Gary Wassner, chief executive of Hilldun, a financial services company that caters to fashion businesses. “Now we’re left with nothing but dissipating smoke and broken mirrors.”
For years, designers spun whimsical garments that tantalized the imagination but mostly didn’t sell; it was their more pragmatic styles that made the cash registers sing.
Brands burnished images redolent of old wealth and aspirational extravagance while their bottom line was little more than red ink
and magical thinking. Success was a fabulist tale of prepaid celebrity endorsements and social media impressions. Even the vision of the industry as a place of open-minded tolerance was wishful thinking.
The thrill of this creative Shangri-La was enough to woo investors who ended up with portfolios of fool’s gold.
Bricks-and-mortar retailers opened outlet after outlet, e-commerce expanded its reach, all while discounting merchandise that customers refused to buy until it was discounted even more, because most everyone had learned to shop by the mantra: Never pay full price.
For shoppers, fashion was an all-encompassing pop culture phenomenon — but a phenomenon is not necessarily a good business.
“The industry needs to be fixed,” says Julie Gilhart, president of Tomorrow Consulting and a former Barneys New York executive. “We’ve known this for a while. It was still moving, even though it was broken.”
Now that the fashion cycle has come to an abrupt halt during the pandemic, the industry is trying to suss out what needs to be discarded and what can be salvaged.
Some big-picture remedies under consideration include reducing the number of runway shows and the sheer volume of clothing that’s produced, delivering garments to stores in-season rather than months early, marking down merchandise only in June and January and even ... abolishing Black Friday, that malignant discounting feeding frenzy.
The problems facing the industry are
“The industry needs to be fixed. We’ve known this for a while. It was still moving, even though it was broken.” — JULIE GILHART, PRESIDENT, TOMORROW CONSULTING; FORMER BARNEYS NEW YORK EXECUTIVE
most often caused by shortterm fixes instead of longterm strategies, the belief in quantity over quality and, of course, ego and inertia.
Given the chance to stop and take stock, designer Rachel Comey has asked herself: “What kind of growth do you need in this business? What if I didn’t have to grow, from a dollar point of view, and I spent the rest of my career just doing what I love to do at a size that can support my team’s lifestyle?”
“As long as your work is reaching the people you want to reach,” Comey says, “that’s the ultimate goal.”
Designer Prabal Gurung says he has been putting money and effort into things he thought he needed, such as a big marketing budget, only to now think it was all unnecessary.
It’s hard to recall a time since the 1980s when fashion wasn’t wobbly. But most agree that after the 2008 recession, the industry was never the same. The recession sparked drastic markdowns of high-end goods.
“The next year is going to be rough. It’s going to be tough because we’re going to have to change the way we do things,” says Gilhart, whose company advises fashion brands. “I think the thing that’s most positive is people are talking to each other and trying to figure things out because there’s a lot at stake.”