I have a small ritual when I’m tired of the present. I go back and watch old runway shows. Not for the clothes exactly, but for the feeling. And every single time I come out of it with the same question: where the hell did the fantasy go?
Because fashion right now is a lot of things. It’s efficient. It’s profitable, or trying very hard to be. It’s well lit and well merchandised. What it mostly isn’t is a dream.
When a show was a whole world
Think about what Alexander McQueen did with fifteen minutes. A model standing on a turning platform in a white dress while two robots sprayed her with paint. A glass box that made the audience stare at their own reflections before the show even began. Kate Moss appearing as a ghost made of light. You didn’t just see clothes. You felt something you couldn’t fully explain, and you carried it around for days.
Or John Galliano, who never sent out a collection so much as a cast of characters. Every girl walking had a backstory. She was running from someone, or to someone, or she’d just stepped off a ship. His last couture show for Margiela in 2024, under a bridge in Paris with those porcelain-doll faces, had people in the fashion world crying on the internet. Over a fashion show. In this economy.
That reaction told me everything. People weren’t emotional because the tailoring was good, although it was. They were emotional because they’d forgotten fashion could do that, and for one evening it remembered.
It’s not just the logos
When people complain that fashion has gone corporate, they usually mean logomania. And sure, there’s plenty of that. But I think the logo is the least of it. You can put a giant logo on something and still tell a story.
What I mean is quieter and more depressing. It’s the feeling that a collection was designed backwards from a sales report. That each look exists because it tested well, because the bag needs a hero image, because the celebrity in the front row needs something to wear in the next campaign. The show becomes a content shoot with an audience. The clothes become “product”. The designer becomes a “creative director”, which is a very telling job title when you think about it. Directing creative. Managing it.
So you get season after season of very nice coats. Very nice trousers. A very nice bag in four sizes. Nothing wrong with any of it. I would wear a lot of it. But nice is not the same as moving, and I don’t remember the last time a perfectly sensible beige look changed anyone’s life.
Why the system can’t afford to dream
I want to be fair here, because I don’t think designers suddenly lost their imagination. I think the system stopped paying for it.
Most of the big houses now sit inside a handful of giant groups that answer to shareholders every quarter. A designer is expected to deliver women’s, men’s, pre-collections, couture, bags, shoes and a perfume campaign, on a loop, with no time to sit and think. And if the numbers dip, they’re out. We’ve watched what feels like half the industry change creative directors in the last couple of years. How do you build a universe when you might not be there in eighteen months?
Fantasy needs time, money and permission to fail. It needs someone at the top who’s willing to say “this show won’t sell a single thing directly, and we’re doing it anyway, because it’s why people will care about us for the next twenty years.” That kind of patience is rare now. Risk has been replaced with risk management.
And then there’s the phone. A show used to be built for the three hundred people in the room. Now it’s built for a nine-second clip. A slow, strange story that unfolds over twenty minutes doesn’t cut down well. A viral stunt does. So we get stunts instead of stories, and I think audiences can feel the difference even when they can’t name it.
Fantasy is not frivolous
Some people hear “fantasy” and think I’m asking for costumes nobody can wear. I’m not. I’m asking for a point of view.
Fashion has always come from storytelling. Dior’s New Look was a story about abundance after years of rationing. Punk was a story about anger. Even the plainest minimalism of the nineties was a story about a woman who had better things to do than fuss. The clothes people actually bought were the souvenirs of those stories. You wanted the jacket because you wanted to live in that world for a bit.
Take the story away and all that’s left is a jacket. Then the only things left to compete on are price and logo, and that’s exactly the trap luxury has walked into. Prices keep climbing, the dream keeps shrinking, and customers have started asking what exactly they’re paying for. Good question.
It’s not all gone, and I want to say that too
There are still people keeping the lights on. Schiaparelli’s couture still makes me gasp out loud. Rick Owens still builds a whole belief system every season. Thom Browne still treats a runway like theatre. A lot of the most exciting storytelling is coming from young, independent designers with no budget and nothing to lose, which makes sense, because nobody is asking them for a quarterly forecast.
And I’ll admit that I get a real thrill every time one of the big houses lets a designer go properly strange for even one look. You can feel the room wake up. That reaction is the proof. People are starving for it.
Let them dream
I’m not naive. Fashion is a business and it has always been a business. McQueen had to sell clothes too. But there used to be an understanding that the dream was the business. That the show nobody could wear was the reason the perfume sold.
So this is my small, unreasonable request to the people with the budgets. Give designers time. Let a collection be about something. Let a show confuse people. Let it fail sometimes. Stop asking “will this convert?” about every single look.
We have enough product. What we’re short on is wonder.
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